Women embrace the system in which they share unequal benefits for the same reasons men do: for the rewards conferred, obviously, but also because it relieves them of responsibility to re-create society and redefine the world according to a better vision. Such a responsibility would force women to allocate their energies outside the home without being co-opted into the male system. This reluctance to rock the boat instead of the cradle, and the compromises women have accepted over the ages, stem from the original division of labor in which woman’s focus is her children and the hearth, while man’s focus is the dangerous world beyond, first of nature and then of other males and their ambitious schemes, from which women continue to benefit on the sidelines. But all are bound together in a pecking order, to the lottery system of capitalism, whereby anyone supposedly can rise to the top, though obviously not everyone. The fact that there can be moderate winnings for many, and extreme winnings for some, induces most to support the system on the gamble of success, even those who by any rational calculation stand to lose. The price paid for subscribing to the myth of social mobility is to tolerate the disproportionate wealth and power of the top layer at the expense of the whole of society. And then, it is far too easy for women in particular to ignore their complicity in maintaining their recessive position within a repressive society. For one thing, the struggle for “equality” is a motherhood issue—forgive the expression. It is a mythical catchword and a diversion from real issues. Sexual equality within patriarchal society can only mean the right to be a functional male. Women who seek parity in the male-dominated system are chasing the same chimera as governments and social policies that seek economic success by embracing modernization and consumerism without succumbing to cultural imperialism. The failure of feminist critique to propose significant alternatives to faulty masculine rule reflects more than a lack of imagination. For, it is far safer to demand equality and strive for recognition within the male system, while continuing to reap its ill-gotten benefits, than to propose a radical rebuilding of society, which would be based on entirely different principles and which might preclude the privileged lifestyles to which women too have grown accustomed. No one, male or female, wants to rock the boat enough to sink it; and that it is sinking anyway is not a thought we care to dwell on.

Consumers have colluded in Western society to minimize their own significance and power. We have sold out for the ill-gotten comforts of a lifestyle we now take for granted, in spite of the fact that it can never be the birthright of most of humanity, and cannot continue even for those who presently enjoy it, without utter ecological collapse. A silent collusion is maintained among all sectors of modern society, so as not to disturb global capitalism’s ever-laying magic golden hen. In contrast to the state censorship of top-down dictatorships, the key to understanding the self-serving nature of Western ideology is voluntary self-censorship. Neither the media nor their audience, in America in particular, will bite the corporate hands that feed them, but will believe and promulgate whatever illusions are necessary to maintain the privileged position of their society in the world.

The same “technological stance” that underlies masculine science extends even to attitudes toward lovemaking and sexual behavior. It may be a moot question whether the objectification of woman or of nature came first—another question for the detached male mind. But the fact that they are intimately linked should inspire curiosity about this connection and its implications, both in regard to sexuality and science. For, in making love with woman we have the same choice as in our inquiry of nature: to allow ourselves to be overcome and transformed by the mystery of the experience or to remain in control and to protect an established identity. One attitude surrenders control and leads to union; the other maintains distance and leads to use and abuse. One is a stance of opening, softening, dissolving; the other, of hardening, closing, reasserting fixed boundaries. As with nature, woman can be considered a resource, used to please oneself or to demonstrate technical prowess while nominally pleasing her. The superficiality of lust, as portrayed in the sexualizing ethos of the media, is a defense against the softening in surrender that woman importunes. The physical intensity of the sexual act may in itself seem overwhelming, enforcing a surrender, at least in orgasm. But against the primal longing to be overcome stands always the compulsion to remain in control, intact. The very distinction between self and other may blur in sex. One is then neither an object for the other, nor the isolated subject one took oneself to be. Neither knows in a fixed way what either is: the unknown subject confronts the unknown object. But in detached or controlled sex one retains the same identity, at the price of also limiting the identity and meaning of the other. Sex is mechanical when the whole point is to keep things predictable, circumscribed, chasing known pleasures with known strategies. Safe sex indeed!

The sacred is whatever harbors the sense of openness to the numinous—the immensity, mystery, and open-endedness of life. Persons are sacred because their complexity enables them, in principle, to outgrow any box we put them into. Physical reality may share this complexity and have this same quality of eluding containment. To say that personhood is sacred is to reiterate our conviction that persons are potentially infinite, and therefore mysterious beyond bounds. What this tangibly means is that our stories about persons, and our play with them, are potentially inexhaustible. Unlike the object fixed in knowledge, the subject can unfold onto ever grander horizons, through the endless ability of consciousness to transcend itself. And the cosmos itself may prove to be of a similar nature.

The male fascination with killing was and continues to be an exercise in conquest over the animal world. Prehistoric excesses of hunting and animal sacrifice demonstrate a primordial blood lust. The slaughter to extinction of large game that humans engaged in during their first expansions onto new continents exceeds any possible need and can be seen as sheer revenge against nature. At the hand of nature, after all, early Man suffered not only injury but insult. The damaged body can repair and be mollified; but the damaged ego grows vengeful and power-hungry. Man is not satisfied merely to improve the human lot in nature, but seeks to redesign and even displace nature altogether. The humiliated spirit seeks not redress but total vindication. And the same wound that creates the drive for power over nature leads to war between peoples and the brutality of rulers against their own citizenry. When all the great beasts were hunted to extinction, the spear was turned against other men.

Marriage as a medieval institution was a male right of ownership and control over the woman, her sexuality and reproductive function. But courtly love, as the historical basis of romantic or “true” love, was something radically different. From the point of view of goal-oriented sexual contest and possession, chivalry was impossible love, frustrated but driven, and condemned to a shadow existence outside the mainstream order and mentality of patriarchy and property. It was about passion, therefore, and not the action of conquest, control, or the triumph of will. Chivalry involved restraint of animal motivations and channeling of ego drives that usually served external power and control. The loss of control in passion leads symbolically, and sometimes literally, to death, as the ultimate defeat of ego, reason and control. Surrender to love, and in love, is a kind of ego death, a surrender of masculine purpose and presumption. In the romance of Tristan and Isolde, she is betrothed to King Marc, Tristan’s uncle and liege. It is an arranged marriage of state, since Isolde is heiress of a neighboring kingdom. In marriage, she becomes Marc’s property, extending his power. His nephew is bound to him by kinship and fealty, and is therefore his property as well. Nevertheless Tristan falls in love with the new queen and she with him. They conspire to meet in secret, are suspected, and much of the tale relates the charming and suspenseful ruses of their clandestine adventures. But Tristan is torn between his duty to Marc and his passion for Isolde; he is also concerned for the danger he places her in, since their illicit affair is treasonous and punishable for both by death. He resolves to avoid her, and meets another woman, who is curiously also named Isolde, as if to underline the parallel lives he must choose between. Her he marries, but never consummates this marriage, always tormented by his forbidden love for the first Isolde, which does finally lead to the death of both lovers. However, the tragedy of the story is not mortality, which symbolizes surrender, but the conflict between two modes of love and relation to the feminine that could not be resolved in the life of the times. Tristan, the man of action, does not simply run off with Isolde the Fair, to steal her to be his own property.294 Nor does he resign himself to a conventional married life with the other Isolde who is his lawful possession. Either of these options would have signified the business-as-usual of patriarchy and masculine assertion. His passion is bound up with a fate he cannot and does not wish to control, and he passively allows it to overtake him. From the perspective of conventional wisdom, this is a cautionary tale. But symbolically, from the perspective of a greater wisdom that would balance control with surrender, Tristan’s fatal indecision is a higher-level choice to transcend the masculine ethos of medieval Europe.

Masculinity must be redefined. In a sense, the masculine has never had an identity or a program of its own, consciously forged, but has always consisted of unconscious acting out, either of genetically-determined impulses or of unconscious rebellion against the feminine. This is highly ironic, given the masculine identification with consciousness, initiative, and self-generation; the very essence of the solar, yang energy is proactive. Surely a new type of advocate and protector is needed and possible, with a new vision of masculinity to embody. Men must cease to define themselves as the opposite of women. The culture they create must cease to be a denial of mortality, finitude, and embodiment. They must refuse the conventional attractions of money, power, sex, and violence, to become more original in their definitions of masculinity and success. Because men have assumed power in the world, they have established for themselves the right to disregard the feminine and women’s points of view. Their hubris or success has made them spiritually lazy. The world’s imbalances can be described as an effect of male domination and an eclipse of feminine values, in which women have played their tacit part. It could equally well be described as a failure of masculinity to bring forth an inspired vision for the future, a crisis in masculinity itself and in the leadership that men have taken upon themselves. Far from collapsing, or being moderated by feminists, patriarchy is rapidly expanding and ever refining itself as a power system. It has rendered gender nearly irrelevant, since so many women in developed societies have been co-opted within it. It is ironic that men have inadvertently followed the dictates of their genes even in rebelling against them. The drives toward idealism, objectivity, transcendence, and transformation—and against nature, the body, and woman—have coincided too readily with the genetically driven role of the male as aggressive, competitive, controlling, hard, emotionally steeled and distant, sexually impersonal, and so forth. While the women’s movement set their goal too low (mere parity in a male world), the men’s movement wallowed in grief for their lost fathers and the lost vitality of “wildness,” failing to meaningfully articulate what men need to be liberated from or vital for or wild about. None defined a profound vision for society, nor an ethical and dignified role for men in a post-patriarchal world. While each of these movements may have been fun and exciting, none dared to rock society to its foundations. Instead, the men’s and women’s movements colluded in trivializing both masculinity and femininity, in a society retreating ever further into materialistic cynicism, born-again corporate patriarchy, or New Age mumbo-jumbo.

The obvious and laudable ideal of technology is rational effort to better the general human condition. Technology promises a modern materialist path toward salvation and heaven on earth. It is safe to say, however, that it has failed in this promise for all but the privileged few. While technology serves power, and promotes the welfare of the few at the expense of the many, the hubris of the technological enterprise is not fully accounted for by “rational” self-interest. A deeper, darker, and more passionate motivation underlying technology, to put it bluntly, is the quest to play God. If new technologies fail to meet genuine human needs, it may be because that is not their real purpose. Avarice, power, and even altruism play their parts, of course, in driving invention. But what consistently, if unconsciously, directs much technological development is the ideology of transcendence.

If Man is to be a self-making, ideal creature, then how can he be of woman born, between two excretions, as the saying goes? The association of the feminine with the vulnerable human condition—with the existential dilemmas of mortality, finitude, and animal nature—will persist as long as human beings come into this world through the wombs of women. It is the infant’s early experience with the mother which renders “female intentionality” so overawing and apparently threatening to the dependent child’s budding autonomy, but even more so to his secret projects of self-generation, transcendence and immortality. We identify nature with woman because nature holds a power over us like that which our human mothers did over us as infants. She is all, the object of the infant’s every passion and the source of relief from every need. While the growing child may be wary of being smothered in the maternal matrix from which he or she seeks symbolically to break away, nature inescapably drags each of us back into her womb at the end of life. And though it be the great idealist dream, we can never in life leave our natural home of embodied physicality. Who could be to blame for this imprisonment within the confines of nature but woman herself, who brought us into the world in the first place? And what better way to begin to turn the tables on nature than by isolating, containing, conquering and taming the dangerous influence of the feminine?

We are living inside a very complex machine, increasingly vulnerable to external disruption and internal failure. As with our complicated automobiles, we can do little as individuals to fix the global economy when it breaks down or improve the design of governance when still running. In tribal societies, the focus was very much on the past and on continuity, as though it were unconsciously realized that a collective will must be exerted to hold society together and prevent a future out of control. And such a will was possible on that scale. We may not willingly choose to return to pre-industrial times, let alone to the timelessness of the Stone Age tribe. But perhaps we can free ourselves from the mythological compulsions of “progress” and return to a human political scale. The real question is how to strike a synthesis of the need for global unity with the equally urgent needs for equality and local autonomy. Present rule by big government and big business, which are increasingly indistinguishable, takes us in the wrong direction. Far from being contradictory, global unity and local autonomy are mutually necessary; both imply relative equality. The problem is one of political will. For, the very nature of modern society undermines collective will, and is even tailored to do so by well-organized and powerful interests.