On the other hand, the turbo-capitalism described by Edward Luttwak in his 1999 book produces high-tech's "super-tycoons" like Bill Gates, Craig Venter, Steve Jobs, Sergei Brin or Larry Page who are more powerful and richer than many states, like the independent warlords of yore.
Whether humans rise to a post-human condition or become truly human, depending upon the definition we give to "humanity", the fact is that we will have to answer the rhetorical question posed by Amkreutz (ibid): "what do we do with the institutions (and constitutions) our fathers founded on "self-evident" natural principles"? He proceeds to point out that digeality will --render Left and Right meaningless and create a new reality which transcends both capitalism and socialism", as geopolitics will be absorbed in noopolitics "which is about mindsets, not territories". That new reality would require some form of economy of communion, as the basis for the kind of associative democracy being experimented in some regions of Italy, Portugal and Latin America.
Amkreutz is not being optimistic about this; he simply takes stock of current and predictable developments and concludes that we need to build interactive digital realities through web-enabled peer networks if we wish to mediate successfully the artificial universe of our making. That may be too technical a recipe for most people to understand but in effect it translates into glocal politics and economics, based on political ecology, striking a balance between the individual and the community and rising above the fatalistic reading of history to invent reality as we wish it to be and no more as we are told it must be by past precedents.
It is here that archaeo-futurists make a number of interesting proposals drawn from ancient precepts and forms of social organization in diverse societies. While the Hindu social philosopher D D Upadhaya defined an Integral Humanism rooted in the traditional Vedic and Upanishadic vision of man and the cosmos, the Bengali 20th century thinker P R Sarkar defined the "ethics for a new humanism" in his book The Liberation of Intellect (Kolkata, Ananda Marg, 1972) and articulated the rules of what he called a holistic Proutist Economics (for PROgressive Utilisation Theory) in his Discourse on Economic Liberation (1992).
In the West EF Schumaker was inspired by both the western Christian tradition and Buddhist Economics on which he wrote a famous essay in 1966 and which is currently being championed by various social reformers as far apart as Sri Lanka, Bhutan (with its ideal of Gross National Happiness or GNH as a corrective to the quantitative myopia of GNP idolatry), Vietnam and Japan.
More recently the Finnish philosopher Sirkka Heikkonen (Prometheus Revisited in Commentationes Humanarum Litterarum, Societas Scientiarum Fennica, Helsinki, 2000) draws inspiration from the Roman philosopher Seneca to advocate transcending our exploitive civilization to enter an age of Epistemological Expansion according to the Stoic formula for achieving the synthesis between the state of nature of our origins and the utilitarian science-driven mechanisms we have established.
Thus Seneca's precept: sequere naturam can acquire a new meaning in the contemporary epistemic context and provide a "philosophical basis for the information society according to the principles of sustainable development" (Heikkonen) whereby we would become real humans or truly sapiens by setting moral progress, and not the accumulation of wealth and power, as our foremost goal, in the awareness that as the Roman sage said, increasing knowledge of the world in order to realize our real or essential nature is the source of the highest happiness.
In Russia and the Central Asian area the concept of a noospheric civilization connected to the "universal, cognitive, semantic field" is being actively promoted, even at government level by followers of V I Vernadsky and V P Kaznachev such as Prof. L. Gordina, author of From Biosphere to Noosphere (http://www.newhumanity, org.ru) and organizer of the World Forum of Spiritual Culture under the patronage of the Presidency of Kazakhstan. The goal is to bring together spiritual traditions and ecological-cosmic awareness and practices for building a better global society.
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