 I'm Salvatore Babonis, and today's lecture is American Tinshah, State and Self at the End of History. The philosopher Georg Hegel famously wrote that the history of the world is nothing but the development of the idea of freedom. And while I might not agree with him for the pre-modern era, I definitely agree that the overarching theme of the modern age has been the development of the idea of freedom. Of course, I'm not the only one. Karl Marx famously began his career as a young Hegelian, and over the course of his career he took Hegel's master-slave dialectic and developed it, or you might even say refined it into a bourgeoisie-proletariat dialectic for the modern age. Of course, Karl Marx saw the end of history as the victory of the proletariat, the withering away of the state, and the coming of a classless society. Karl Marx was one of the young or left Hegelians. We often tend to forget that there was an entirely separate and at the time probably much more influential group known as the right Hegelians, the right Hegelians focused on Hegel's notion of the state as the culmination of history, and ultimately came to be associated with the rise of militarism and then Nazism in Germany, which is I think why they tend to get written out of history. Nonetheless, we can see a 20th century heir of the right Hegelians in the philosopher Alexander Kozhev. Alexander Kozhev was a Russian-born philosopher who migrated to France and mainly wrote in French. He refined Hegel's concept of the state at the end of history into the universal homogeneous state. Kozhev found all of this latent in Hegel and brought it out and actually put it into Hegel's mouth in his book on reading Hegel. The universal homogeneous state at the end of history would be what it sounds like, a state that is universal, covers everything, is homogeneous, has no class distinctions, but also no racial distinctions, no ethnic distinctions, no distinctions among citizens of any kind, and is a state that is not an end of history where the state has withered away, but is instead an end of history in which the state remains strong. Kozhev, not coincidentally, was instrumental in providing the philosophical underpinnings for what is now the European Union, and many people, including Francis Fukuyama, have talked about the European Union as being the culmination of Hegel's notion via Kozhev of the universal homogeneous state. But farther to the right of the right Hegelians were people who weren't happy living in a universal state at the end of history, preferred the continuation of conflict, and here the leading light was certainly Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche famously wrote about the Superman versus the Last Man, and we all know the Superman. Nietzsche's Superman is the man who seeks to create his own destiny through struggle and is maybe the archetype for the Nazi warrior, but we forget about Nietzsche's Last Man. Nietzsche's Last Man was what he wanted to avoid. It was the comfortable man who had no longer any need to struggle at the end of history in Hegel, or as we know it now, via Kozhev's universal homogeneous state. If Kozhev looked forward to a world in which nobody had to struggle anymore, Nietzsche dreaded a world in which nobody had to struggle anymore, and not just Nietzsche, Leo Strauss was one of Kozhev's main 20th century interlocutors, and most English readers will know Kozhev via Strauss and via the dialogue between Strauss and Kozhev recorded in Strauss's on tyranny. Strauss himself took Nietzsche's point of view and argued that Kozhev might be right that the world was moving towards a Hegelian universal homogeneous state, but he didn't want any part of it. Strauss thought that was terrible, and he really wanted there to be supermen to disrupt this universal homogeneous state, and Strauss actually argued that no matter how comfortable the world became, there would always be those people who sought to overturn the existing order and to have an impact on history. With that kind of attitude, it's not surprising that Strauss was an inspiration for a whole generation of American neoconservatives. If you think of pretty much anybody who was associated with the project for a new American century in the 1990s and early 2000s, the whole slew of neoconservatives, most famously Paul Wolfowitz, they're all students of or admirers of or readers of Leo Strauss. One of the most famous readers of Leo Strauss was and is Francis Fukuyama. Francis Fukuyama took Kozhev's universal homogeneous state, and Nietzsche's last man synthesized them via Leo Strauss into his end of history thesis, the end of history and the last man, in which the universal homogeneous state at the end of history was conceptualized as liberal democracy plus, forgive me, VCRs and stereos. Now Fukuyama may not have been much of a technologist, but I think he was a very insightful and is a very insightful political philosopher. He wrote, we might summarize the content of the universal homogeneous state as liberal democracy in the political sphere, combined with easy access to VCRs and stereos in the economic. In other words, liberal democracy and consumerism or liberal democracy and the market economy. Fukuyama's original thesis was written in 1989 and for my money, you don't really have to read his 1991 book, The End of History and the Last Man, read the 1989 essay in the national interest. It's shorter to the point and much more interesting. And all of these ideas about the universal homogeneous state are really right there in the summer, northern summer, 1989 article in the national interest. What's amazing though is that Fukuyama wrote that article before Tiananmen Square, before the fall of the Berlin Wall, before the victory of solidarity. All of those events took place after Fukuyama wrote his essay, including the breakup of the Soviet Union. So we tend to telescope history and most retellings of Fukuyama say that inspired by the breakup of the Soviet Union, Fukuyama said it was the end of history. That is an ahistorical reading of Fukuyama's work. Fukuyama said it was the end of history and then came Tiananmen Square and then came the fall of the Berlin Wall and then came the victory of solidarity and only two years later came the breakup of the Soviet Union. So I think we should see Fukuyama as incredibly prescient to have understood very early that everything was changing in 1989. But I think we can forgive him if he didn't see the full implications of his own thesis. In fact, over the years Fukuyama has, he seemed to tire of being asked over and over again, do you still think it's the end of history? And he seems to have pulled back from the original thesis to say that well, you know, it's the end of history for some people in some places. He hasn't really seized the concept and pushed forward with it. Someone who has, leave it to a Russian, is actually the Russian essentialist, often called a nationalist, but really a Heideggerian essentialist, autodidact philosopher, Alexander Dugan. Alexander Dugan wrote, when liberalism transforms from being an ideological arrangement to the only content of our extant social and technological existence, then it is no longer an ideology, but an existential fact, an objective order of things. What Dugan has understood in his writings is that the victory of liberalism is not just a triumph of the US over the USSR or of one system over another, it's the final system. There's only one system standing in the 21st century in the Third Millennium and that system is liberalism. Now, of course, Dugan hates that fact and his work is full of plans to overthrow liberalism, but he himself is very clear that it will be a very difficult thing indeed. The universal homogeneous state at the end of history is not just liberal democracy and the market economy or liberal democracy and consumerism. The universal homogeneous state at the end of history truly is universal, that is global covering the entire world and homogeneous, that is, classless without ethnic distinction, without distinction based on sexuality, without distinction based on group membership. It is a liberal Tiansha. Now, Tiansha is, of course, the Chinese term for all under heaven and I think it really encapsulates the end of history that Fukuyama saw. Tiansha depicts an enlightened realm that Confucian thinkers and mandarins raised to one of universal values that determined who was civilized and who was not. In today's world, by definition, those who embrace liberalism are civilized, anti-liberal, by definition are excluded from civilization. Now, those words about Tiansha come from the eminent straight Chinese historian Wang Gengwu. He coined the term American Tiansha in a 2013 book on China. He said, today an American Tiansha has a strong global presence. It has a missionary drive that is backed by unmatched military power and political influence. Compared to the Chinese concept, it is not passive and defensive, rather unlike other universal ideals, it is supported by a greater capacity to expand. I think Wang has it absolutely right. And I think if you want to get to the heart of the American Tiansha, you can look to the founding document of the American Republic, the Declaration of Independence, in which the founders of the United States of America wrote, we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. This is the statement of the coming of the homogeneous society. And the universalization of that society, and after 1989, created a Hegelian universal homogeneous state. The American Tiansha is the universal homogeneous state that Fukuyama was looking for, but did not find. Now, when I say the American Tiansha, I do not mean the 50 states and territories of the United States of America. The United States of America is merely the central state of the American Tiansha, or one might say the Zhongguo of the American Tiansha. Zhongguo, of course, is China's name for China, but literally it simply means central state, or as it's more colorfully translated, middle kingdom. The United States of America is the central state of the American Tiansha, but it's not the totality of it. The American Tiansha is global in scale. Wherever you go in the world, you are inside the American Tiansha in the sense that you are inside an ideological zone based on liberalism and the market economy. Let me contrast with you the classic Ming Tiansha in China and the American Tiansha of today. Now, every Chinese empire had a Tiansha. The Ming Tiansha may be thought of as the ultimate development of this, and you could look to a document like Da Minglu, the great Ming code for guidance as to what Tiansha meant in the Ming world. The earlier Song Tiansha and the later Qing Tiansha are very similar, but let's keep with the Ming. At the center, the central core identity of the Ming Tiansha was the Han Chinese. The Ming code, the great Ming code, distinguished between the Han Chinese inside the Chinese empire and other people who were inside the Chinese empire, but were not Han. I think in the same way, we can see the United States of America, actual bona fide citizens of the United States of America as the very center of the American Tiansha, but more broadly speaking, there's an area of shared governance in the Ming Tiansha, which was the entire Ming Empire. In the American Tiansha, the parallel might be the Anglo-Saxon allies. The United States, United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand and Canada have complete military interoperability, share intelligence. These are the five eyes countries that cooperate to read all, essentially all, international electronic communications. The five countries, their systems are closely intertwined to the point where it's possible for an Australian media baron, Rupert Murdoch, to move to the UK, become a British media baron, and then to move to the United States and start Fox News, which then became the most popular news channel in America and influential in US elections. So a person who started out influencing Adelaide elections, later influenced Australian elections, later swung British elections, later swung American elections, and the same kinds of patterns have existed for the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom. There's an enormous shared space. It's not only the media, it's the entire world of governance and ideas. US think tanks will pick up pieces published by Australian, British or Canadian think tanks without a second thought. They're part of the shared discourse of governance in the American Tiansha. Outside that discourse, but sharing the basic philosophies, well, on the borders may be Korea and Israel, but on the Chinese side, outside the shared governance, outside the Ming Empire proper, but still sharing an adherence to Confucian values were the Confucian tributaries. So places like the Vietnam and the Ryukyu Islands, some minor dependencies, a small number of little principalities around the South China Sea that accepted Confucian principles and governance from, or Suzerainty from Beijing. But on the American Tiansha, we could also compare NATO allies, Japan, South Korea and Singapore, the Pacific allies, perhaps even Sweden, which is not formally an ally of the United States, but nobody doubts that Sweden shares the ideology of the American Tiansha, liberalism and orientation towards the West. So we can compare this shared ideology based on Confucianism in the Ming space, and a shared ideology based on liberalism in the American Tiansha. Now I would consider this sphere, this third sphere, the sphere of liberalism, and this sphere encompasses pretty much all of the substantial economies of the Western world, plus many smaller outposts around the world as well. Then in the Ming Tiansha, there was the outer layer of countries and places that shared Chinese principles in a broad sense. That is, they had treaties with Ming China, they were willing to play by Ming Chinese terms, they occasionally cooperated with Ming China. And here I include even Russia, which signed a treaty in the 1600s that was relatively favorable to Ming China. The era of unequal treaties came 200 years later. In the Ming era, in the 1500s and the early 1600s, in the Qing era of the 1600s, early 1700s, Russia was aligned with China in Central Asia against nomadic peoples. Of course also major Southeast Asian countries like Thailand, Burma, and even the Yurkans and maybe some Mongols on the Ming-Northern border were broadly aligned with Ming power. They weren't confucian by any means, they did not accept the Ming emperor as their emperor, but they were pro-systemic, certainly not anti-systemic, trying to bring down the Ming system. Maybe even you might include the Western Europeans during the Ming era. British and Portuguese traders were willing to kowtow if that meant that they could trade with China. In the American Tianshaw we might think of India, Saudi Arabia, Indonesia, Brazil, Mexico, pretty much most of the rest of the world as being places that are not liberal, don't share an American ideology in its fullest sense, but that are pro-systemic powers that broadly cooperate in American governance of the world. And here we might even include China. China is often thought of as a quote-unquote rising power, a challenger enemy of the United States, but there's very little evidence that that's really true. And there's a ton of evidence that China cooperates with the American global system. Now I know there's a lot of rhetoric about China challenging America, but I don't think there's a lot of practical evidence that that's really happening. China challenging the Philippines, China challenging Japan, sure. China challenging the liberal market economy? No, I don't think there's really any evidence of that at all. The BRICS Bank, if anything, has endorsed IMF governance principles, and the BRICS Bank will only fund projects that are aligned with IMF principles. So I really can't see China as an anti-systemic power. Maybe anti-Philippines or anti-Japan or anti-Vietnam, but not anti the American liberal world order. That leaves us with just a few external enemies. For the Ming-Chianshah, Japan, some Mongol tribes, some Turkic tribes that were outside of the Ming-Chianshah on its borders. But of course, also outside the Ming-Chianshah was an entire world out there. Now as it happened, the Ming-Chianshah collapsed internally due to a peasant rebellion in 1644 and Jurkin invaders, the Manchus, invaded China and replaced the Ming-Chianshah with a Qing-Chianshah. But they took Da Ming-Liu, the great Ming code, and they simply expanded it into Da Qing-Liu, the great Qing code, and they governed China on Confucian principles, and they continued the tributary relationship with the neighbors of China. So even the Ming-Ching transition can't really be seen as an external overthrow of the Tian-Chah itself. A change in leadership certainly, a change in who the actual rulers were, but not a change in the system. It took the collision between the Chinese world and the European world in the opium wars starting in 1840 to really bring down the Ming-Chianshah. Well, the American-Chianshah also has its border disputes. Russia staying in many ways outside the American-Chianshah and challenging it in very minor ways from a geopolitical standpoint, challenging the American-Chianshah in borderlands like Crimea and Syria, but not making an attempt to overthrow the system. Russia has made no systematic attempt to put an end to the liberal American-centered global governance system. North Korea even less so. North Korea may be a very hostile country, but North Korea is not going to overthrow the Western liberal order. Syria the same thing. Even Islamic State has no chance of overthrowing the Western liberal order. And there we end. The big difference between the Chinese-Chianshah, the Ming-Chianshah, Qing-Chianshah, and the American one is that the Chinese-Chianshah was geographically limited. The American-Chianshah has no external borders. There's no over there beyond the seas. There are no Martian landers that may come and put an end to the American-Chianshah. Thus the American-Chianshah is likely to be very stable. It can only collapse through internal processes. And even if it were to collapse through an internal process, the successors would likely be built on the same system. That is, even if the political order in America were to collapse, a President Trump or some other person would end up seizing the levers of state machinery in Washington D.C. and running the American-Chianshah, just like the Manchurians seize the levers of state machinery in Ming-China and turned it into Qing-China. There is no external power that can overthrow the American-Chianshah. Now, I'm not the first person to think of this parallel. I actually have to give credit to Yuan Feng-Kong of the Lee Kuan-Yu School at National University of Singapore. Kong wrote an article in, I believe it was 2004, on the American tributary system interpreting the American world order. He didn't use the word American-Chianshah, but the American world order interpreting it as a tributary system parallel to the Chinese tributary system. And he went through a whole series of dimensions on which they are either parallel or similar. But there are two that he didn't focus on, two that he missed that I really think we need to consider. One is the ideological dimension with the Chinese-Chianshah, the Ming or Qing-Chianshah being based on Confucianism, the American-Chianshah based on individualism. And the second, the one being limited to East Asia, the other one being global. These two differences, I think, are pregnant with implications. Here you see, for example, the embodiment of the post-modern Chinese member of the American-Chianshah. This is a famous meme, a Chinese student graduating at Harvard Business School, holding in his hands the two symbols he presumably values most, the Chinese flag and the all-powerful American dollar. This is the American-Chianshah embodied and it's made possible by globalism, the Chinese student studying in the United States, but also made possible by liberalism. It's made possible by the fact that this student is able to become part of a larger world that is non-essentialist. It's a post-modern world. In a modern world of modern nation states, it would be impossible for a student like this to become a member of the American elite. But in the post-modern world, in the liberal world, that is very much a possibility. In fact, that's presumably why he went to Harvard Business School in the first place. You don't go to Harvard Business School to learn the skills to succeed in business. You go to Harvard Business School to enter the global elite and there's no barrier to Chinese students doing so. This is one reason why I don't think you can see China as a challenging power to the United States because Chinese people and especially elite Chinese people are much more interested in joining the American Tianshah than in overthrowing it. Like 80 years ago, 90 years ago, Oswald Spengler wrote, forgive my German, der Untergang des Abenlandes, literally the undergoing of the western lands, the decline of the west. This book was written at the end of World War I, actually published at the end of World War I, written during World War I. Although Spengler was not himself a Nazi, it inspired Nazi dreams that the west was over and a new energetic east would overthrow the western order. And of course, there were plans for a Nazi invasion of England and it's something that I just find, I don't mean to laugh at the Nazis, but sometimes maybe laughter is the best medicine. The Nazi plans for the invasion of England pointed out that Eaton College was the school to send children of the senior Nazi occupation officers and officials. That is, the Nazi plans Operation Sea Lion to invade England may have been, in some ways, a backdoor attempt to get the children of Nazi leaders into exclusive English public schools, to get them into Eaton and the other famous schools of England. I just find that incredible, but not so incredible if you consider that UK independent schools today publish statistics on their foreign student enrollments. The number one source is China. So in 1940, the Nazis wanted to get their children into Eaton. In 2015, the people who most wanted to get their children into Eaton were Chinese millionaires. And right behind the Chinese millionaires, Hong Kong based millionaires, who of course are many of them, also Chinese millionaires. Number three, if anyone wants to guess, Russia. So the top three contributors, foreign contributors of students to English independent schools, these exclusive schools in England that train elite students who go on to Oxford and Cambridge and Harvard and such. The top three sources of foreign students are puttively the places, or at least two of them, China and Russia, puttively the places that are going to overthrow the American liberal order. Well, again, I find it not credible to surmise that Chinese and Russian elites are trying to overthrow the Western order by getting their children educated at Eaton and Harrow colleges. And of course, you don't have to go to an English public school to get into a top university. You can go directly from China or Russia and where are the top universities? Well, according to the Chinese own ranking system, the Shanghai Jiao Tong University, World University rankings, the Shanghai rankings. If you look at a list of the top 20, well, there you go, America, America, America, America, Britain, America, America, America, Britain, America, America, America, America, Britain, America. Number 20, a Swiss university sneaks in at number 20. 19 of the top 20 universities in the world by Chinese reckoning are American and British universities, and if not just the first 20, the next 20 as well. So if you go 21 through 40, you get a couple of Japanese universities in Canadian, which is also a part of, clearly part of the American Tiansha, a Danish school, a French school. But the dominance of Anglo-American universities in the Chinese university rankings is, of course, overwhelming. And the number of students who go to them is similarly overwhelming of 4.2 million Chinese students who have gone abroad to pursue education in the last 35 years. Only 2.2 million have returned to China. Now, that doesn't account for the fact that many of those who returned maybe didn't want to return, but couldn't get a visa to stay as a permanent resident in the West. It also doesn't account for the fact that some of those returnees keep a foot in both worlds and are not permanent returnees. Roughly speaking, something like half of the Chinese students who go abroad to study, and there are a lot of them, roughly half of them stay abroad permanently. They don't want. These Chinese elites don't want to build their lives in China to develop China so it can overthrow the West. This is not the Germany of World War I challenging the West. It's impossible to imagine in Germany in 1910 the German elites falling over themselves to get their kids into British and American universities. We live in a very different world. We live in a world in which the returns to individuals of joining the American Tiansha are so great that undermines the integrity, the coherence of countries themselves. One need look no further than the Harun Report. The Harun Report is the Bible of the Chinese rich list, China's Fortune magazine. The Harun Report does a regular survey of the citizenship plans of China's wealthiest people. The Harun Report reports that 64% of Chinese multimillionaires either have foreign citizenship or are planning to get foreign citizenship or foreign permanent residence. The top destinations, no surprise. Number one, United States. Number two, Canada. And Canada famously is a backdoor into the United States. So many of those going to Canada are actually going to the United States but couldn't get in. Number three, England. Number four, Australia. Number five is I think the European Union as a whole. They don't have statistics on breaking it out. So where are the Chinese going? The highest educated, the wealthiest Chinese are going to the American Tiansha, to the very liberal core of the American Tiansha, primarily the United States and if they can't get into the US, Canada, UK, Australia, maybe New Zealand. They're also the babies. China and the United States now have a reciprocal agreement for 10-year tourist visas, so multiple entry tourist visa for 10 years. It used to be the case that when Chinese women tried to get into the United States, if they appeared pregnant at their visa interviews, US consular officials would deny them a visa. At least that's the rumor that has, not just a rumor, it's a widely understood, widely well widely understood understanding throughout China. But now you can get a 10-year visa, which means that a Chinese woman can get a visa at age 20 or 22, just after finishing at university. And then when she gets pregnant five years later, seven years later, can just board a flight to the US. No need to go apply for a visa, 10-year multiple entry visa. The number of USA babies being born is unknown, but staggering. And I know it's staggeringly large because every time I fly back and forth to China, I find myself in the immigration line with women who have Chinese passports, whose babies have American passports. And if I'm seeing this every time I travel, I know it's not a small phenomenon. Look, there are entire hospitals in Southern California that exist solely to service the needs of Chinese women who are coming to the US to have their babies. There are even movies about Chinese women, romantic comedies about Chinese women who come to America to have their babies. It's such a well-known phenomenon in China that you can make a popular movie script around it, and everyone knows what you're talking about. When people are eager to have USA babies, they're not eager to declare war on the United States. We have entered a new post-modern world, a world in which individuals seek to develop their own identities and their own place in the world without much regard to the nation states to which they are nominally aligned by citizenship and passports. That post-modern world may seem very new, but in fact it is deep roots. Arnold Toynbee, the famous world historian, dated the beginning of the post-modern world very precisely in 1875. And I think he correctly said that it began in the United States. Now, he didn't give a reason for 1875. My own instinct is that he chose that date because it was 100 years after the Declaration of Independence. The Declaration of Independence was, I think, the first recognizably post-modern document, and it took perhaps 100 years, or in Toynbee's case, 99 years, for this post-modern document of the Enlightenment to ultimately become something like reality. Now, what I mean by that is that the feeling, the actual popular sentiment that all men, and let's face it, by 1875 we were only talking men, not women, but the sentiment that all men are created equal. That there's nothing special about big men, about presidents and generals and artists, but that all men are created equal. That notion really came to be embedded in the American psyche after the Civil War, and let me give you an example. Here's the State of New York Monument at Gettysburg National Cemetery in the United States, built 1893. The State of New York Monument is not a monument to a general. It's not Nelson's column. It is a column to the ordinary soldier. It's topped by an allegorical figure of New York State shedding tears for the deaths of the men who have died in the Battle of Gettysburg, and around the bottom are bronze plaques listing the names of the men of New York who died in the battle at Gettysburg. Now, as far as I can tell, lists of names of the fallen originated in American Civil War remembrance. Only came to happen in the U.K. and in U.K. Commonwealth countries after World War I and only spread to the rest of the world, and then only certain parts of the rest of the world after World War II. Similarly, Memorial Days. The first Memorial Day was in the 1870s in the United States. It was called Decoration Day, the day that you brought flowers to decorate the graves of the fallen. That's why American Memorial Day is in May, traditionally May 31st, because that's when flowers were available. Whereas British Commonwealth remembrance days are November 11th, commemorating World War I. So what the Civil War was for the United States, World War I was for the rest of the English-speaking world and the non-English-speaking world only entered post-modernity much later. If I were to give some vague dates, I would suggest post-modernity arrived in America after the Civil War, arrived in the British Commonwealth after World War I, maybe arrived in France roughly around that same time, I'm not sure, only spread to Germany after World War II. And you might even say only spread to the eastern block after 1991. In any case, the Civil War was the traumatic moment in American history. Something around 20% of all Union soldiers were killed. Around 40%, 40% of all Confederate soldiers died in the Civil War. The average death toll for the United States as a whole was 30% of soldiers died in the Civil War. Now, you can find all sorts of war memorials around Australia and the UK, but even in Australia, which was famously hard-hit by World War I, 15% of soldiers died in the war. So the American casualties in the Civil War were twice as high as the Australian casualties were a generation later or two generations later in World War I. So you can imagine why people thought that the loss of life had to be commemorated, but it wasn't generals. It was the loss of life of ordinary soldiers. And this becomes particularly poignant in other monuments. For instance, this is the 138th New York Infantry Regiment. Here you can see a very postmodern monument. And this is a postmodern monument from 1888. The monument doesn't have cannons on it or battleships or rifles. Well, the monument is a tree stump, and on the tree stump is the soldier's kit. The drum, a dispatch bag, there is a rifle leaning up against the tree stump. That is, this is a monument, a sad monument to commemorate the loss of ordinary soldiers. And the material of the monument is the ordinary soldier's kit in 1888. Here's another one with, again, a New York monument with the muse, Cleo, writing the deeds of the 123rd New York Regiment into the scrolls of history. Here's a particularly poignant one, the 54th Regiment of New York soldiers. There was a flag boy, a boy who carried the colors, non-combatant carrying the flag in battle, who was shot and died in battle. That boy was commemorated on the monument. So the main figure on the monument is not a god, is not a general, the main figure on the monument is a boy who was killed carrying the flag, particularly a poignant one. And I could go on and on. There are 90 New York state monuments at Gettysburg battlefield. And that's just the New York state monuments. There are a couple hundred monuments to soldiers from other states of the Gettysburg battlefield. And that's only Gettysburg. There are a hundred other battlefields of the American Civil War. There are thousands of American Civil War monuments. And overwhelmingly, there are monuments of ordinary soldiers, at least the northern ones are. Interestingly, the south, which was maybe less advanced down the road to post-modernity, much more commonly put great heroes on its monuments. General Lee, most of all, Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederacy, General Beauregard, Stonewall Jackson. The south commemorated the glorious generals. The north commemorated the fallen soldiers. Or perhaps my favorite monument is the monument to the Civil War correspondence, the first reporters of the post-modern age. War correspondents have their own memorial just outside Antietam battlefield in western Maryland. I think that Toynbee was right to date the post-modern self from the period after the American Civil War. And to understand that it spread from there, and that the Jackson Pollock painting underneath this slide is of a kind with the monuments to the fallen soldiers of the Civil War, because both embrace the dignity of the individual. And a hundred years later, a hundred years after the beginning of post-modernity, of course we have the ultimate post-modern, no more war, this is just the individual celebrating individuality by the 1970s. Post-modernity can be defined as the democratization of individuality. You don't have to be Leonardo or Newton or Napoleon or Hitler to be an individual. Every person is an individual. Every person's story matters. Everybody has an identity. And post-modernity then becomes the leitmotif of the American Tiansha. Running through the rise of America is the story of post-modernity. The great immigrant waves into America in the late 19th century were waves of people who gave up their essentialist, Heideggerian design, their sense of being, and just melted into the post-modern American identity. My own family are Italians and Greeks from 100 to 150 years ago who came to America and simply became Americans. They developed their own identities. Instead of having identities that were given to them at birth, they created their own new identities. And there's nothing more post-modern than that. But as America has expanded and as the reach of America has expanded, we have moved from an era when people moved to America to become post-modern individuals in the late 19th century to an era when America comes to you. You can attend an American-style university and get an American degree in Singapore, in Germany, in China, all across Africa, in the Persian Gulf. In fact, it's very difficult to find universities today that don't want to Americanize, even in Russia. The highest prestige universities all have formal programs, they call it to professionalize their research and their curricula, but the model that they're professionalizing on is an American model of higher education. The American Association of Colleges and Schools of Business have accredited business schools everywhere in the world. It's the gold standard for business education to be accredited by the American accrediting body. Well, what does that mean? It means that no matter where students study business, they study American principles of business. When we seek out success as individuals, no matter where we are and no matter what our passports may say we are, we ultimately are seeking a place in the liberal American tinsha. In this post-modern American tinsha, every individual participates directly in a single global sovereignty. They may have more or less rights in that sovereignty. Someone whose last name is Bush or Clinton has more rights than an ordinary American voter, and an ordinary American voter has more rights than a Canadian. But something that you don't realize is that even a Canadian has more influence on the American elections than a German. Because Canadians are part of the discourse that shapes opinion in those United States elections. A German is less so. But even a German is more so than a Russian. And even a Russian is more so than a Tajik. There are circles of membership in this post-modern American tinsha, but there's only one tinsha to be a member of. There's a flip side to that, which is that national politics is increasingly irrelevant. Fukuyama about the American tinsha, Fukuyama about the end of history was liberal democracy. Well, keep the liberal, nix the democracy. Democracy may be the form of government, but when decisions are made, or not necessarily made, when ideas are shaped, when the ideas that determine decisions are shaped at a global level, being informed by an American view of how the world should be run. Well, your country may be a democracy, but it doesn't mean that your country is actually voting on issues that will determine your country's destiny. Now, the classic example of that for 2016 is the Trans-Pacific Partnership. The Trans-Pacific Partnership fundamentally undermines national democracy in all sorts of ways, well, not all sorts of ways, in ways that are shaped by American liberal thought and the American tinsha. The result is post-political movements, people who are not seeking power, but who are protesting power. Movements like the hacker collective Anonymous. Movements like Nuit D'Abu in Paris and across French-speaking Europe. Occupy Wall Street, Indignados all over the world, or at least all over Europe and North America. There have been protest movements against the political system. Let's face it, the political system is democratic, so what do people want? They want something that is maybe incoherent, because no matter what political system they have, democracy, dictatorship, something in the middle, that political system will make decisions based on principles that come from outside the country, that come from this overarching American tinsha. Of course, the ultimate post-modern political leader is the reality TV star Donald Trump. Donald Trump is emblematic of post-modernity, of the post-modern self, the construction of the individual and the individual mattering more than democratic rules, more than political systems, more than modern technocratic procedures. The victory of Donald Trump, and we don't know whether he'll win the election or not, at least as of the recording of this lecture, but we do know that he's come very close, and he's come very close as a post-modern individual in a broader liberal American global system, not as somebody who worked his way up the ladder of American politics as it's construed at the national level. Look, Gork Hegel said that the history of the world is nothing but the development of the idea of freedom, and he was smart enough, impression enough, to realize that America is therefore the land of the future, where in ages that lie before us, or at least that lie before him, the burden of the world's history shall reveal itself. Freedom is a wonderful word, and it's a wonderful thing. I wouldn't want to live in a world that is not free, but freedom, or specifically the sense of freedom as liberty, the liberty of the individual to do whatever the individual wants, and make of herself or himself whatever she or he wants to be. The freedoms of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for the individual at a systemic level, at a global level, act to create a larger polity, a larger way of thinking that transcends national boundaries, but not in a generic way, in a specifically American way. There's only one country, only one major country in the world, whose people are organically postmodern, where nobody except a very small number of indigenous people can claim a connection to the soil. That one country is the United States of America, as we move into a postmodern world, that postmodern world is inevitably an American world, merely by virtue of the fact that it is postmodern. Thank you for listening. You can find out more about me at my website at SalvaturbaBonus.com, where you can also sign up for my monthly newsletter on global affairs.