Abstract This paper is in response to an article by Professor Marangudakis in Zygon in which he presented a “grand narrative” that predicted the coming of a new “axial age” (Marangudakis, 2012). In his article, Marangudakis criticized parts of my article in Zygon, “Athens, Jerusalem and the Arrival of Techno-Secularism” (Caiazza, 2005). Two issues separate us: first, whether the Athens/Jerusalem dilemma can or should be overcome in a new axial age, and second, how benign future technological developments will be. Marangudakis (...) thinks that the Athens/Jerusalem dichotomy will be overcome, whereas I think that the dichotomy should and will persist in future ages. I am suspicious of the future effects of current technologies, since they give political elites increased control over the individual, while Marangudakis generally applauds the new technologies (especially biotechnology). The Athens/Jerusalem dichotomy arises as an inevitable part of monotheistic religious belief. (shrink)

The “eutopia” vision of the future, promulgated by technoscientists and libertarian thinkers, could herald the coming of a third axial age that could reshape and reformulate the legacy of the Great Religions and their transcendental moral imperatives, and of Modernity and the democratic imperative of equality of social conditions. A sociological diagnosis of a third, technosomatic, morality, is not a matter of supporting or rejecting such a possibility, but a matter of detecting its rise and regulating its impact.