 I'm Salvatore Babona, and today's lecture is American Tinsha, State and Self at the End of History. The German philosopher George Hegel famously wrote that the history of the world is nothing but the development of the idea of freedom, and in contrast to Hobbes and his theory of the Leviathan, Hegel thought that freedom could only truly be developed in the context of society, and ultimately in the context of the modern nation state. He wrote self-consciousness in the form of social disposition has its substantive freedom, its substantive freedom in the state as the essence, purpose and product of its activity. We can have a ridiculous freedom out in the wild in a Russoian sense to do what we want, in any real substantive way to have freedom is to have freedom within society, and that's only possible under the state. His late disciple Alexander Pojev developed Hegel's philosophy of the right into the idea of the universal homogeneous state, the state that is universal in its jurisdiction and internally homogeneous with no distinctions among classes or groups of people within the state itself. And again, Pojev thought this was the place where people could truly develop as individuals if they were inside a state that had no internal conflict and no external conflict, a state that was based on solely the membership of the individual within it. Ultimately this led to Francis Fukuyama and the end of history. Now Francis Fukuyama thought that the end of history was liberal democracy plus VCRs and stereos, but he located that within Pojev's Hegelian universal homogeneous state. He said, we might summarize the content of the universal homogeneous state as liberal democracy and the political sphere combined with easy access to VCRs and stereos in the economic. Now, Fukuyama may have been no great futurist when it comes to technology, but he was and is a great political vinker. Remember, he wrote those words in early 1989, before Tiananmen Square, before the fall of the Berlin Wall, before the victory of solidarity in Poland. In fact, two years before the breakup of the Soviet Union, he was prescient well before his time. Now, maybe it takes a Russian to fully comprehend the importance of the fall of the Soviet Union and the victory of liberal democracy looked to Alexander Dugan when liberalism transforms from being an ideological arrangement to being 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. So where Fukuyama, the liberal, was reluctant to claim any true universality for liberalism, he thought that liberalism would be contained within a country, Dugan, the arch enemy of liberalism sees liberalism as something that impacts the entire world, not just within any particular state container. In other words, the universal homogeneous state at the end of history is not just liberal democracy within any individual country and VCRs and stereos in the economic sphere. The universal homogeneous state is a new Tiansha. Tiansha is the Chinese term for all under heaven. 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. Now, the Chinese Tiansha, the Ming and Qing dynasty may have been a Confucian Tiansha, but the American Tiansha is unavoidably a liberal Tiansha. As Wang Gongwu 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. And states may not expand, but the American Tiansha, the liberal, postmodern individual, is expanding to cover the entire world. As the US Declaration of Independence said, 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 creed, the ideology, of the 21st century American Tiansha. The American Tiansha is the universal homogeneous state that Fukuyama was looking for in 1989, but did not find. Fukuyama thought that the best that could come out of a universal state would be something like the European Union. In fact, we live in a true universal state, that of an overarching American Tiansha. By that I don't mean that the United States of America has taken over the world, far from it. The United States of America is merely the central state, the Zhongguo, in the larger American Tiansha. The two characters Zhongguo mean China, in Chinese, often translated as Middle Kingdom, they literally mean central state. In the Confucian Chinese Tiansha, China didn't rule the entire East Asian world, China was the central state of an ideological system that was embraced by their entire world. China's ideological system is a system of postmodern liberalism. It's not Confucianism, it's a different philosophy, but it performs the same function in the American world that Confucianism historically performed in the Ming and Qing dynasties of the Chinese Tiansha. Many of us identify postmodernism with post-World War II French philosophers, but in fact the person who coined the term postmodernism was Arnold Toynbee, the British World Historian, and he located postmodernism as beginning after the Civil War in the United States of America, or approximately 100 years after the Declaration of Independence. The Declaration of Independence was a holy postmodern document in its aspiration that every individual, not just great men and politicians and scientists, but that every individual had rights to freedom and the pursuit of happiness, and although that was not immediately operationalized in America, after the Civil War there was, coming to fruition, a cult of the individual. We can see it in war memorializations. Here is the State of New York monument at Gettysburg National Battlefield. The State of New York monument has a plinth, but who's on top of it? Not the Governor of New York, not the General McClellan. The figure at the top of the column is a metaphorical figure of the State of New York holding a wreath for the fallen heroes of New York State, and you can't see it in the photo, but crying tears down her cheek. Also invisible in the photo are the inscriptions of the names of the citizens of New York who fell in battle at Gettysburg. In other words there is a memorialization of the individual soldier, not of the General McClellan or the politician, and that theme runs through American memorials after the Civil War. In fact, Memorial Day, the United States Remembrance Day, began in the 1870s as Decoration Day, the day for decorating the graves of those who had fallen in the Civil War, and it's not just one monument, hundreds of monuments. This one is particularly poignant, the 136th New York Infantry, a monument of a tree stump, cut off, symbolizing the soldiers who were struck down in the prime of life with a soldier's kit, a drum, a leather bag, a rifle, leaning against the stump, and again on the back of the monument the names of the individual soldiers who died at Gettysburg. We could go on and on monument after monument, here is the news of history, recording the names of the fallen into the scroll of history, again accompanied by a list of soldiers who died in the battle, a particularly poignant memorial. This is a depiction of the flag boy who was shot down at the very beginning of the battle, holding the banner, holding the flag. It's not the regiment commander who's memorialized, it's the boy who held the flag who's memorialized, and again on the back the names of all of the fallen. Even the war correspondents of the Civil War, not the memorial, this is one of my famous favorites, it's actually just outside Antietam battlefield, and it's an arch to the war correspondents, the reporters who suffered and died reporting the Civil War. This kind of monuments only appeared in the rest of the Anglo-Saxon world, in Britain and Australia, maybe a little after the Civil War, and certainly after World War I, Australians and British will be familiar with the lists of the dead. If you look at Napoleonic memorials in the UK, you find Nelson atop his column. If you look at World War I monuments, good luck finding a general on horseback with a saber drawn. They're just not there. The World War I monuments are monuments to individual people. That kind of post-modernity, post-modernity as the democratization of individuality started in the Anglo-Saxon world, specifically in America, spread to Western Europe, and arguably only in the 1960s spread to continental Europe, and only in the 1990s to Eastern Europe and parts of Asia. The democratization of individuality, the post-modern individual, is the leitmotif of the American Tiansha. It runs through the, not just the culture, but the ideology, the understanding of the world that arose in America in the late 19th century and is now spreading certainly to elites and even spreading down to ordinary people throughout the world. Nobody wants to die for the emperor anymore. Nobody wants to die for communism. Nobody even wants to die for democracy. People want to live, to live out their own lives, to flourish in the pursuit of individual happiness. That is the heart, the leitmotif of the American Tiansha. And the post-modern American Tiansha, every individual participates directly in a single global sovereignty that of not exactly the United States, but a sovereignty of the American system. That is every post-modern individual has a stake in the stability and perpetuation of the American Tiansha. Here's a famous internet meme of a Chinese student graduating from Harvard Business School holding aloft the two things he presumably most values in the world, Chinese flag and the American dollar. Will this student, will this man, ever go on to advocate the invasion of America and the overthrow of the capitalist system? I think not. Returning to Hegel, Hegel said the history of the world is nothing but the development of the idea of freedom. Hegel thought that freedom could only be realized in the context of the state. But maybe Hegel didn't anticipate that one day the entire world would become in effect a single state, a single political entity, with a single set of political norms. After all, Hegel said, America is the land of the future, where in ages that lie before us, the burdens of the world's history will reveal itself. Hegel was aware that he didn't know exactly where America was going to lead, but that whatever it led was going to become the future of the world. And I think we've already arrived there at the global American tinshaw, an in effect, a global state that encompasses all of the smaller, more local polities of the world. To find out more, you can listen to my fuller one hour lecture available on my YouTube channel. You can also find me at salvaturbabonus.com, where you can sign up for my monthly newsletter on global affairs.