Peter Singer Lecture in Brisbane

This evening I joined several hundred others attending a lecture by the philosopher Peter Singer. Singer was speaking at a Brisbane 2009 Ideas Festival event at the State Library of Queensland. The event was timed to launch his new book "The life you can save: Acting now to end world poverty". The book is about what people in the Western world should be doing about the crisis of the extreme poor.

The 62 year old Australian born Singer is a professor of bioethics at Princeton University's Centre for Human Values. He also lectures at the University of Melbourne's Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics. Introducing him tonight, the Vice Chancellor of Griffith University Professor Ian O’Connor described him as “one of Australia’s greatest thinkers” and someone who in his 25 books has set the agenda in ethics and causes his audience to ponder their own role in the global community. O’Connor said there was a congruence in his material and the way Singer lives his own life and all royalties from the sale of the new book were going to Oxfam.

Singer then took the stage and said he was honoured to speak at the first public event of this year’s ideas festival. He said his contribution would be a discussion of what our obligations are to those people living in extreme poverty. Singer said this was something he had thought about all his professional life. He tackled the subject in one of his earliest articles “Famine, Affluence and Morality” (ppt) which was published in the journal Philosophy and Public Affairs in 1972 and said it was a “novel idea at the time” for philosophers to tackle the issues of the day.

The article was published just twelve months after the crisis in what was then East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) which was agitating for independence from the western wing. Millions fled the violence into India which at the time did not have the resources to feed them. The richer nations were not giving nearly enough to sustain them. At the time Singer was living in Oxford and employed by the University. He felt that by giving money to Oxfam, he personally could do something to help the Bangladeshi people who were in “desperate straits”. This began a lifelong commitment of giving to the aid agency.

Meanwhile the 1972 article began to be discussed and its ideas reprinted elsewhere. It kicked off a debate that Singer followed closely. He returned to the topic in his 1979 book Practical Ethics. More recently he realised that the issue had risen in the public consciousness and that given the amount of recent literature he would devote an entire book to the subject. Singer said “the time was right” to bring attention to the matter as the capacity of the developed world to combat poverty had drastically increased in the last 30 years.

Singer then challenged the assumption that think global poverty is always going to be with us and there is not much we can do about it. However the World Bank (which defines extreme poverty as living on $1.25 or less a day) says that in the last 30 years the proportion of the world’s poor has halved from 40 percent of the total population to 20 percent.

These people have no buffer for when things go wrong. All it takes is a poor harvest or an illness in the family to push them over the edge. The most heartbreaking aspect of this poverty, said Singer, is knowing a child is sick and a cure is available but not being able to afford it, or travel to where the cure is available. The lack of a small amount of money can ruin lives. This is where the West can make a difference, says Singer. Everyone he meets in the US or Australia has spare resources. “If you drink bottled water or juice wherever there is a tap, then you are spending money on luxuries,” he said. "We all have the capacity to contribute to organisations that promote sustainable development and help people get out of poverty in their own ways".

Singer then addressed the question of how much money people should donate. Should they donate all of their discretionary spend, or keep going until they themselves are on the poverty line? That would be heroic, he said, “but not something I would do myself”. Singer suggested that those earning up to $105,000 a year should donate one percent of their income. Above that it should be scalable; beginning at five percent while those above $250,000 should donate 10 percent. He said that if this scale was commonplace, it would easily raise the amount economist Jeffrey Sachs said would be needed for the world to meet the UN Millennium Development goals established in 2000 which aimed to halve world poverty by 2015.

Singer urged Australians to go to the website associated with the new book where they could pledge to meet the standard donation based on their income bracket. Singer said a hundred people had already pledged (and there were 149 at the time of writing a few hours later) and he expects this number to grow exponentially as the book is released in the US next month and Europe in the months after. By pledging, Singer said, people will also help change the public standard of what is involved in living an ethical life in a world of great affluence and extreme poverty.

Singer concluded his talk by taking questions from the floor. One person asked why he concentrated on individual donations and not those of governments. Singer responded by saying that while Australia’s aid budget had gone up from 30c to 32c in every $100 under the current government, it was still below the pre-election pledge of 50c, and well below the $1 donated by the likes of Sweden. Government aid is often also tied to conditions or goods and services purchased in the country and is also usually locally directed. Australia, for example, gives hardly any aid to sub-Saharan Africa. By contrast, individual aid to NGOs is usually better targetted.

Another good question related to motivation: why should I donate? Singer said that some people donate because “it is the right thing to do”. Others want to prevent bad things from happening the world. He also cited Henry Sidgwick’s “point of view of the universe” which enables people to lift themselves out of their own perspective. Finally he acknowledged an egoistic element in that helping others gives people’s own lives meaning. Singer called this practice “enlightened self-interest”.

Another questioner asked Singer whether anyone in Australia qualifies in the category of “extreme poverty”. Singer said no, even the poorest here are entitled to financial support. There is a social security net that provides a certain standard of health care, safe drinking water, and shelter. Together these entitlements put them above the extreme poverty line. The extremely poor are mostly in Africa (50 per cent of the total population) and also in the South Asia sub-continent (33 per cent – but largest overall in absolute numbers). The very poor, as UNICEF states, “die quietly in some of the poorest villages on earth, far removed from the scrutiny and the conscience of the world.” Singer is on a mission to change that.

Gray and Fukuyama

Today’s The Australian has a feature on British philosopher John Gray who arrives for the Sydney Writers Festival in a week’s time. Gray is not to be confused with Dr John Gray who writes about men and women as if they come from different planets, neither of which support life. The Sydney-bound Gray has also been accused of not supporting life. His straight talking and profoundly original thinking in books such as “Straw Dogs” has seen him labelled erroneously as a misanthrope. But the reason Gray doesn’t like big ideas because they lead to “big casualties”. Gray is a post-anthropist, recording likely future extinction with scientific insensitivity. He will be in Sydney to promote his new book Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia in four events at the festival between May 19-25.

One of John Gray’s most vehement critics is Francis Fukuyama, still best known for his 1992 work “The End of History and The Last Man”. The book’s elegiac title alone should have endeared Fukuyama to Gray. But Gray had no time for Fukuyama’s theory that the end of the Cold War marked a total victory for the idea of liberal democracy.

Both men have their political contradictions. Gray has in his time supported the Tories, then New Labour and now wishes a plague on both their houses. After establishing his reputation, Fukuyama joined the powerful People for New American Century (PNAC) in the late 1990s. PNAC backed the winning horse (after a protest) in the 2000 election and most of the key positions in the Bush Administration were filled by PNAC members. Behind the scenes, Fukuyama and PNAC were key advocates of linking Iraq to 9/11. Inexplicably, Fukuyama changed course in 2002 and began distancing himself from the neo-cons. By 2006 he was saying that history will not judge the Iraq War or “the ideas animating it” kindly.

Back in 1995, Gray interviewed Fukuyama for the then new “Prospect” magazine. Fukuyama had just released his follow up to The End of History called “Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity”. In that book Fukuyama explored the social factors that created prosperity and how they could be harnessed. Gray called him a “theorist of global economic rivalry and, perhaps, of American decline.” The second-generation Japanese immigrant bristled at the latter prospect.

In his 1999 work “The Great Disruption”, Fukuyama described Gray as an inheritor of the “Burkean critique of the Enlightenment.” Fukuyama described Gray as the logical follower of the 18th century Irish statesman and orator Edmund Burke. Burke was the MP for Bristol at the time of the French Revolution. He was a Whig but as Tory as they come. Burke excoriated the French Revolution as a human disaster. The Revolution, like the Enlightenment that caused it, sought to replace traditional rules with rational ones.

Fukuyama saw these qualities in Gray. Fukuyama said Gray’s reaction to the fall of the Berlin Wall (a pivotal event in his own End of History schema) was that it laid bare the internal contradictions of the Enlightenment. Gray’s 1995 book “Enlightenment’s Wake” said the victory of capitalism in Berlin led to higher crime rates and social disorder in the US. The self-interest of capitalism reinforces the process by placing self-interest ahead of moral obligation and a tragedy of the commons occurs. Society survives only on a limited human capital that is running out and not being replenished.

Himself veering further to the right as the 1990s wore on, Fukuyama disagreed with the assumption that human capital could not replenished. Fukuyama pointed out that both crimes against violence and property were on the wane since 1992, falling dramatically especially in the big cities of New York, Chicago, Detroit and Los Angeles. In New York, crime levels are now at the levels they were at before they exploded in the 1960s. Fukuyama calls the period of the 1960s to the 1990s the “Great Disruption” when society underwent the greatest structural change. He says a new social order is now emerging from the chaos because we are all biologically hardwired to forge bonds.

Gray believes that Fukuyama’s ideas proved irresistible to the right because they painted a seductive picture of capitalism as an unstoppable force of nature. Gray proved better at predicting the course of history than Fukuyama when he said it would quickly resume in the shape of ethnic, religious and resource wars. He knew that a non-ideological approach would be needed to deal with the conflicts to follow the victory of liberal democracy. But in Gray's eyes the Enlightenment was still culprit. He sees Al Qaeda as an inheritor of the same post-Enlightenment revolutionary tradition as communism, Nazism and neo-conservatism. Al Qaeda can mean "the base" but can also mean "the database". Knowledge is indeed power in Gray's book.

The Marx Botherers: 125 years on

On the 125th anniversary of Karl Marx’s death, China’s Communist Government has announced that work on the first direct translation from the German of the 60 volumes of the Chinese-language edition of 'The Complete Works of Marx and Engels' won't be completed in the foreseeable future because of staff shortages. The work has never before been translated from German directly into Chinese and it has taken 18 years to produce the first 20 volumes. The latest deal is lack of new qualified translators who take up to ten years to train. The previous translation is based on a Russian version from the 1950s.

The father of communism, Karl Marx died on 14 March 1883 of pleurisy and bronchitis. However his writings on politics, economics and philosophy remain hugely influential today. Marx was born on 5 May 1818 at Trier in the Rhineland which was then part of Prussia. His father Heinrich was a lawyer who, although was from a Jewish family, registered as a Protestant when laws were passed preventing Jews from holding public positions. Europe was undergoing massive change during Karl’s early life. The Industrial Revolution was leading to the growth of the factory system and the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars led to the abolition of feudalism throughout much of Europe.

Marx followed in his father’s footsteps and studied law at the University of Bonn before moving on to history and philosophy. In 1836 he moved to the University of Berlin where he became interested in the teachings of Hegel. He wrote a thesis on Greek philosophers which was accepted at the University of Jena in 1841. In 1843 he married Johanna “Jenny” von Westphalen, the beautiful daughter of Baron von Westphalen, a cultured and politically progressive Prussian. That same year Marx began working for the radical newspaper Rheinische Zeitung. His hard-hitting articles on the plight of peasants in France’s Moselle region made waves and the paper was eventually censored and Marx was forced to resign.

Marx moved to Paris to escape Prussian political repression. There he encountered a vibrant working class and socialist movement. He briefly worked on a journal called German-French Annals where Marx first began to direct his appeals to the workers rather than the intellectuals. It was here he also met Friedrich Engels who was to become a lifelong friend. Engels was a business agent based in England working for his father. It was his article on economics for the Annals that impressed Marx.

While in Paris, Marx also became influenced by Russian anarchists including Mikhail Bakunin. Their ideas of a government-less society and absolute freedom became important to him as he struggled to work out his own philosophy. In 1848, he and Engels published their own theory of reform in a 12,000 word booklet called Manifesto of the Communist Party, popularly shortened to The Communist Manifesto. The book described the unfair state of society and how revolution could change it into an ideal communist state. It described how the capitalist system had come about and how it exploited the conflict between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. The most famous rallying cry of the book read: The proletarians have nothing to lose except their chains…working men of all countries unite!”

Marx’s revolutionary ideas caused him to be expelled from France in 1845, from Belgium in 1848 and Prussia a year later. He moved to London where he settled for the rest of his life. His wife Jenny gave birth to seven children but only three survived. The baron’s daughter was not used to the crushing poverty she now found herself in. They relied heavily on Engel’s largesse while Marx learned English. His main source of income were the articles he wrote for newspapers such as the New York Herald Tribune.

In London, Marx’s main contacts were with other Europeans, particularly German and French radicals and refugees, with many of whom he had intermittent squabbles and disagreements. Marx spent the last 25 years of his life writing Das Kapital. This was to be a broad-ranging scientific study of capitalism, politics and economics running into several volumes. He spend much of his time researching at the British Museum library where he became a well known figure. Marx made extensive use of the library’s collection of factory inspectors’ and public health officers’ reports. Marx also spoke often at working men’s clubs and political groups.

Marx’s final years were dogged with illness especially bronchitis. Marx was a heavy smoker and also drank alcohol heavily. He made his illnesses worse by overwork. As well as working and speech-making, he was also heavily involved with the International Working Men’s Association which was better known simply as the International. Marx was a founder member of the international in 1864, wrote its inaugural address and drew up its statutes.

His last years were also dominated by personal tragedy. Jenny died in 1881 and his favourite eldest daughter, also Jenny, died a year later of cancer of the bladder. Marx never recovered from this double blow. He died in March 1883 with his great work incomplete. He was buried at London’s Highgate cemetery. After he died, Engels spent another 11 years working on Marx’s papers and completing the final volumes of Das Kapital.

Marx’s ideas were initially slow to spread. Although Marx himself expected the revolution to occur in the industrialised countries of Britain and Germany, it was Russia where his ideas were first put into practice. Marxism came to Tsarist Russia through the work of Georgi Plekhanov, son of a European based landowner. Plekhanov was the first Russian to write about Marxism as it applied to his own country. His ideas were taken on by students who spread the word through towns and factories.

One of the early converts was Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov who was later to become known as Lenin. Lenin was sent to Siberia for three years for preaching Marxism to factory workers. He was a charismatic leader whose time came with Russia’s disastrous entry into World War I. His Bolsheviks gained power in October 1917 and inaugurated the dictatorship of the proletariat. But after many years of civil war, the Russian Communist state that emerged bore little resemblance to that envisioned by Marx and Engels. Russia was not developed economically enough for true communism to exist. Stalin became dictator on Lenin’s death and the state that Marx prophesised would ‘wither away’ instead became all powerful.

Although the capitalist system that Marx described no longer exists, Marxism remains relevant in the 21st century. His economic predictions that large corporations would dominate world markets and industry would become reliant on technology have both proven to be correct. At the end of the Cold War, critics suggested that Das Kapital was obsolete but by 1998 market panics in Asia caused the Financial Times to question if we had moved "from the triumph of global capitalism to its crisis in barely a decade. Marx’s philosophy is also pertinent. His ideas of the alienation of labour and its debilitating consequences on human beings has more credence than ever today.

A short history of myths

Myths may be old-fashioned but there is no doubting they still have currency. The world’s media love a good myth. In the last 48 hours alone, the concept of "myth" was used to explain matters as diverse as redemptive violence, search engine optimisation, Hitler's would-be assassin Von Stauffenburg, Black Friday, the music of Gram Parsons, a strong British pound, cricket’s nervous nineties, pay inequality in Bahrain,t he life of Hunter S Thompson and whether the English language was good for India. While today the word "myth" is often used to describe something that simply isn’t true, within its definition is an acknowledgement a myth is more powerful and complex than a mere lie. What is it about this concept of myth that unifies these diverse themes?

The idea and history of myths is explored in Karen Armstrong’s “A Short History of Myth”. Myth is culture’s way of understanding itself and the word has many meanings across ritual and anthropological, literary and semiological fields. Armstrong examines the primary meaning: its ritual and anthropological function. She said humans have been mythmakers since Neanderthal times and our imagination allows us to have irrational ideas. She said the five most important things about myths are 1) they are rooted in the fear of death 2) they are inseparable from ritual 3) they force us to go beyond our experience 4) they teach us how to behave and 5) they speak of another reality, most commonly referred to the world of the gods.

While now more akin to theology, the ancients saw mythology in the light of human experience. The world of the gods and the world of humanity were not separated and mythology was designed to cope with the human predicament. Mythology and lying are now conflated, but a myth used to be something which happened once, but also happened all the time. Because of our chronological view of history we have no word for such an occurrence but mythology transcends this core of reality. This is something we have become alienated to but has long been an indispensable part of our ability to make sense of the world. Armstrong calls this concept the “everywhen”.

The earliest myths belongs to Palaeolithic times, between 20000 and 8000 BCE. Prior to the development of agriculture, hunter-gatherers used myth as a stable backdrop of their lives. One of the earliest myths was the Golden Age which told of a lost paradise where humans lived in close contact with the divine. Its purpose was to show people how they could return to this era by rapture and more importantly by the regular duties of everyday life. Every mundane thing could be sacred. The earliest mythologies taught people to embrace an external reality in the ordinary. The sky with its storms, sunsets, eclipses, rainbows and meteors was a religious experience. People began to personify the drama of the heavens and sky gods were born.

As humanity developed survival skills and organised society, it developed a new pragmatic mode the Greeks would call “logos”. Different from mythical thinking, logos needs to correspond accurately to objective facts. Where mythos seeks explanation in the “everywhen”, logos always looks to the future. Both have their limitations and the pre-modern world realised they were complementary. One covered spiritual matters, the other technological.

Technology was to become increasingly important in human development during the Neolithic period between 8000 and 4000 BCE with the rise of agriculture. Initially this was a religious experience. The crop was sacred and the Earth was a living womb. Sexual myths prevailed. The soil was female, the seeds were semen, and rain was sex between heaven and earth. The Earth was a brutal and unforgiving Mother Goddess which pastoralists battled constantly to gain a living. She was the cause of death and sorrow and her journey was of initiation and transformation.

Around 4000 BCE, humans built the first cities and with them the first civilisations. The earliest successful cities were in the Fertile Crescent where the rate of societal growth rapidly increased. People learned new skills and new occupations: engineers, plumbers, builders, barbers, porters, musicians and scribes. Destruction was common-place. Cities brought wars, massacres and revolutions and urban violence was reflected in new mythology. Cain was the first city-builder and the first murderer. The Tower of Babel caused those who built it to be unable to understand each others speech. Mesopotamian myths such as the Epic of Gilgamesh were the first in which the Gods withdrew from the world. Civilisation and culture were on the ascendency and God was becoming increasingly remote.

The next major development occurred between 800 and 200 BCE. Armstrong quotes German philosopher Karl Jaspers who calls this period the Axial Age because it is a pivotal era in humanity’s spiritual development. It marks the beginning of modern religion. There was Confucianism and Taoism in China, Buddhism and Hinduism in India, monotheism (Zoroastrianism and Judaism) in the Middle East and rationalism in Greece. A market economy developed in which power passed from holy men and kings to merchants. The new religious movements tampered with the older myths. City life made the divine more remote and alien. Indian cultures reflected this with the severe asceticism of their holy men. The Chinese did not speak of the divine at all. The philosophy of Confucius and Lao Tse were based on the ethics of how humans dealt with each other.

All the new religions believed strongly in rites which gave the myths emotional resonance. Myths demanded action. The Jews, convinced by the emptiness of earlier myths, began to insist that their god, Yahweh, was the only God. The Greeks used logos to find a rational basis for old myths. In physics, philosophy and drama, they explored ancient themes in new settings. Plato was impatient with myths but he saw they were important in exploring ideas that lie beyond the scope of philosophy. He used the myth of the cave to show enlightenment was relative. Irrational matters, he conceded, might allow a plausible fable.

In the post-Axial Age of 200 BCE to 1500 CE, the status of myth remained constant. Judaism inspired the myth of Christianity. The historical figure of Jesus was mythologised by St Paul. Paul was uninterested in Jesus’s teachings. What was important to him was the mystery of the crucifixion and resurrection. He turned the death and ascension into a mythical creation of the ‘everywhen’. Western Christianity used the Fall of Rome to develop the myth of Original Sin, but the myth is unknown to the eastern Orthodox, where the Roman Empire did not fall. The Christians were followed by Mohammed and the Koran. The Muslim holy book is a series of parables that speak about the divine in terms of signs and symbols.

In the 16th century, Europe (followed by its North American imitation) was beginning its world dominance. The Western modernity was based on logos. Society was freed from its dependence on the constraints of traditional cultures and forged forward fuelled by technological advances and constant reinvestment of capital. The western economy seemed infinitely renewable. This modernity bred an intellectual enlightenment that deemed myth useless, false and outmoded. Modern medicine, hygiene, technologies and transport revolutionised life in Europe and North America. However logos could not explain these successes’ intuitive sense of significance. In reaction, some read religion factually; hence the horror of Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species.

In 1882, one of Nietzsche’s characters in “The Gay Science” famously proclaimed God was dead. Armstrong argues Nietzsche was right in one way; without myth and ritual, the sense of sacredness dies. Humanity turned God into a wholly notional truth. The nihilism of the 20th century bore this out. The sinking of the Titanic, the killing fields of World War I, the death camps of World War II and the Russian gulags seemed to indicate the results of a total loss of the sacred. Armstrong argues we need to disabuse ourselves of the notion myth is false or inferior. She says we need them to help us identify with all of humanity, create a spiritual attitude and help us become transcendent. The stakes are high. "Unless there is some kind of spiritual revolution that is able to keep abreast of our technological genius, we will not save our planet," Armstrong concludes.

PoMo Primer: An introduction to Postmodernism

In a probing article on the goings on in the fin de siecle days of the Bush White House, Alexander G Rubio claims the administration “is founded on a post-modern belief in creating reality by sheer force of will and exporting democratic revolution world wide”. Rubio uses the example of Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum where an invented conspiracy came to pass to show how the Bush administration ended up believing in their own web of lies and spin.

Rubio quotes from the surrealistic White House 3 July press briefing by Tony Snow where he defends Bush’s action’s in the Libby case using a weight of logical contradictions. According to Snow, Bush wasn't "granting a favour to anyone" but that the case got his "special handling." It was not done for "political reasons" even though "it was political." It was also handled "in a routine manner," yet it was also "an extraordinary case.” And "we are not going to make comments" on the case, even though Bush had already issued a 655-word statement commenting on the case. Rubio argues that the façade of the administration has crumbled leaving nothing but naked power underneath. And the moral according to Rubio is “postmodernism might make for some half way decent art, [but] it produces really bad politics.”

But what exactly is postmodernism? Woolly Days has just finished reading Kevin Hart’s “Postmodernism: A Beginner’s Guide”. The book was attempt to explain the subject for people who know little or nothing about it. The Australian born Hart was Professor of English at the University of Notre Dame, Indiana this year and has now moved to the University of Virginia. He has 18 books to his name including seven volumes of poetry.

Hart begins with a list of the various important strands of postmodernism. The first branch is French and begins with Francois Lyotard (1925-1998) whose 1979 work “The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge” first popularised the word. Lyotard argued the postmodern was an attitude of suspicion towards the modern. The modern always appeals to a “meta-narrative” which guides human activity towards some sort of moral progress. The postmodern does not follow the modern but maintains an attitude of disbelief towards it. The postmodern presents what cannot be conceptualised.

The next major French postmodernist is Jacques Lacan (1901-1981). Lacan was a combination of psychoanalyst, philosopher and literary critic. He was fascinated by the “subject” and how it is organised and disorganised by language. The subject is the combination of being and meaning and Lacan thought of it as “the space of desire”. Using methods of metaphor and metonymy, Lacan constructs a nebulous subject that is motivated by a desire for something not quite symbolic and not quite real. It is also always changing.

In 1975 Jacques Derrida (1930-2004) wrote an essay based on Lacan’s work called “Le facteur de la verite” (which puns on “postman/factor of truth”). Derrida expanded Lacan’s examples into the world of economics, politics, architecture and elsewhere. Derrida’s teaching can be condensed into a French expression “plus d’une langue” which means variously “more than one language” or “no more of one language”. In other words, there is no master language of communication. Translation is always necessary.

Derrida draws on the works on metaphysics by German philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889-1976). Heidegger said that metaphysics (Greek meta ta physica “what comes after physics”) asks the question “what are beings?” but doesn’t ask the more fundamental question “what is being?” This means that being is figured by way of beings so is never considered to be God or Mind.

Others rebelled against the preoccupation of subject found in Freud and Lacan. Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari wrote several books together where they tackled the free flow of desire. Desire, they said, doesn’t arise from the subject but is flowing everywhere. They claimed that experience is not maintained in the consciousness of the subject and drawing from Scottish philosopher David Hume said there is no ground of experience, either within or without the mind. Humans have no exclusive rights to experience, perception and consciousness.

French philosopher and historian Michel Foucault (1926-1984) had similar ideas. He analysed the relationship between power and knowledge. He was most interested in humanity’s “rifts, ruptures and contradictions”. Foucault tried to think outside the realm of the subject and argued that power is everywhere. It isn’t concentrated in individuals but lives in structures and systems, he said. Power can be resisted but it is impossible to get outside of it.

Others argued that this wave of French philosophers were not true-postmodernists at all, they were post-structuralists. That is convenient, because post-structuralism rejects definitions that claim to have discovered absolute 'truths' or facts about the world it is itself difficult to define. Nonetheless many argue that postmodernism is more truly an American construct rather than French and Las Vegas represents postmodernity far better than Paris.

And indeed postmodernism is rife in the US. Company branding is one example: when drinking Coke, what you are really consuming is the image. Artists as diverse as Madonna and Britney Spears perpetually remake themselves. War is presented as a sanitised operation from TV studios and would eventually lead to Jean Baudrillard’s “The Gulf War Did Not Take Place” (the title ending up more well known than the book itself) which showed we are hostages of media presentation which create illusions he described as “simulacra”. What CNN provided was a hyper-real simulacra of the First Gulf War (the second was no better), not what “really happened”.

In essence American postmodernism is about taking things out of context, pulling them to pieces and playing with those pieces. It is about data and simulation rather than nature. In literature, the Irish first dabbled in postmodernism with Joyce’s “Finnegans Wake” and Beckett’s “The Unnamable”. Pynchon, Calvino, DeLillo, and Eco followed on from there. Postmodernity became a complex reaction to the mid-twentieth century failings of modernity. The idea of modernity being a series of steady unabated progress has been shattered.

Nonetheless there are those who argue that postmodernism offers the chance for re-enchantment and a new opportunity for thinking ethics and the mystery of the godhead. Modernity had no place for gods and instead put its faith in universal reason. It was fascinated by abstractions, secularism and nihilism. But the extermination camps and gulags put an end to this faith. The postmodern is now the site of the post-secular. They believe there are no fixed essences only what Hart calls a “differential flux”.

Kevin Hart himself belongs to this branch of postmodernism. Hart points to Derrida who, although not a believer himself, opened a way to develop a sophisticated non-metaphysical theology and one that rejects idolatry. Postmodernism for Hart and others allows them to re-elaborate the central doctrines of Christianity.

So the word “postmodernism” means different things in different contexts. The Modernism to which it refers is the melange of avant garde cultural phenomena of the first 30 years of the 20th century as represented by the work of Eliot, Pound, Joyce (Ulysses), Woolf, Picasso, Duchamp, Matisse and Le Corbusier. Postmodernism questioned and then played around with various strands of modernism beginning in the 1950s. William Burroughs early collage novels were important examples. The French then tied together the American experience with local threads and re-exported the mix across the world.

Hart quotes Jorge Luis Borges’ “Of Exactitude in Science” in which an empire’s cartographers devise a map so complex it has a one-to-one correspondence with the land itself. But when the empire declines, the map falls into disrepair. Baudrillard suggests that the same is not true of postmodernism. We can no longer be sure which is priority the map or the terrain. In the end there is no substantial difference between the two. We no longer live with the real but instead with the hyper-real. And that includes the hyper-reality of the White House.