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26 Charles Ess

This cosmopolitanism will not necessarily result simply from ex-
posure to CMC technologies, but rather through an intentional
process of education and socialization—in Aristotelian terms,
through cultivating the proper human habits (ethos in Greek) and
virtues (in the Greek sense of arete, our excellence as human beings)
preceding the development and use of these technologies (Aristotle,
Nichomachean Ethics, esp. Book II, 1103a14–26). Nor is the focus on
virtue, habit, and excellence exclusively Western; rather, it can be
found in various expressions across cultures—for example, in Bud-
dhism and the Confucian ideal of chün-tzu (the authentic or profound
30
person), as well as in recent feminist approaches. Moreover, there
are historical precedents for such cosmopolitanism beginning at the
level of culture itself. Cultures themselves have largely worked as dy-
namic entities: to a greater or lesser degree and at varying speeds,
most cultures of the world are in an ongoing process of losing ele-
ments of cultural habit, practice, belief, and values while simultane-
ously absorbing and creating new such elements, resulting in new
“hybrids” that graft such elements from neighboring cultures. 31
In the past, in parallel with such dynamic cultural dissolu-
tion/accretion, there have always been a few who have explored and
adopted to “other” cultures and new cultural mixes: the cosmopoli-
tans, citizens of the world, who have learned to live beyond the
boundaries of a particular cultural domain. What is different now is
not that CMC technologies are continuing this process of stirring up
cultural pots, but that they are doing so on a global scale, and at a
perhaps unimaginable speed (indeed, as Sandbothe (1999) makes
clear, to the point of eliminating traditional notions of “time” alto-
gether). Because of this scope and speed, it would seem that the
process of cultural intermixing now requires that not just the few,
but the many—anyone who desires to participate in an intercultural
global society—must become cultural hybrids (synthesizing two cul-
tures) or cultural polybrids.
In Western historical terms, an intercultural global village will
require the contemporary equivalent of Renaissance women and
men, where the Western Renaissance itself emerged from and ex-
panded on precisely the extensive cultural interactions of the Me-
dieval period (e.g., the recovery of ancient Greco-Roman science and
philosophy as refined and expanded in the Muslim world, the infu-
sion of Chinese sciences and technologies, the interactions—politi-
cal, theological, and philosophical—among Muslims, Christians, and
Jews, etc.). Such polybrid cosmopolitanism contrasts in particular
with the uncritical “cosmopolitanism” of the cybersurfing “cultural