To compensate for its emptiness, the West lapses variously into ironic and self-congratulatory sophistication or into simple-minded heroic nationalism and fundamentalism; into sheer materialism or New Age mysticism; into designer drugs or virtual reality. These are not, of course, mutually exclusive. A universal subjectivism levels everything as entertainment of one sort or another. It is understandable to feel empty and “alienated” in such circumstances—or rather to avoid feeling altogether. For, numbness and depression are the inevitable outcomes of retreat from a deep relationship with experience and reality, whether the realities of our natural being or the political and social realities of the world. We live as prisoners in our man-made realm. This creates a vicious cycle, in which drugs and intensity are sought to compensate the inherent meaninglessness and triviality of consumer life and the stress of urban living, but which only succeed in further dulling the mind and entrenching escapism. The malaise derives at once from over-subjectivism and from the excessive outward focus that leaves modern Man with a deficient sense of being. The emptiness infects the very objects that are supposed in the materialistic society to be the source of all satisfaction. Cheap industrial “goods” lack the interior life of handmade things, so that the modern environment is a constant reminder of the vapidity of consumer values. We seek in luxuries and conveniences compensation for the loss of nature and vitality, and for the essential poverty of the Ideal manifest in urban landscapes. The general retreat into subjectivism at the core of consumerism is a failure of imagination and nerve, with deep roots in the Western mentality. In such retreat one can choose only among options designed by someone else. In our cool, postmodern detachment, we are often rightly suspicious of idealists, of high morals, of axes to grind, and of utopian visions. But moral disengagement forfeits the power to work original good. What characterizes the emerging global culture is just this loss of local initiative: consumer society has emasculated itself by trading self-reliance for convenience and imagined security. And what characterizes the emerging anti-globalist movement is a search to recover this local autonomy, to forge alternative visions to the self-serving schemes of ruling elites. The perennial dilemma facing the meek—domination by the aggressive—is a moral dilemma as well as political. For, those who rise to power unfairly must do so with the unwitting help of those they rule, who are vulnerable to manipulation through their own cupidity, passivity, and lack of imagination.

To be a human being is to be conscious of embodiment. What that is subjectively like can hardly be what it is like to be a (presumably) unself-conscious creature, such as a bat. But neither can it be what it is like to be a spirit without body, such as an angel or soul. Like the animal’s, our sentience is conditioned by the natural context within which it has co-evolved with the sentience of other creatures. And that context is embodiment in a physical world of competing and cooperating biological organisms. This has never prevented humans from aspiring to a discarnate state, nor from pretending to have a disembodied point of view. The naiveté of the natural realist, in which human sentience unselfconsciously identifies with the body’s programs and views the world as simply there, may be compared and contrasted with an idealism that sees only the self reflected in the mirror of experience, and that consciously denies the power of the world and the body over the self.

Fascination with objects, power, the external world, acquisitiveness, control, and goal-oriented doing has become far more than a male specialization with adaptive value; it has become the root metaphor and obsession dominating life, the motive and rationale of modern culture. It has eclipsed the more feminine values of relationship, openness, compassion, surrender, nurturance, contemplation and just being. In thought, if not yet in deed, the whole of nature has already become an it, a dead thing, a machine. Instead of promoting equitable distribution of the benefits of technology, economic institutions—enforced by war machines—have become mechanisms to divert wealth and power into even fewer hands. If technological and economic optimists have their way, the world will become an ever more inhospitable place to all but the extremely wealthy, whose resources will be used trying to shield themselves from the effects of war, crime, pollution and ecological catastrophe they themselves have promoted for gain. And even they cannot live on a dead planet!

The dualism of mind and body, stated simply, is the truism that each of us is a “self” who has a body. When we look out upon the world, however, we nowhere see selves having bodies. What we do see is bodies going about their business, whether these bodies are inanimate objects or living organisms. The fact of self-consciousness adds to this picture a sense of our own existence—of being someone as well as something. Indeed, we find ourselves inside the particular something that the body is (perhaps even inside the head). There is the impression that one’s consciousness is the true inhabitant, the body a mere dwelling or vehicle: you, not your body, are who you really are. This arrogation of identity to the “self” forever pits us against the world and especially that part of the world known intimately as one’s body.

Dualism establishes a relationship of use or manipulation in regard to the world, and to the body as part of the world. One may call this the ‘I/it’ relationship. Since the body is a part of the world, and my experience seems to be dependent on body functions, I find myself in the same adversarial relationship with my own body as with the world at large. This struggle may take obvious forms, as in the attempt to control experience through drugs or to tame the body through rigors and spiritual practices. It may take more subtle forms like biofeedback training, which reprograms physiological responses and associated conscious experience. Or it may take fanciful forms that would transcend dependence on the body altogether, such as “uploading” one’s mind to cyberspace. All these strategies in the struggle with embodiment have in common a manipulative stance of the head toward the body, experience, and the world at large. It is this stance of control that broadly underwrites technology.

The dualism of mind and body, stated simply, is the truism that each of us is a “self” who has a body. When we look out upon the world, however, we nowhere see selves having bodies. What we do see is bodies going about their business, whether these bodies are inanimate objects or living organisms. The fact of self-consciousness adds to this picture a sense of our own existence—of being someone as well as something. Indeed, we find ourselves inside the particular something that the body is (perhaps even inside the head). There is the impression that one’s consciousness is the true inhabitant, the body a mere dwelling or vehicle: you, not your body, are who you really are. This arrogation of identity to the “self” forever pits us against the world and especially that part of the world known intimately as one’s body.

Dualism establishes a relationship of use or manipulation in regard to the world, and to the body as part of the world. One may call this the ‘I/it’ relationship. Since the body is a part of the world, and my experience seems to be dependent on body functions, I find myself in the same adversarial relationship with my own body as with the world at large. This struggle may take obvious forms, as in the attempt to control experience through drugs or to tame the body through rigors and spiritual practices. It may take more subtle forms like biofeedback training, which reprograms physiological responses and associated conscious experience. Or it may take fanciful forms that would transcend dependence on the body altogether, such as “uploading” one’s mind to cyberspace. All these strategies in the struggle with embodiment have in common a manipulative stance of the head toward the body, experience, and the world at large. It is this stance of control that broadly underwrites technology.

While we are inescapably embodied and part of nature, collectively we have always aspired to be disembodied spirits, angels, free of natural bounds. The possibility of post-human or artificial life is merely the latest version of an ancient dream. This dream is false, however, because even robots are physical creatures, causally connected to their environments. If there are to be truly intelligent machines, they will, in effect, be organisms with a life of their own and with their own connections to the environing world. Intelligence, natural or artificial, derives from the connections entailed by embodiment and can never completely divest itself from this reference, nor from material form.

The schism in human nature extends to conflict over the relationship to nature itself. On the one hand lies nostalgia for lost vitality and paradise, and the motive to preserve what remains of the natural world. We long to be restored, in some sense, to a life of greater authenticity and harmony within it. The irony there, of course, is that our species probably never did live in harmony with nature. A life strictly within the natural order—that is, without culture—would be the vital but unreflective life of the brute, limited in the damage it could inflict upon the planet, to be sure, by small numbers and the restraining presence of other creatures. Having already been there and tried that, phylogenetically speaking, humans began early to search at the other extreme for security, superiority, and conquest of nature. The first step in this program, initiated many thousands of years ago, was the elimination of large menacing or competing predators. The final step would be complete control and transcendence of matter, energy, space and time—indeed, the conversion of all matter to conscious, if not human, intelligence.

Contemporary disaffection for rapid change and the dubious fruits of technology fuels a return to religious and spiritual beliefs and conservative values. But religion and tradition cannot effectively re-enchant the world. They represent, rather, the same remove from nature that motivates technology. Theology may provide security in a fixed system of beliefs; but it will be an impoverished system because of its very fixity, offering only a precarious security. The wonder and awe for which people pine in the mechanized world derive from the vastness of the natural world and the open horizon of consciousness; they cannot be rekindled in claustrophobic systems of thought. While any religion is far more reductionist (and fatalist) than the 19th-century scientific determinism from which we are beginning to recover, the modern program of science still includes the idealist article of faith that physical reality is, in principle, exhaustible by human thought—or by superhuman computation. It is the faith that Man, or his spiritual descendants, will one day know and control everything, and that the shallow values of the modernist aberration will spread over this planet and beyond. This is the sound of idealist monologue, of no one listening because nature is deemed to have nothing further to say.

From our cosmopolitan perspective in the postmodern monoculture, we may regret the disappearance of ethnic ways, as we do the disappearance of species. Apart from nostalgia, there is a real loss of variety and of alternative models analogous to the loss of genetic diversity. On the other hand, humans must achieve a world culture if there is to be a collective human will. This requires not the imposition of cultural uniformity, but the eradication of disparities of health, wealth and education. It is conceivable to have diversity and equality, individuality with equity. It is possible to find individual identity and distinction through unique interests and through the pursuit of quality, rather than through winning the bigger prize. The global monoculture, in contrast, ironically achieves its uniformity and ubiquity at the cost of enormous class disparities and loss of cultural ways. It flaunts individualism and democracy while actually destroying them. This follows from the actual intent behind it, which is to create a monolithic engine of profit. The appeal of this monoculture to liberal-minded thinkers trades on a confusion between uniformity and unity; it confuses individual expression with having more than others and promotes self-interest in the name of “freedom.” The brute fact is that the interests of power, in a world with enormous differences of living standard, militate against both unity and democratic freedom. It might be possible for educated middle-class Moslems to sit down with their Jewish or Christian counterparts, leaving their guns at the door, and calmly discuss their doctrinal differences; but until the rich are willing to sit down with the poor, with another aim than further exploiting them, there will be no basis for lasting peace. Religion will only serve to amplify sensitivity to injustice.

Every idea casts a shadow that returns to haunt it, claiming its moment on the stage of history, which therefore breathes, as it were, through a dialectic of opposites. This is because the propositional nature of thought guarantees a complement to any assertion, another side of the coin, which is a proposition in its own right, an anti-thesis. Any idea or scheme, no matter how clever or complete, omits something that could be perilous to ignore. But the very nature of the Ideal is to assume that thought can be complete and mind should have its own way, without the niggling interference of details. Nevertheless, we are real embodied creatures, not simply minds. We live in the complex world of matter and energy, not in the oversimplified storybook world of thought, where anything goes simply because it has been said or conceived.