Capitalist society has been successful by offering, so to speak, a profit-sharing plan to its subscribers. It is an offer that few can refuse, but for which everyone pays a price in dignity and self-determination. And, increasingly: in dollars and time. To begin with, one must accept money as the measure of all value and the goal of life. This alone is an insult to human intelligence, to which is added the injury of having to do meaningless work in a false economy and to lie to oneself concerning its significance. True, the individual in tribal society is also submerged in a social order. But there is a difference. The tribal member, if he or she is not a slave, is no one’s tool and no one’s fool. Their station may be lower than some other member such as the chief, but both together serve the common welfare of the tribe. In the modern economy, we have been liberated from subservience to nature only to become subservient to other people, most of whom we do not know or even know about.

The current threat to the West lies less in terrorism than in its own failure to achieve a universal standard of life that respects nature and allows all people, the world over, a happy and sustainable place within it (what globalism should mean). This failure manifests in growing class extremes, political divisiveness, alienation in overdeveloped as well as in underdeveloped countries, and violation of human rights. To focus on terrorism puts the cart before the horse. Whether random and domestic or political and imported, terrorism has always been a catchword to distract attention from the realities of the economic system both at home and abroad. Now, as a thousand years ago, having an apparently external enemy masks the complicity of nominal Christendom in exploiting the poorer world, as well as its own growing exploitation by corporate power. This mechanism of scapegoating, and distraction by irrelevant and trivial pseudo-issues that dominate American media (bread and circuses), are symptoms of a mentality that sees neither its own subtle manipulations nor the way it is controlled by others through fear and greed.

The quest for immortality is based on the subjective sense of self as significant and existing apart from the objects of experience, including the body. Perhaps, more than logic, it was the forcefulness of this sense of self-existence that persuaded Descartes he could not doubt his own conscious existence, even though he felt compelled to doubt any particular content of experience. The illusion, specifically, is of a self apart from and against the body as a mere object in the external world. From a materialist perspective, however, Descartes’ view of the privileged existence of the conscious ego is simply wrong. If anything is real and indubitable, it is the body and the world. And if anything should be doubted as illusory, it is one’s existence as a conscious self, an ego, which is ultimately nothing other than the first-person perspective of the body. It is the continuance of this conscious self that is mistakenly sought in the quest for immortality. It would be far more logical to seek the immortality of the body!

It is still widely professed that robotics and superintelligent computers will usher in a golden age of leisure, at least for Western middle and upper classes. This, in spite of evidence that middle classes in these countries are shrinking and people are working harder to maintain the same standard of living, when they can find jobs at all. It is still widely claimed that automation will serve the “re-humanization” of industrial work by upgrading unskilled workers to technicians, even though labor overall is being downgraded and the bulk of relatively unskilled and underpaid work in the West has been shifted to the Third World, where no such pretension operates. Even in the most developed countries, new classes of slave labor are emerging. No doubt life is still easier and safer in these countries—but for whom and for how long? Technology cannot be separated from the systems and institutions that produce it; it is questionable whether it has improved the human lot as a whole, and even more doubtful that it will in the future if it continues to reflect present values and institutions. The new genetic, medical, and nano technologies are supposed to usher in an age of abundance, well-being, and leisure—but not for everyone. They are infused with the ideology of free markets and the promise of a boon to all which they cannot and are not intended to deliver. Society as a whole could not afford the high cost of high-tech medicine if it were universally available. Reprogenetic technology is implicitly for the few. For new medical technologies to become the universal benefit to mankind they are touted to be, the structure and values of Western society would have to change from an opportunistic individualism to an altruistic communalism. Though not unthinkable, such a change is hardly in the interests of those who finance, develop, market and administer these technologies. Pharmaceutical drugs and medical services could be a constitutional right, in an economy where everyone is paid alike and where motivation is for social good rather than profit or personal advantage. But that, of course, is “communism”!

Inquiry into nature, like history itself, has been predominantly a male enterprise. While women made babies and kept the home fires burning, men went out, for better and worse, to discover and make the world. But the same side of the male mind that leads to technology useful for the domination of nature and other men led concurrently to the use and domination of the male resource and support most important and closest to home: women. The rebellion against the body and nature is enacted against woman too, through her historical enslavement and every subtle form of continuing misogyny. For, nature is the body of the world and the womb of culture, the matrix within which we make our human life. Woman is literally the first environment we know. On a profound level, the control of women mirrors the control of matter, as woman and nature are identified deeply in the human psyche. (Indeed, matter, mother, and matrix come from the same Latin root.) The technological stance reflects the reactive attitude of the male mind in defending itself against the feminine as the mysterious Other, a defensiveness reflected even in men’s attitudes toward lovemaking. If women accepted historically to make the best of their situation, it was no doubt essentially for the sake of their children. Population growth, however, has brought us full cycle. The world no longer needs an expanding population, and women are potentially freed, from their defined role as breeders and homemakers, to become emissaries of feminine consciousness and to focus their energies on the wider world’s problems. History may be calling for a more active role of women in political and economic affairs; far more importantly, it demands the feminine voice to define what politics and economics are to be.

The time it takes to install and debug a new program is an example of “shadow work,” a term Ivan Illich coined to designate the consumer’s unpaid work necessary to make a commodity useful—the “learning curve” for a new gadget, for example. The term also evokes other modern shifts of burden from producer to consumer: filling out your own bank deposit slips or tax forms, pumping your own gas, assembling a prefabricated module of furniture, waiting on the phone on “hold,” driving across town to stand in line to pay for an item on sale, the time it takes to remove and dispose of or recycle packaging, not to mention to pay for it. Shadow work, which exists only in an industrial economy, must be contrasted with subsistence, which lies outside that economy. One is exacted by the system of nature, the other by the modern system of production and marketing. Shadow work is one hidden cost of “convenience;” other costs include pollution and unnecessary depletion of resources, trash and litter from packaging, and inflated prices. Convenience items may not really be all that convenient, save labor, or do anything useful at all, because they are designed to make money, not to satisfy real need. Time and fuel lost in gridlock, medicine that makes you sicker, education and media that disinform you and “dumb you down,” and political and professional elites who disempower you and render you dependent upon their guidance, all are further instances of counterproductive modernity.

The self-conscious animal is haunted by a progression of realizations, beginning with that of its vulnerable mortality and physical finitude in contrast to the potential eternity and boundlessness suggested in consciousness. This progression goes on to include the indifference and enormity of the universe as a presence beyond human ken or control, and independent of human intentions. Out of this sense of the impersonal and objective life of the cosmos ultimately grew the key metaphor of mechanism, which turns the tables on the vastness of nature by reducing it to a device of human conception and proportion. But long before, this creature intuitively realized that it could and must define its own world; that hope lay in the realms of consciousness rather than in nature; and that it could shape the external world to conform in limited ways to its ideal expectations. Mankind would also have to adapt itself to the world of its making. If mankind wished to live apart from nature, in a plastic bubble of reason and technology, it would have to remake itself as an artificial creature. This corresponded, in fact, to Man’s deepest desires for self-generation. Above all, then, Man is this self-defining, self-generating, idealizing creature, fleeing mortality and embodiment, the corruption of time, the determinism of nature and the compelling authority of the Real. The hope behind culture is for a more humanly conceived environment—but also that human artifacts and institutions may prevail as repositories of meaning beyond death and decay, so that mankind (and even the individual) may in some sense count.

Religion and technology, far from being opposed, are commonly motivated by the search for relief from the harsh and disappointing life of the body in the real world. They both seek salvation from the animal condition. Having conceived ideals of perfection, the religious mind then projects these outside itself as “God.” Such ideals are spiritualized in order to believe that they are “already so.” The secret human project has always been the darkly religious motivation behind the hubris of technology: to make it so by stealing the fire or mantle of the Creator, to become as gods ourselves. Moreover, technology and monotheistic religion unite in arrogating to the male the right to do as he sees fit with the future of the planet, indeed the cosmos. They merge in the longing to emulate the ways of a masculine god.

We may yet come to believe that the ultimate value of the study of nature is to enable us to understand and better appreciate the marvel and depth of existence. The ultimate significance of science may lie more in its mythical than its commercial potential, more in perception and vision than in technological empowerment. The ideology of progress through technology has only unevenly served the betterment of humanity. Truth is not mere fact and means to mastery; it is also the heart of vision needed to give meaning to life. The need for that vision is what moves people to religion and political ideology. Its advantage over other visions is its detached universality, its transpersonal and trans-cultural language and focus, and the unperjured ideal of objective truth. Science may be the only ideology capable of uniting us. This may be the real tragedy of the corporate takeover of research and the conscription of science, like all else in our culture, to the service of commerce and consumerism.

The modern attitude toward sexuality has flattened and subjectified it as controllable private sensation, a tool kit of techniques designed to maximize pleasure. What narrowly distinguishes the consumer attitude toward sex from prostitution is reciprocity: one contracts to be the means for the other’s pleasure in return, bartering services in kind rather than cash. Each manipulates the other’s body to create a parallel, but implicitly private, entertainment. Perhaps the male, especially, is tempted to delight in the woman’s pleasure as a sign of his own skillfulness, playing her like an instrument. Her body is then the medium of his virtuosity, her orgasms a trophy. He remains in control, his mission to transport her beyond self-control. The sexual materialist is either an artist-technician or a connoisseur, or both. He or she focuses on playing out sexual roles and images rather than communion or a raw journey into the unknown. The sexual materialist encourages and rewards a similar attitude in his or her lover. But true intimacy is inhibited when sexuality is used collusively as a hiding place.