The human response to the hopelessness of mortality is complex. It can be viewed as a cultural form of grief, with its various stages. It is, after all, the loss of one’s own life that is mourned in advance. First, there is denial. I suspect this is why people are inclined to believe they have immortal souls and will be resurrected even in their bodies. It’s why the first half of life is an upward curve, as though there were no end in sight. And why people try to accumulate millions of dollars, when hundreds might do, and seek every form of excess—especially sex, status, wealth and power. It’s why we worship youthfulness and the perfection and beauty of the body, which is biologically little more than a tube for digestion. It’s why murder and suicide are important as ways of taking charge of death, why war is a spiteful strategy to beat the Grim Reaper to the punch. This is the denial of death, of which Ernest Becker wrote so eloquently and insightfully. The knowledge of mortality—and not sexuality, as Freud had thought—is the primary motive of the “repression” upon which culture is built. We symbolic creatures have only the mythical life and world we (collectively) invent to mollify the sting of death. It is the story told at the campfire to dispel terror of the dark, where devouring beasts may lurk in wait; it is equally the voyage to other planets, terraforming, and the conquest of the dark of space. The story itself is the ideal world it posits. The campfire, as creative invention just as much as light, is the answer to the darkness.

A self-conscious creature may recognize its participation in the system of nature, as an embodied player in the game of selection. From a materialist perspective, for consciousness to exist at all it must have an embodied relation to the world, established through an evolutionary history. And this in turn means: to be an earnest player in the game, playing by the rules and for keeps. Earnestness means viewing the game from within, from the highly identified perspective of an individual playing piece. Identification with the body and its needs is a prerequisite to stay in the game. We are instinctively compelled to take seriously the pursuit of well-being (known to us subjectively as pleasure or comfort), the avoidance of damage or the threat of it (known to us as pain, discomfort, fear), and the supreme goal of reproduction (known to us as sexual pleasure or lust, and longings for family or relationship). There is little room for dabblers in the game of life; they would long ago have been out-reproduced by more earnest lineages—or would never have arisen. This is something of a paradox, given that the human species is a notorious dabbler and also, for the moment, highly successful. The paradox becomes mere irony when one considers the advantages conferred by points of view that are relatively free from automatic compulsions, if only to be identified on higher levels with the survival mandate. For instance, to seek the fulfillment or salvation of the soul rather than the flesh may lead—through the complex series of sublimations and reversals known as culture—to improved conditions for bodies in general and to greater reproductive success of the collective, if not the individual concerned. That we are here because our ancestors reproduced may seem an empty tautology. But it reveals a great deal when we look at what sort of organism we must be in order to have survived to be here posing these questions. Like characters in a novel, we come from a certain background, in this case an animal heritage. This informs all the categories of our thinking, but also inspires a deep rebellion against our upbringing in nature. This conflict continues to plague us with social and environmental consequences. Nothing could better portend a cheerful dénouement of the human story than to understand both this instinctual background and the rejection of it.

If women have been excluded from credit for attainments judged positive by history, they have similarly avoided blame for history’s parade of moral and social catastrophes. By keeping a low profile, so to speak, women have remained largely bystanders to the fray of historical process, though often becoming its victims. They have sometimes been spared the evils suffered regularly by men—combat, violent or stressful competition, assassination, hard labor, the rigors of adventure—though at the price, perhaps, of infantalizing themselves through keeping the company of children and becoming the sort of docile company many men prefer. To be sure, they have played their part behind the scenes, occasionally coming to the fore to reveal characters as ruthless as the most aggressive males. Think of Lady Macbeth and Queen Elizabeth I; or of the bloodthirsty Maori women who, though they may not have partaken directly of cannibal feasts or clubbed enemies into slavery, heartily encouraged and profited by the savageness of their men. Think of the matrons of societies involved in ethnic feuds the world over and in every time, calling for revenge of their slain husbands, sons and brothers. And think of the cliché of the upwardly mobile housewife who lives through her husband’s career, presses him for ever more luxuries, and grooms her sons to follow in his footsteps. Just as the masculine mentality has a positive and a negative side, so the feminine has its dark aspects along with its potential.

The issue of controlling technology looms over this generation, to judge by the plethora of Hollywood films about intelligent machines turned antisocial, or about high-tech spying and social control. Since technology is control, it is ultimately an issue of whether (or when) there occurs a point of no return in technological development, beyond which technology as a whole will have passed out of human control. It seems already to have passed out of deliberative civil or democratic control. It behooves us to ask, before it is too late: under what conditions can intelligence be created which remains a tool of human purpose, to serve general human benefit? Metabolism must be distinguished from reproduction. A metabolism maintains itself by a flow of energy through it. An entity might be self-replicating without being metabolic; conversely, there could exist metabolism without replication. In the age of mechanism, when it is glibly assumed that an organism is essentially a machine, the crucial thing to understand is the precise difference between organism and machine. If we hope for a robot technology that will remain subservient to human purpose, we must ensure that metabolism never be joined with self-replication. Our machines must remain without self-definition and purpose of their own. For, in the history of life, organism was the direct outcome of self-replicating metabolism. It is important to understand exactly where to draw the line—and never to cross it!

The very fact that the Christian view of nature gave way to the secular scientific view intimates a continuity of intent and ethos between the two. There is but a fine line between the Biblical dominion appointed to Man over Creation and the domination of nature through technology; between the quest for godliness and for godlike powers. Is it God or Adam, in Michelangelo’s famous image on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, who reaches out with the power of creation? God is the projection and symbol of the innermost longing for perfection, transcendence, freedom, immortality, omniscience and omnipotence. The divine is the ideal we can conceive ourselves becoming, the human potential, as yet unmanifest in time though already full blown in eternity. Humanism and science were able to steal fire from religion as technology began to realize some of the powers represented in the image of God, as there was less motivation to project them outside the human sphere.

Let us be clear that consumer society is a form of welfare state. Investors are subsidized, for very little effort on their part, with regular handouts from their portfolios. Whether or not we are investors, we all are passively provisioned, if not equally, by corporate paternalism, instead of directly providing for our own subsistence through dignified real work.

We are not obliged to embrace technology wholesale; and if we are wary of a particular technology or product, one way to resist its proliferation is by refusing to buy it or invest in it—no matter how profitable, cheap, or conveniently available it may be. The law of demand is foiled if in fact the public doesn’t demand such things, or doesn’t want them to be produced and distributed through a profiteering system, and refuses to consume them or invest in the companies that produce them. We do not have to support big business nor live in a consumer society at all!

The rebellion against nature, the body, and woman originates in the claustrophobic perception of being trapped within a closed and limiting system. Freedom is associated with the transcendent perceiver, while limitation is associated with the perceived: the body and the environing world. Woman (mother) was the first environment and literally what was first and foremost perceived. One’s body, therefore, is identified with her body and with nature, the body of the world. It may be perceived as prison, as constraining Other, because the desire for freedom—to be a subject, a soul, a spiritual essence not identified with the body—is in part the desire to be subject only, a fly on the wall, and no object of the limiting and controlling attention of other subjects. It is the desire to be the agent in sole control of one’s experience and fate. The corollary of this desire is the tendency to regard the world, including the body, as utterly object to be acted upon by the self. The self is in a contest to control its experience, whether the opponent is another person, one’s own body, or the cosmos at large. It seeks to win this contest either through self-mastery or by mastery of the external world. The latter way is the root of the drive for power, whose ultimate satisfaction is the subjugation or elimination of the threatening Other. The former is the spiritual quest for surrender, whose final, paradoxical satisfaction is the subjugation or elimination of the self.

It can be argued that civilization would not be possible without centralized hierarchical organization. Certainly the military would not be possible, nor large corporations or national governments. Let us bear in mind, however, that any hierarchical organization is a tool in someone’s hand. Hierarchies are devices for carrying out superiors’ decisions without confusion or question. But confusion and indecision are natural responses to the richly ranging texture of experience moment to moment, which includes empathy for others. Hierarchical organization and the rule of procedure, on the other hand, mean life by the template. The richly analog context of openness to direct experience, which ought normally to inform our actions, is replaced by a formula. Units in a chain of command are not supposed to make their own decisions, based on diverse and potentially contradictory experience, thought, and feeling, but to apply their skills only to interpreting and carrying out accepted procedure, or orders issued by others, within a circumscribed latitude of discretion. In short, they are to bracket their humanity. This permits and requires ignoring the questions, doubts, protests and fears that normally arise in course of considering an action, as well as alternatives that might creatively present themselves. In other words, it precludes the exercise of wisdom.

Kant’s imperative, to treat the Other not as means but as end, applies not only to people but to experience, to reality at large. “Being here now” involves embracing the moment for its potential to affect us, perhaps modifying our goals. It is not necessarily attention to the details of sensation or the physical world, nor, in Zen fashion, the chopping of wood and carrying of water. Rather, it is openness to the whole continuum of experience, including thought and feeling, in such a way that one can be affected and transformed by it. The point is not that sensation is more valid than thought, but that being moved is as important as being mover. It is an attitude of surrender or vulnerability to the Unknown behind the mask of experience. While the future is goal-oriented and distant, something one can maneuver toward and manipulate, the present moment stares one intimately in the face, like a lover whose eyes cannot be averted.