What World Do We Want?

Abstract

Amitai Etzioni’s From Empire to Community traces the fundamental socio-political problem of our time to that of maintaining human primacy. He argues that the tendency of our technological means is to overtake our ability to assign worthy goals for their application. His analysis of the possibility of forming a cosmopolitan order can be applied fruitfully in a posthuman context in which emerging technologies pose a challenge for constructing a posthuman political and moral order. In this context, the task is to maintain posthuman primacy. I show that there are several converging lines of thought and supportive social factors that underwrite the construction of a posthuman cosmopolitan order. I argue that self-consistent recursivity must be applied to the very procedural character of reflexive modernization of institutions and to the creation of posthuman beings that may participate in the creation of a future cosmopolitan social order.