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We feel that we are the masters of life and death when we control the fate of others. This allows us to project the death/lack outside us, personified in the enemy in the enemy who is perceived as trying to kill us. No wonder, then, people tend to rejoice when war finally breaks out, as even Freud and Rilke did at the beginning of the Great War. Projecting death/lack over there liberates the space for life here. We feel newly bonded to our fellows in a joint life-against-death project that no longer festers unconsciously because it is no longer individual but has become collective, is no longer unwinnable but something we have some measure of conscious control over. Our private "immortality accounts" become merged. We mourn our dead, but not too much if the number of enemy dead is greater.

Nunc stans. The Greek debate between Heraclitean flux and Parmenidian Being has a striking parallel in the classical Indian controversy between the impermanence of early Buddhism and the immutable Brahman of Advaita Vedānta. But when we look for a dialectical synthesis of the two alternatives, comparable perhaps to Plato's, we find a different view of time/eternity present in the "middle way" of Mādhyamika Buddhism. Rather than combing them in a hierarchical fasion that tacitly accepts the reality of both, Nāgārjuna refutes both permanence and impermanence by demonstrating their interdependence, leaving us with a paradox that denies the dualism between them: "All things are impermanent, which means there is neither permanence nor impermanence." One way to express this paradox is to affirm that there is indeed that which does not change, and this is nothing other than the flux of change itself. Rather than contradicting, each alternative actually implies the other, for to make time absolute and to negate it altogether amount to the same thing. We can realize this if we stop thinking of ourselves as thing in time.

In religious terms (and this whole book is an argument that in the end we cannot avoid religious terms), the worldview implicit in technology has an inadequate eschatology. It is a meaning-system without any ultimate meaning, because lacking any vision of cloture between humankind and the cosmos. This is a defect that is quite literally unendurable. A sense of purpose in the universe must be and always is found somewhere. Then the issue is not how hardheaded we are in our supposedly nonmetaphysical materialistic realism, but how repressed or conscious we shall be in our commitments. The technological response to ultimate questions �� those questions that because they are ultimate can never be avoided �� is to believe in ... the future. What is the meaning of life? Where are we all going so fast? Since we no longer have answers to those questions, yet cannot live without answers, our answer is to defer the issue. Until the last few years, our eschatology has veeen progress. Things are getting better, or, when they are obviously not, things will get better. The ecological crisis, which is no longer impending but something we are now well into, signifies the end of this collective dream, although it remains to be seen whether our collective psyche will recognize the fact in time. The supreme irony is that our collective project to secure ourselves is what threatens to destory us.

Contrary to our usual understanding, then, transcendence has not disappeared from the West. It just went inside and became the Cartesian self. The result was an increasingly anxious individual, increasingly inclined to rely on his own judgment, to measure the world according to his own standards, and to use his own resources to challenge the social environment as much as the physical one. As an increasingly ultimate commitment, the possibilities of the sense of self and the dangers of the sense of lack were unprecedented. As they say, the rest is history