What is most significant and modern about Jesus’ ethical teaching, from a sociological point of view, is that it widens the circle of those deserving our love, respect, and concern to include all members of what we now recognize as Homo sapiens. That is, Jesus taught that the family of Man includes all people, not just our biological relatives, nor our group or tribe or race or nation or gender. The Good Samaritan was good because he helped a stranger who belonged to another group; Jesus chose him as example because he was not of the Hebrew tribe, yet acknowledged the humanity of another in need. His teaching was to love your neighbor as yourself—and that the neighborhood has no bounds. In particular he admonished us to love our enemies. Here two issues are addressed at once: to overcome the individual bias of self-interest, and to overcome the social phobia against otherness. Your enemy is your competitor, and often a member of another tribe as well.

Transnational capitalism as a whole is a virtual machine, an artificial parasite, which lives on slave labor and sucks wealth as a nonrenewable resource wherever it can. While the rhetoric of globalism is that all countries and all segments of society will ultimately benefit from free markets, in truth the rich get richer and everyone else poorer—and not only quantitatively. As the world becomes a monoculture, its diversity is reduced to a few standard services and products in look-alike cities around the globe. This is the actual purpose of globalism, moreover, and the ultimate economic fulfillment of the mechanist metaphor: to remake the whole world as a smooth-running, uniform and monolithic engine of profit. The consumer culture itself has become a virtual factory for turning out consumer clones and values, designed to function as an economic artery to a handful of ultra-powerful men. Just as pre-industrial society milked and bled its animal stocks for sustenance and slave labor; and just as industrial society herded peasantry into a new class of laboring poor; so corporate capitalism adroitly manages herds of consumer-investors, on the one hand, and herds of dehumanized foreign laborers, on the other.

The fusion of globalism and technology moves toward ultimate power while promising heaven in a global shopping mall. It offers the same standard franchises and consumer goods the world over, in the same global culture with the same international architecture in every city. This was parodied in Jacque Tati’s prescient extravaganza of the 1970s, Playtime, where glimpses of famous Parisian monuments are only seen reflected in the closing doors of glass office towers. While genetic engineers propose headless chickens and immortality as consumer rights, with the freedom to plug our bodiless minds into a variety of optional artificial embodiments, we might remember the lesson of a more recent film, The Matrix: that human beings could themselves become little more than headless chickens, cultivated for someone else’s benefit. It can be no great consolation that our overlords are not yet intelligent machines, but only our mortal fellows, the human masters of a global financial empire. One way or the other, slaves and machines are interchangeable from the perspective of the mechanist vision and the world economic machine, which will use whichever is cheaper—or the most cost-effective combination. It should come as no great surprise that the dream of limitless freedom, based on riches wantonly taken from nature and the rest of the world, inevitably bears an impossible price to pay.

Humanist values favored the individual over the collective, and competition over cooperation. Personal satisfaction is central to individualism, and is now so taken for granted in the West that it is difficult to view human institutions as having any other goal than furthering individual happiness. Cooperation is ideologically suspect as a limit upon individual enterprise. Ironically, the rhetoric of individualism underwrites an undemocratic, inegalitarian class structure that is highly satisfying to a few, moderately satisfying to some, but decidedly unsatisfying to many others. Individual satisfaction, when it does not coincide with general fulfillment, can only mean parasitism. It is to avoid the inconvenient realization of this simple truth that society accepts ideas of class, racial superiority, and the myth that anyone—but not everyone, of course—can strike it rich. In contrast, traditional societies were more naturally cooperative and egalitarian, with property held in common. While individualism may have instigated movements for equality in modern history, it is not in itself a stable force for equality. Hence, the interests of the individual often appear to be opposed to those of the collective, and egalitarianism has come to be associated with a strong collectivity disfavoring individual rights. It is as though the only way to insure equality is by suppressing the individual’s desire to rise above others! But this may simply speak for modernity’s obsession with material things, and our blindness to expressions of individuality that do not involve struggling to have more than one’s fellows.

The interests of the individual organism coincide generally with those of the body, while the rules of the game are dictated by the interests of the genes. The interests of the individual human personality, however, are potentially independent of both. Humans suffer in awareness of their situation, therefore, to the degree that their actual purposes, visions, life plans, values, goals, actions, and experiences are at odds with the system of nature, thwarted by the body, or determined by forces outside themselves. From the point of view of the self-aware consciousness trapped within it, the system of nature is a mad machine, a kafkaesque bureaucracy without concern for individual welfare or happiness—except as that happens to favor success of the genes the individual harbors. Commitment to the game means obeying the dictates of genes. Besides the compulsion to eat fellow creatures, this commitment requires beating others of one’s kind in competition for mates and for the resources necessary to attract them and insure successful progeny. This implies further aggression and brutality, as well as a narrow organization of one’s interests, time and energies.

An aspect of the natural condition against which men rebel is the sexual asymmetry between male and female interests and even between their apparent levels of interest in sex. The male ideal would have women pursue sex in the same ways and to the same degree as men, as though the two mentalities were somehow mirror images. But this is hardly the case, owing originally to the diverging genetic interests of males and females in the system of nature. One reason why men and women find it so difficult to comprehend each other is that they are not simply identical particles with opposite charge. Psychologically, women are not men with cavities, any more than men are women with protuberances. The two represent wholly complementary mentalities, not to be trivialized as mere sexual roles. However, the drift of modern society is toward one mentality, ideologically neuter but implicitly masculine. While the natural tendency of desire is toward the other as a complement, the constructed ideal of the consumer culture views the female as a simulacrum of the male. This may help to explain why lesbian and gay sexual attitudes can be every bit as materialistic as the clichéd macho man’s.

Only relatively recently have ideals of genderless identity gained widespread acceptance, perhaps beginning with the Christian ideal of heaven, where there is neither male nor female. Genderless concepts of soul, person, and human being have led to humanism and universal human rights, on the one hand, but also to the invasion of gendered tradition by commercialism in industrial society, where the individual is a sexless unit of production and consumption. Only with the Industrial Revolution was a genderless worker conceived, along with genderless labor, tools, processes and materials. The new science which paved the way for industrialization introduced a neutral, quality-less, abstract matter at the disposal of industrious Man—no longer men in distinction to the moiety of women, but another abstraction: the observer, experimenter, inventor, laborer, merchant, entrepreneur, etc. These roles were nonetheless masculine roles, representing a mono-polar force, unbalanced and unrestrained by a complement. Changes in the meaning of materials, tasks, and agents expressed an ultimate triumph, through mechanism, over the feminine. These changes coincided with the first intellectual appropriations of the commons by moneyed interests, the first infringements of modernism on what Ivan Illich calls vernacular values—the traditional ways of subsistence, oriented toward communal satisfaction rather than the exploitation of one segment of society by another. Until then, work had largely consisted of gender-specific tasks performed with gender-specific tools and materials, accompanied by taboos protecting these arrangements. Illich makes the point that the mutual dependence of men and women upon each other set limits to the battle of the sexes in traditional societies—a truce which, however unfavorable to woman, was broken by industrialization.

In Steven Spielberg’s film Artificial Intelligence, set in a high-tech world of the near future, a woman is not allowed to have a second natural child, but is permitted to adopt an artificial substitute: a boy android that is astonishingly lifelike in its emotional responses. The illogic of this premise (why would an artificial child be preferable to a real one?) betrays the true intent: controlling not population but reproduction, displacing female-created life with male-created artifice. The play of the artificial boy upon his adopted mother’s emotions represents the triumph of masculine ingenuity over feminine sentiments and instincts: the ultimate test of the masculine project of simulating life is whether it can fool a real mother. Ironically, the film largely follows the quest of this “pinocchio” to become a real son. Virtually immortal, his deepest wish is to be reunited, if only for a day, with his long-dead human mother, to be enfolded at last in feminine love.

Now the middle class itself has become a resource to be harvested to extinction by modern predatory capitalism. The shift from production to investment, and the accompanying decline in real living standard of most people since about 1970, helps to explain the global widening poverty gap, not only between rich and poor nations but also within the overdeveloped nations themselves. It gives the lie to the promise of universal abundance through technology and trickle-down. Contrary to the prevailing doctrine that free markets will cure all social ills and “naturally” distribute wealth, in truth globalism represents a concerted scramble to grab existing assets in a situation of declining production of real goods. Its very purpose is to redistribute wealth upwardly rather than to actually create it. Because of the false doctrines of modern economic theory, not to mention payoffs to corrupt politicians, governments everywhere are dismantling themselves in a frenzy to give away public assets to private business, only adding to public impoverishment. The emerging global feudalism is not interested in sustainable ventures nor in the general human welfare, though it uses both these as rhetoric. Nor has it any commitment to maintain the middle class it once needed. Already the limited production necessary to supply the upper classes is guaranteed at very little cost through a slave labor class offshore. In the near future, when managerial and clerical tasks as well as production can be assigned to intelligent machines, those who control the means of production will require neither a human labor force nor a consumer force to maintain their wealth. What they will need is a very large police force!

An ethical system must be based on accepted values, just as a formal system must have its assumed axioms, and a game must have its rules and defined elements. The central task of ethics is therefore to find basic values that can be agreed upon—the premises of the system. Traditionally, however, what facilitates such agreement is the shared conviction that these are not mere premises or arbitrary conventions but objective truths. Ideals and social conventions are cherished as intersubjectively given realities; for, what unites a group is a common perception of the world. In short, the Ideal must be perceived as real in order to be upheld consensually. People do share much genetically and by living together on the same planet. But there is also great variety among both individuals and environments within this commonality, and the subjective variable allows for enormous variance in how the world is perceived. Societies solve this problem through shared ideals, beliefs and values, continually renewed within the group. At the same time, these may foster division, hatred, and strife between groups, and this remains the weak point of human society. The cosmopolitan vision of a unified world culture depends on an unlikely universal agreement about the games in play, their rules and premises.