Humanity has become its own environment. The conquest of the planet has been an effect of sheer numbers. Now we respond not only to the vicissitudes of nature but also to the increasing intricacies of the human landscape. Natural selection takes place in a milieu that is no longer natural, so that it blends with sexual selection and cultural selection, as well as with conscious political choice. While the organism lives in nature, the human subject lives primarily in the human world. This means first of all in the subjective domain; secondly, in the social environment of others facilitated by language; and finally, in the constructed environment of artifacts. All of these constitute the human world, as opposed to nature; mind, as opposed to body; city and mechanism, as opposed to wilderness. While Man’s first home away from the home of nature is the inner subjective space, this would never have developed had he not been a highly social, language-using creature. Right from the start, mankind’s primary environment was composed of other people and their communications.

The idealism behind culture, technology, religion, and the domination of nature is a masculine mystery, which begins with the primacy of spirit and looks upon the reality of the phenomenal world as the creation of mind. There once were feminine mysteries, and hopefully there will be again. But just as masculine religion is a distraction from the intentionality required in the present age, so the feminine mystery that is needed now will not be a return to goddess religions or to mystifications that cannot take hold in the modern mind. It will be something new and far more powerful. Like the ancient feminine mysteries, though, it will begin with the material reality of nature (mater=mother), from which mind or spirit is born.369 While the masculine mystery concerns the struggle of ego to become distinct, the feminine mystery concerns the self-regenerating matrix from which ego seeks to emerge and to which it must return. Ultimately that is the Other, the Unknown, the independent being of nature. Some may choose to call it God.

It is not so evident why men would have switched to a male god when they seemed to revere goddesses for a much longer period than recorded history. A masculine deity, however, personifies those male aspects central to the projects of ascensionism and dominion that are the foundation of patriarchal civilization. The goddesses were rather representatives of nature, while male gods represent Man against nature, or above it. In the natural order, the male is peripheral, derivative, a biological afterthought, while the female is primary. The patriarchal family is significant not only because civilization is patterned on it, but because, like male-dominated civilization, it is an institution giving expression to the deep-seated need of the male psyche to be central, essential, primary, in command.

Of course, women can sustain multiple orgasms, and their biological and emotional self-sufficiency probably do trigger insecurities among men. Rather than face these, however, men typically pretend to be the ones who are independent, powerful, and sexually privileged. Such buried insecurity is compensated by making a world in which they hold the power, the political and economic independence; by creating realms of enterprise away from family and home, so that they appear to be the ones who are self-contained; by imitating, mastering, displacing, and appropriating nature so that they appear as the ones with enviable creative powers; by pursuing attitudes of sexual conquest and bravado, along with detachment, so that they seem at once sexually and spiritually superior. Man compensates his humiliating insecurity by endless posturing and flexing of literal and figurative muscles; he indulges his revenge for peripheral expendability by marginalizing and repressing women and expunging the feminine from within himself. Surely woman sees this and has contempt for the lie and the liar, as well as for the treatment she has received. Woman’s cagey exploitation of male foibles becomes her own resentful compensation for the inferior position to which she has been relegated. It becomes her own lie: the belief that she knows best and is really in control—the knowing wink of superiority.

Biological life, human society, and machines are all systems that depend on an external reservoir of energy. For life, it is solar energy falling on the earth; for society it is the energy and materials supplied by nature and by other, subservient societies; for machines it is the dwindling reservoir of fossil fuels. But just as a refrigerator creates cold in a contained location by heating the environment outside it (which makes it ever more difficult to maintain the cold inside), the organization of life, of society, and of machines is maintained at the expense of their environments with diminishing returns. While one automobile might run forever on the world’s supply of fossil fuels without exhausting them or creating noticeable pollution, a billion of them cannot. Free lunch depends on an infinitely resilient environment; but the earth is not infinite and nature is resilient only within elastic bounds that are already on the verge of snapping. The bigger the effect of the part, the bigger the counter-effect of the whole. And when the part is large in relation to the whole, like industrial civilization on the planet, its impact is enormous. There are limits to the overall progress our civilization can make against the backdrop of nature and against that of the world community. There is no free lunch in the long term and on the large scale, neither in society nor in nature, because equilibrium implies that there is no overall long-term domination of one part by another and no progress without the slow co-evolution of the whole. The investment economy is in complete denial of this simple truth. If we applied the same common sense to economics that is involved in ecological principles, we might have a world that is just as well as sustainable.

Computer simulation rests on the principle that a digital program can indefinitely approximate any analog reality. This is a useful principle for devices such as televisions and CD players, whose product is not a truly exhaustive replication of an analog original but a subjectively satisfactory representation in the consciousness of the human user. In other words, simulation is useful for creating entertainments and virtual realities, for eyes and ears that cannot tell the difference, but not for exhaustively replicating reality. The fact that digital sound, for example, subjectively passes for the original does not mean it exhaustively replicates it. This distinction, unimportant to most music listeners, becomes highly relevant in AI and robotics. It is only laxness about it that permits cyberspace fantasies of reverse-engineering brains, downloading minds, or fabricating artificial creatures, where the motive to create a useful artifact is confused with the unconscious drive to create life and reality itself. It is one thing to seek humanly useful technology, fully cognizant of the tradeoffs involved. It is quite another thing to dream of total control over matter, as though it were possible, desirable, and inevitable.

Only if idealism were literally true, and reality were nothing more than a simulation in a brain, could it be perfectly modeled by other simulations, such as scientific theories and computer programs. In other words, only if nature turns out to be a device, unnatural by definition, must it be possible to map it thoroughly with other devices, or to “exhaust” its being through rational analysis.

Man has applied all the same self-defensive stratagems in regard to woman as to the divine; for, in the modern world, the feminine is equally the Unknown. Here, again, the key is the man’s attitude and not the woman as object. Nor should one’s own bodily pleasure and orgasm be the focus of sexual desire, any more than one’s personal salvation should be the aim of worship. Desire is a natural expression of the outward reach of awareness. Subjective consciousness poses the conundrum that experience can be bracketed as referring inward, so that the phenomena of sexual experience may be interpreted as mere sensation in the body. In the same way, religious experience may be trivialized as referring to one’s personal state or salvation. In love, however, as in mystical experience, the distinction between self and other blurs but also deepens in meaning.

Pity, empathy, and compassion—even for a suffering and dying god—may soften one’s heart but do not necessarily oblige one to change. Inspiration, however, is more efficacious. This is why it is not enough for literature and the cinema to be filled with sympathetic, if flawed characters. We are not taken beyond ourselves and the ordinary unless the character can genuinely embody the Ideal, without glossing over obstacles. A cynical litany of human sordidness in the name of realism or ironic sophistication can only take one so far, in a negative wallowing whose positive counterpart begs to be demonstrated.

The biosphere as a whole works because any single agent is held in place and in check by the entirety. This is partly because the whole is much larger than any part and can absorb and circumscribe its influence. More importantly, its influence only develops in the first place under conditions to which many other agents have contributed and are able to adapt. This mutual adaptation and co-evolution takes place slowly and incrementally, in equilibrium, limiting the effects of parts. This means that the actions and significance of any part can only be defined and understood in terms of the whole—in terms of the actions and responses of other agents, upon which the individual organism implicitly depends. It also means that the actions of an individual are at every step restricted and countered by those of other individuals, in a system of mutual restraints. In a sense, there are no individuals; all arose together and none could exist without the others. In contrast, humans use technology, hyper-organization, and vast alliances to distort the power of individuals over their fellows, and this also magnifies the collective power of the species to impact the rest of the biosphere and aggravate the adjustments the planet must make to us. Culture alters the time scale of change from the ultra slow pace of biological evolution to the catastrophically rapid pace of technological advance. The biosphere may simply be unable to adapt to changes initiated by people fast enough to maintain equilibrium. Multiply these factors and you have the astounding fact that a single human individual may be in a position to do things that seriously affect all of life for generations to come. The fact that technological society can throw nature out of whack means that her accumulated responses may not be incremental or in equilibrium, but may produce delayed, sudden, unpredictable and huge effects.