The question is about the Europeans’ fascination with the oracles of a certain Octopus during the World Cup Football that concluded last month. This piece is not going to be a critique in any way of the World Cup. After all, this was just an entertainment game and many human beings on earth feel as if they have invented a cause to live for and suddenly found the purpose of life finally around the times of this tournament. This piece is about the Europeans whose documented civilization began three/four thousand years ago with their beliefs in oracles (refer to the Oracles at Delphi, for example, and one may also recall the play Oedipus Rex by Sophocles).
The Europeans’ quest for “knowledge”, and then a “scientific knowledge” later, traversed through many significant phases in the last three thousand years, whose optimum cumulative manifestation was the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century. We can take as its latest threshold the British scientist and thinker Stephen Hawking’s assertions about the universe, whereby he tries to “understand” the mind of God, without fully dismissing the possible existence of God, who may have existed from before the “time” there was universe or beyond what the human mind is capable to comprehend. But then comes the popular European fascination with the Octopus in the year 2010 as a rude shock, almost metaphorically reversing the European civilization to the times when the Greek mythological gods existed, and people believed in oracles. In the softest possible term, this is a shame.
One could dismiss this whole thing by saying that this was all for fun, and it added glamour to the tournament and nothing is wrong with that. And that it should not be read as a window to analyze where the European mind is today. But this is exactly the point. Cultural events like the World Cup are a powerful window to analyze the progress, or its opposite, of the human mind. In the three thousand years of history of civilization beginning with the Greek civilization, where has Europe arrived today? Is the retreat toward believing in an Octopus oracle a triumph of postmodernism, at last?
It was not just the Europeans, and not all Europeans believed in it. This is true. But the very fact that such a thing gets so much of space in the mainstream European media including the London-based BBC cannot be just ignored, and forgiven. One cannot even compare this with why the Colombian pop singer Shakira was needed for the World Cup. Everyone loved, including this scribe, her performance but that is not the point again. Capitalism has its own ways and markets, and the FIFA is a natural means for this. I have no problem with capitalism and the way FIFA glamorizes football and sells products through World Cup. But there is problem in my reading of the seeming incongruity between the European intellectual developments and its practical manifestations.
By the eighteenth century, Europe was able to detach religion/Christianity from knowledge. The Bible had long before failed to be congruous with the scientific knowledge, with the explanation about how the earth was created and many more such things. This knowledge directly complimented the European progress on the whole and their power to colonize the rest of the world. The world then became Euro-centric, and it continues to be so to a large extent even now. And this discussion is against such background. But the events like the one discussed in this piece makes one wonder if there is a difference between the broader rational human intellectual growth and the actual psychic beings that we all have been for all the times from history to the present.
As a student of the Western intellectual history, I find the significance of the Octopus episode very high with regard to reading the European mind at this particular period of time. The second half of the twentieth century in the West was no doubt a deconstructionist and postmodernist era, which exposed the hollowness behind all the so called human values and ideals, and the nature of truth, which was claimed to be a linguistic construct only. Thinkers have not yet defined what have been the consequences of the postmodernist approach on the previously established notions of truths and how the West has internalized postmodernism while it comes to embracing a world view. The question now is: Has postmodernism taken its toll on rationality that Europe developed over the centuries?
The game of football and why human beings play football has its own rationality. It may not sound rational to some but it has one. Due to the prominence the game has gained to be a major cultural event, it can be a window to read the mind of a certain civilization, like the one I have proposed in this piece above. It is like looking back at the tradition of Gaijatra in the Kathmandu Valley and reading how certain people in a certain period of time rationalized deaths. When the game of football has its own science, could one take it so simply that the fascination with the Octopus oracle is just like some people’s fascination with horror movies? For me, I tried hard to come to terms with the fascination with Octopus and just accept it as one more fun associated with football. But it continued to bother because it became a metaphor for me to read the history and future of European Enlightenment. Maybe it sounds far-fetched in comparison but surely it must be a topic to bother a thinking mind.
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