bogus though commonplace. But in any case even if we believe that our language is just one game among many, how can this be anything more than a matter of belief? Whether the anthropologist is ‘native’ or ‘western’, is not his/her work of culture precisely an attempt to explain ‘it’ to (and I would also say fabricate it for) us? And are not these ‘profound’ differences in reality effects of genres—literary, film, scholarly—our genres? Even if then there are profound differences, the only ones we can understand are the ones we understand (or think we do). And reflexively or self-critically we now know that the anthro-pologist can be more inventive than the native, or the native can be inventive for the benefit of the anthropologist.59

There is also the question of future generations. It is improbable that humans have the capacity to think seriously beyond the present and the future which is present in that present. One or two generations—children and grandchildren—have traditionally provided some kind of horizon for measuring this present future and this is embedded in the most fundamental device for the purposive coordination of society which is the rules of inheritance. Cryogenics and cloning may come to offer a sci-fi dissolution of this limited time-frame and elongate the present future. Beyond that, we can allow future generations in as virtual pre-sent discussants to speak for their interests, however we try to institutionalise that.60 (In a partly pre-institutional sense, that is what Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth and other groups are trying to do.) But what often gets muddled up here is the distinction between the worlded nature of postmetaphysical thinking and the viability of transposing our traditional language of trusteeship and responsibility from this world to the world of the future and of its inhabitants. This is necessarily an abstract problem (the cultural allegiances of Greenpeace etc often obscure this) and I suspect it can only be formulated technocratically, ie through calculations, statistics, measurements, computer simulations, and, in the end, probabilistically. And at this level the problem is that it’s difficult to do these calculations for ourselves and it’s difficult to choose between alternative calculations and so it’s difficult to have open-ended discussions about what we should do faced with an agenda assembled in this way.61

In response to all this, Luhmann’s position is blunt:

[Habermas’s] theory sides with the human to join the latter in battle against enemy forces. But isn’t this human merely an invention of this theory, merely a veiling of this theory’s self-reference? If he or she were meant as an empirical object (with the name of subject), the theory would have to declare who, then, is meant, for obviously it cannot send five billion humans, who at the same time are living and acting, on a discursive search for good grounds. Not only the length of this process of searching, and the conditions of ‘bounded rationality’, but already the sheer simultaneity of

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59 Cf, the Writing Cultures debate literature. 60 J Habermas, The Future of Human Nature (Oxford, Polity, 2003). 61 Cf, the debate around B Lomborg, The Skeptical Environmentalist: Measuring the Real State of the World (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2001).