Males have played a dominant part in transforming the planet. The conquest of nature, the building of civilizations, and the exploration of intellectual and spiritual space, as well as of physical space, have been largely male enterprises. The role of females in creating culture and the human identity has been overshadowed and overlooked. We have yet to imagine what a world made by women would look like. The story of Man’s relationship to nature, moreover, is really the story of men’s relationship to the feminine. Characteristic solutions to the masculine identity crisis are what we know as “ego satisfactions”: power, status, dominance, recognition, accomplishment, etc. Perhaps these reflect the extent to which social values have been defined by dominant men. On the other hand, the great dreamers, contemplatives, saints and idealists, who have been relatively in touch with the feminine principle, have either been lumped together with the great conquerors, doers and troublemakers of history simply by gender, or else have thrown in their lot with them in a shared masculine idealism. Culture has been ostensibly a masculine accomplishment first of all because men have created and ruled the world while women remained, perforce or by choice, in nurturing roles at home. In addition, it is because the efforts of women to make their marks in a male-dominated world have been systematically ignored, thwarted or appropriated by men. Just as importantly, because a certain type of man has been able and driven to impose his leadership on society, the voice of the feminine has been muted in the patriarchal era and the masculine idealism that dominates it has acquired its particular tone. Male and female alike have been conscripted into the masculine ethos, and men too have been seduced by masculine concepts and values (progress, power, success, consumerism) that are against common sense and the common good. The repression of the feminine has served to keep in their places not only women but also the majority of men. If we have not witnessed a world defined by women, neither have we seen one produced by a positive masculinity: one that is not defined against women, the body, and nature, nor one that is not controlled by an elite of other men.

The ideology of progress is part of the patriarchal aberration. Boundless technological advancement and boundless economic growth are myths invoked to mask the true problems of how to share the world’s wealth and how to work collectively toward the planetary good. Achieving social justice and cohesion, in balance within nature, would be a far more significant accomplishment than is promised by proliferating technology (let alone supersedence by robots!) The wise use of technology cannot be a matter of blind faith in the future as held by the technological and economic optimists who have the ear of power. In fact, it cannot be left in the masculine hands of “power” as currently conceived. The needed transformation of human priorities might come about through engagement of the world’s great untapped resource of feminine consciousness—supported, of course, by men who respect the values it represents.

In the inner world of idea and imagination, the human spirit is free and illimitable, self-generating and in control. It is the author of its own being, rather than created and constrained by inscrutable and uncontrollable forces impinging upon it from without. Accordingly, this is where the self-conscious creature finds itself more secure than in external reality. This inner realm is literally imaginal, ideal. Yet the self-conscious mind, a mere upstart on the evolutionary scene, is conditioned by its long genetic heritage to venerate only what it perceives as solid, real, and external. For this reason, idealism typically conceives the ideal, the image, the wishful thought, as already and actually existing independently of human mediacy. The inner or subjective content is projected outward as objective and real. In order to challenge the authority of nature, the realm of the Ideal must be conceived as superseding nature. It must be perceived not as mere wishful thinking but as substantial, independent, preceding mind both logically and temporally in the way that nature does. Hence the tendency of religions and mythologies to project the utopian condition backward in time as a golden age, and to project human aspirations as the attributes and dictates of the gods.

The mission of idealism, to rise above the system of nature and create a world more to the taste of a self-conscious creature, has largely been diverted to personal material gain. Moreover, idealism has been appropriated and defined by males to express their purposes—through technology, empire, and religion. Ironically, in many cultures the spiritual impulse has been deflected from its true goal of tempering the excesses of the masculine with the influence of the feminine. Two competing and contradictory intentions seem to inform the human heart: surrender and control. Accordingly, religion has two aspects; one opens receptively, while the other asserts dogmatically.

The ideal of truth has evolutionary and conceptual origins in selective advantage, as a strategy in the game of survival. We are a successful species because of an intelligence that combines objectifying abstraction with manual dexterity to produce a significant technology. But the very nature of objectivity points beyond utility. Paradoxically, it could hardly be so advantageous if it did not. Objectivity fosters a (literal) superior grasp of the environment, but also a detachment from grasping interest, whether personal, genetic, or group. The human ideal of objectivity transcends the parochial concerns in which it is grounded. Truth is born of utility, but grows beyond it because the self-conscious mind is inherently self-transcending and open-ended. While an organism obviously acts upon the world to maintain its own being, this in itself implies no picture or concept of the world, let alone the verisimilitude of such a picture, and certainly no resemblance to the human picture. How true to reality a creature’s perception is can only be evaluated in terms of genetic success (as mere advantage) or else by comparison to the picture humans see. People, of course, have grander pretensions than mere advantage. But when we do view those pretensions as moves within an evolutionary game, it is difficult to escape the paradoxical conclusion that even the ideals of truth and objectivity—whatever else they may be—are clever survival strategies.

While the human consciousness, in its own terms, may be independent of time and space and free of causality, the body which houses it is a prisoner of time and causal processes. Consciousness perforce imagines continuity—indeed, it cannot really imagine its own cessation. It is nonetheless confronted by the unassailable facts of aging and death. This is more than simple recognition of natural processes or the body’s vulnerability in a dangerous world. It is a final doom and negation of personal identity and hope. Consciousness cannot fathom nor accept the apparent fact that its own presence and life are totally dependent on the functioning of the fragile and corruptible body. It cannot accept being a mere and temporary thing.

The technological potential to develop ever greater wealth promises social justice and equilibrium, while actually destroying them. Humanism, in its multiple dimensions, has only superficially borne out hopes for a general boon to mankind; there is far less reason to think that one-dimensional globalism or transhumanism, let alone religion, will lead us anywhere but further into dystopia. The worldwide advance of capitalism and nominal democracy in nation states has entrained a very uneven social progress, to say the least. The nature of power becomes increasingly elusive and abstract, its locus concentrated and economic rather than widespread and political. Nations, let alone communities, are no longer forums for self-determination. Even as some nations are still emerging from tribal units, others are dissolving as quickly back into tribalism or chaos. Large-scale power is relocating beyond civic control. Shareholders in transnational corporations may have an official vote, but chances are the only issues that will ever be brought before them are ones affecting the internal structure and revenues of the corporation: election of officers, mergers, etc. In this way, running the world is left to economic technocrats whose loyalties are to completely artificial groups (shareholders) united only in the abstract goal of growth and in their common absentee participation in artificial systems for accomplishing it. Since neither shareholders nor money managers contribute any real productive effort, such money is necessarily “made” at the expense of increasing disparities of wealth while depressing the quality of life of the species as a whole. In terms of the original dreams of humanism, it is a system gone mad and out of control.

The cancerous growth of human civilization on the planet is a joint venture of men and women. The ecological footprint of the human species lies in its capacity to transform the environment, multiplied by its sheer numbers. It is a co-product, in other words, of the usual male excess of culture-making, career, and acquisitiveness combined with the usual female excess of fecundity, domesticity, and acquiescence. If the male has wandered too far from nature, perhaps the female has not wandered far enough.

The symbolic realm is the ground of culture, the human empire within which to create and recreate ourselves in our own image, even before creating external gods to do it symbolically on our behalf; and long before creating literal machines and empires to transform the natural world. This realm is made by decree, by fiat, and not dictated by nature; it is governed by human rather than natural law. And herein lies its great appeal to the human spirit, which longs more than anything to be self-creating, and thereby free. The innermost and sacred (if masculine) dream is to be pure subject and agent, to be no object bound by the rules of an alien universe. To be a person—the object of love and respect, yes—but not some beast’s or germ’s dinner, not a mere tool of biology, an effect of some cause, a thing. By definition, our creations express our intentions, whereas the found world of nature does not, but in many ways appears to oppose them, while asserting its deterministic power over our being and even over our intentions. This may be merely another way to state the obvious: that we do not live in harmony with nature. Those who argue that Man cannot escape being part of nature implicitly embrace a materialist stance. They are thinking of the body, and they are right. But Man long ago took up residence in the mind, the spirit, finding ways to have in eternity the cake that can be eaten only briefly in the flesh.

Throughout history, there has been a dialectical relationship between the playful, embroidering, subjective, ironic side of the human spirit and the heroic, serious, goal-oriented, realist, earnest side. The ironic mentality embraces limits and delights in playing within bounds. It understands all limits to be arbitrary, relative, intentional. The heroic mentality rejects limits as obstructions to absolute truth and personal freedom, while worshipping limitlessness as transcendent reality. The heroic is aspiring, straightforward, straight-laced, straight-lined, passionately simplistic, square, naive, concerned with content over form, and tending toward fascism and militarism in its drive toward monumental ideals and monolithic conceptions. The ironic is witty, sarcastic, curvaceous, ornate, sophisticated, skeptical, self-indulgent and self-referential, tending toward decadent aimlessness and empty formalism. Each is dangerous as an extreme. Together, they are the creative engine of history.