When we become aware of the vastness of the entire evolutionary process—from the big bang to the present moment—that is called awakening to Deep Time. It means having the capacity to assume a perspective that is nothing less than cosmic and being able to see whatever’s happening to us personally from its lofty vantage point. It is also the profound recognition that our very own present-day highly evolved capacity for consciousness, cognition, introspection, compassion, empathy, and even spiritual insight has all been produced by this deep-time developmental process. This means so much! It means that our personal experience is not half as personal as it seems to be. It also means something that is so startling it is hard to let in. It means that human beings, because of our highly developed brains, are the very leading edge of the entire panoramic unfolding. And as far as we know, we are the only life-form in this vast process that has gained the capacity for self-reflective awareness. The personal implications inherent in this truth are enormous. When we ask the question “Who am I?” from the perspective of cosmic evolution, the answer comes back: “I am the universe becoming aware of itself in human form.”

[To receive these weekly quotes by email, or to read past quotes, visit spiritual teacher and EnlightenNext founder Andrew Cohen's website here.]

As you may have noticed, there’s been a flurry of discussion over the past couple of weeks about the 20th-century German philosopher Martin Heidegger and his involvement with the Nazis before and during WWII. While Heidegger’s Nazi connections are no secret, an occasional book pops up now and then to fan the flames of an old debate: Can you separate the man from his philosophy? The latest is French philosopher Emmanuel Faye’s Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy, which first came out in France in 2005 and will be published next week in the US. According to the New York Times, Faye “argues fascist and racist ideas are so woven into the fabric of Heidegger’s theories that they no longer deserve to be called philosophy.” Among the impassioned responses that Faye’s book has provoked, Damon Linker’s piece at TNR is among the most balanced I’ve seen, admitting that “Heidegger was a pretty despicable human being” but that Faye’s argument is still absurd. “Heidegger,” notes Linker, “also possessed the most powerful philosophical mind of the twentieth century. If he had written nothing besides Being and Time (1927), he would deserve to be recognized as Europe’s greatest philosopher since the death of G.W.F. Hegel in 1831.” (For a nice roundup of some of the pro and con commentary, see The Atlantic Wire.)

About a year ago, we touched on the Heidegger controversy in an EnlightenNext column written by contributing editor Michael E. Zimmerman, a Heideggerian scholar who teaches philosophy at the University of Colorado, Boulder. He is also coauthor of the new book Integral Ecology, which he has discussed on this blog here. In the column, reprinted below, Zimmerman explains how his quest for a more integral approach to environmentalism involved, among other things, confronting the dark side of his favorite philosopher…

When I was about seven years old, I would occasionally play in a delightful forest with a stream running through it. On one visit, my last, I discovered bulldozers tearing up the site to make way for the first shopping center in northeastern Ohio. I’ve never forgotten the dismay and puzzlement I felt that day, and I often trace my awakening as an environmentalist to that incident. A few years later, we moved to a small Ohio town, where I played for many hours in nearby woods, creeks, and fields. I had no words for the pleasure I took in the outdoors. Only in college did I discover Wordsworth’s poetry, which gave incomparable voice to how youthful joy and exuberance entwines with wooded glen and high blue sky.

Growing up had been difficult at times, with seven siblings, an understandably distracted mother, and a demanding father whose disciplinary methods were occasionally modeled on nineteenth-century practices. A Massachusetts Institute of Technology graduate in chemical engineering, he helped to produce a very useful but rather toxic plastic called polyvinyl chloride, the notorious PVC. When I graduated from college in 1968, I condemned industrial modernity, and capitalism in particular, for destroying the natural environment. But my attack on modernity was motivated not merely by ideology and love of nature. Hostility toward my father, and by association toward his belief system, played an important role as well. What was that belief system? That industry was good because it brought material well-being, greater health, and longer life spans to millions of people, many of whom had known firsthand the deprivations of the Great Depression and World War II. For friends of industry, pollution was just the cost of doing business that was good for everyone. After all, an engineering professor told me, humans are very adaptable animals!

All the same, I bristled righteously at modernity’s polluting factories and its gross exploitation of labor. As a budding academic in the 1970s, I was attracted to philosophical views that depicted modernity as an enormous mistake that was destroying the biosphere and divorcing humanity from its true possibilities. Drawing on the work of German philosopher Martin Heidegger, who argued that modern industry’s treatment of nature as nothing but raw material could be seen as the culmination of the West’s long slide into nihilism, I began publishing scholarly articles criticizing our misguided efforts to dominate the planet. My writings put me in touch with Bill Devall and George Sessions, whose book Deep Ecology helped to define an environmental movement of the same name. Deep ecologists claimed that in order to reform a completely unsustainable civilization, people needed to think more “deeply” about the source of environmental problems instead of approaching them piecemeal. To me, their strong bias against modernity seemed consistent with Heidegger’s thought, and I published several papers interpreting Heidegger as one of deep ecology’s conceptual forerunners.

But this is only the first half of the story. You see, in high school and college, I had also become committed to one of modernity’s brightest lights, the civil rights movement, which ended Jim Crow laws and finally made available to black people (in principle at least) the rights of all other U.S. citizens. The United States Constitution—a central achievement of modernity—made possible movements demanding the fulfillment of its promise of equal rights for everyone. Along with civil rights, other movements followed: rights for women, for gays and lesbians, for Native Americans, for animals, and—yes—even for trees, rivers, and ecosystems! This expansion of rights beyond those who initially benefited from them—property-owning white men—has been a striking feature of the past two centuries of modernity, and the fact that they were being extended to nature as well as to marginalized peoples gave me pause when thinking about my own smug antimodernism.

At the time, however, I was not yet able to find a way out of my ambivalence toward modernity. My quandary was made worse by the fact that I was appreciatively reading Karl Marx at the same time that I was reading Heidegger. Marx was an archmodernist who regarded industrialism as a necessary stage along the way to a postcapitalist society, where material plenty would free people to pursue their creative interests, and he dismissed as weak-minded those who felt nostalgia for premodern ways of life. I was greatly attracted to socialism, yet I could not accept its uncritical commitment to industry, and I eventually turned to Herbert Marcuse, a socialist thinker who had studied under Heidegger but who maintained that capitalism and socialism alike were both driven by a lust for domination.

Marcuse offered no plausible alternative to the industrial and technological “system,” but it was my hope that deep ecology might—that it might, in fact, provide the beginnings of a postmodern, postindustrial culture that could heal nature and humanity alike. Then in 1987, a book came along that changed my life. In Heidegger and Nazism, historian Victor Farias argued that Heidegger’s infamous affiliation with national socialism was not a political error that ended in 1934 but rather an expression of his very own philosophy. Although Farias’s criticisms went too far, he forced me to recognize that Heidegger was critical not only of modern industrialism and its destruction of the environment but of modern social institutions as well, including the American and French Revolutions that had promulgated the very human rights I regarded as such important achievements. The same fascist ideology responsible for Auschwitz, I discovered, had also provided the justification in the early 1930s for the most sweeping environmental legislation the world had ever seen. As a famous Nazi slogan put it, “pure land” and “pure blood” went hand in hand.

So I asked myself, if Heidegger’s thought was somehow compatible with national socialism and if his work could also be read as anticipating deep ecology, then to what extent was deep ecology itself compatible with fascist antimodernism?

There was no simple answer to that question, but I found enough reason to be troubled by the connections that I had to develop a different attitude toward modernity—an attitude that could acknowledge its dark side (the domination of nature) while simultaneously affirming its noble side (the promise of rights for all humankind). I had been moving in this direction ever since reading Ken Wilber’s book Up from Eden in 1981. Here and elsewhere, Wilber offers an integrative reading of human history, in which he argues that it is appropriate to both integrate and transcend modernity rather than either dismissing it altogether as a mistake or uncritically embracing it as the pinnacle of human development. I was well on my way to realizing an integral perspective, but one more step, perhaps the most difficult, remained for me to take.

In the mid-1980s, I visited my father in his office at what was then the world’s largest PVC plant, near Baton Rouge. I asked him to show me around and tell me something of what he did there. I wanted him to know that I appreciated the remarkable contributions that he and his generation had made to improving human well-being, despite the problems with PVC and a number of other industrial products. But I also wanted to thank him for the contribution he had made to me in his role as my father. By then, he knew that toxic emissions were a real problem that had to be minimized and dealt with appropriately. He wasn’t yet willing to give up on PVC, but we had come to respect each other’s points of view; and in all my years of attempting to attain an integral outlook, nothing was more important than healing my relationship with him. In the end, the personal and the philosophical were intimately related; only by integrating the debt I owed to my father could I truly integrate the debt I owed to modernity.

I wonder if the people who made the blockbuster film The Men Who Stare at Goats (in theatres now) read EnlightenNext magazine? We don’t want to flatter ourselves, of course :), but the editorial team here at EnlightenNext was happy when we found out that a movie was being made about the same group of “psychic soldiers” that contributing editor Maura R. O’Connor wrote about in our March-May 2006 issue (when we were still called What Is Enlightenment? magazine). The Men Who Stare at Goats, which is based on a 2006 book by British Author Jon Ronson, tells the story of a highly classified 1970s US Army project that trained a group of “Aquarian warriors” in a variety of non-traditional combat and peace-keeping tactics which it picked up from the then-budding human potential movement–things like psychic manipulation, “love bombs,” meditation, remote-viewing, and yes, killing goats with their minds.

If you haven’t seen the movie yet, here’s the trailer:

But as O’Connor pointed out in her article, the project was not entirely intended to produce a more effective group of killers. The project’s founder, Lieutenant Colonel Jim Channon (now a reader of EnlightenNext magazine!), had a much more idealistic vision for bringing about a whole new era for the US military. In the following excerpt, she describes how Channon, freshly back from the horrors of the Vietnam War, came up with the idea for what he called “The First Earth Battalion.“:

Traveling to the West Coast, [Channon] spent two years visiting over one hundred fifty New Age groups, futurists, psychotherapists, theologians, martial arts masters, and a “wide array of practitioners both Western and Eastern, ancient and modern, and orthodox and mystic.” Upon his return in 1979, Channon presented the results of his research to the Pentagon in the form of a 125-page manual replete with instructions, blueprints, diagrams, and illustrations for a new military, one that would absorb and implement every conceivable New Age technique and belief on a planetary scale. “It is America’s role,” he wrote, “to lead the world to paradise.”

O’Connor continues with a description of the various techniques that Channon proposed:

The First Earth Battalion would also include “guerilla gurus” to conduct “high consciousness commando raids” and would be capable of using “omni-directional thought” to implement “non-destructive methods of control” over the enemy. Intuition would be consulted first and foremost by battalion soldiers. A chapter on ethical combat describes uniforms that are colorful and functional so that the “individual will shine through the uniformity” and includes drawings of techno-savvy battle gear with pockets for “natural foods,” “ginseng regulators,” and “divining tools.” Alternating between military-speak and spiritual metaphysics, Channon’s manual predicts that the military will move out of its “cultural trance” in order to allow soldiers to “release . . . the force inside . . . for no other descriptions matter in the end. The Earth Battalion honors all paths to enlightenment.”

Of course, Channon’s wild vision wasn’t fully embraced by the military, but as the movie shows, a variety of his ideas were implemented, some of which are still in use today. If you want to learn more about the First Earth Battalion, check out the full article here and this sneak peak of a documentary about the project featuring interviews with Channon and the other soldiers who participated in this avant-garde experiment in military evolution.

The goal of Evolutionary Enlightenment is the emergence of a miraculous potential that I call “intersubjective nonduality.” What does that mean? “Nonduality” is most commonly used to mean oneness, or not-two-ness. It points to the perennial spiritual revelation that there is no other. And “intersubjective” means between subjects. So “intersubjective nonduality,” to put it simply, means one between two. It means the experience of oneness in a context of relatedness. Usually, we experience other people as being separate, outside of our own experience of subjectivity. Except in rare moments, such as sexual intimacy, it seems as if there is an impenetrable wall between us. But I have discovered that when two or more individuals awaken to the truth of Oneness, in the same place and the same space, the liberating knowledge that there is no other—which is the ground of enlightened awareness—can become a shared experience.

When this occurs, we mutually experience a paradox: You appear to be there as a separate individual; I appear to be here as a separate individual; and yet my experience of myself and my experience of you is that we are not two. And this changes everything. Why? Because this is when enlightenment, which is the direct experience of Oneness, breaks out of the purely subjective experience of the individual, and becomes the shared intersubjective context in which relatedness occurs. Miraculously, nonduality is no longer just an abstract idea or even a personal revelation, but becomes the very foundation of the culture between us. To me, this is what enables the power of enlightened awareness to affect real change in the world. The discovery of intersubjective nonduality is nothing less than the ground for creating an enlightened culture.

Quick: “masculine”–take ten seconds and say the words that come to mind that describe masculine. Next, do the same with “feminine.” That was the first exercise that my friend and colleague Cindy Wigglesworth and I asked participants to do in the breakout session that we led at the Integral Leadership in Action conference (October 15-18). What did the participants say? Innie and outie (hence the photo that I put at the top of the blog). Yin and yang. Active and passive. Driving and yielding. Assertive and receptive. Thinking and feeling. Eros and Agape. Rational and emotional. Hard and soft. Pointed and embracing. Strong and… You know, the ususal opposites or polarities that are often associated with men and women. While some describe (or infer) the different bodies that we inhabit, others reflect the different roles and opportunities that women and men have had in culture. “Masculine” and “feminine” don’t each describe one thing–they are a kind of grab bag of stereotypical gender qualities. Cindy and I wanted to encourage these representatives of the integral movement to put a temporary halt to their use of these terms and instead speak much more specifically and precisely about what one really is referring to.

The ILiA group is pretty much focused on business and organizational applications of integral theory (usually, Ken Wilber’s integral theory), and these organizational change agents often work to transform businesses and business leaders from being overly “masculine” to embracing more of the “feminine.” In our postmodern times, the “feminine” has become a buzzword for the kinder and gentler qualities that we want to see valued more in culture. Fine. But labeling those qualities “feminine,” which means “related to females,” seems problematic to me. Masculine and feminine are such value loaded terms–asking a man to be more feminine, or telling a strong woman that she should express more of her feminine side is often confusing, suggesting that somehow either the individual should be more of the other gender or is doing gender, which is one of the deepest aspects of our identity, wrong. If you want someone to change, being more precise about the change you’re looking for is much more helpful to him/her. Speaking about being attentive and listening more is a much clearer direction than asking an individual to be more feminine. Moreover, isn’t it more likely that our culture is more likely to change by adopting values that refer to general human qualities or competencies (listening, assertiveness, compassion, rationality) rather than to whatever the feminine means as a whole?

Cindy and I spoke about how our ideas of gender have changed as human consciousness and culture have developed. There really wasn’t a sense of masculine and feminine as we think about it now until the late medieval period–those words weren’t even in the English language until the fourteenth century. They really are concepts that emerge with modernity, when the entire social world in the West was divided by gender into the male public sphere and the female domestic sphere.

Cindy likes to think about the polarities that we associate with masculine and feminine (like agentic and recpetive) as comprising a system in which both qualities are needed. She was drawing on Barry Johnson’s important work on polarities and how to work with them. She also suggested that we might think about when gender/sex matters and when it doesn’t. Certainly, gender/sex matters when you want to make babies! But in many, if not most, spheres of life, gender or one’s sex shouldn’t matter. Maybe one needs to develop certain competencies–such as in being more connected in relationship or more willing to take risks–but these are not really about gender, even if, at this point in human cultural development, men may often have more experience and comfort with risk and women with a certain connection in relationship.

One of the points that I hope that I made well was that using the term “feminine” to refer to the change we want to see in others or in organizations (and society) ends up hurting women. Believe it or not. It suggests that we women have no developing to do. And, given the crises we are facing, we ALL need to be doing all we can to develop and to consciously evolve. We women don’t have a lot of experience or mettle with standing up and staying together under pressure. Men, actually, are often better at that and we can learn a lot there. Moreover, pushing men to be more “feminine” (rather than coaching them to develop certain skills that are important to us all), too often creates distrust and a deep sense of separation, rather than the unity that we so badly need. Your average sensitive guy might not say anything–he knows better–but, given a chance to talk about it, that sentiment is right on the surface.

Our solution, for the time being, is to ask all integralists to put the words “masculine” and “feminine” on furlough for a year. Let’s see what happens when we stop using those words in business or in relation to personal growth or change. My hunch is that we’ll all be more effective at bringing about the changes that we want to see. Can we all give it a try and then compare notes next year at the ILiA conference?

Have you ever had a mysterious attraction to a particular historical figure without really knowing why. . . until one day you find out something about their life and “bam!” it all makes sense? I recently had this experience with the twentieth century design pioneer Buckminster Fuller (1895-1983) .

I always knew “Bucky” was amazing. I learned about him as one of the early pioneers of the green design movement. He coined the term “spaceship earth.” His geodesic dome has been used in everything from hippie communes to the pavilion at the 1967 World’s Fair. And just about everyone I’ve ever met who considers him or herself a student of his work has been extremely creative, a bit quirky, and very unique in their perception of the world.

A couple of years ago, I even visited the tiny NYC apartment of a carpenter who has dedicated his life to applying Fuller’s design concept to his own work. Using various angles, mirrors, and colors, he had transformed this dinky, glorified-version-of-a-walk-in-closet into a spacious living space that activated a kind of creative clarity in all who entered.

It wasn’t until last week, however, when I saw a video from a series of lectures he gave in 1975 called “Everything I know,” that I really grokked why he’s had such an impact on so many people and why I’ve always been so compelled by him. In the lecture series, Bucky speaks very openly about his spiritual beliefs–God, life after death, love, and even The Lord’s Prayer. I knew that Bucky had some kind of spiritual life and had heard about his life-changing experience on the banks of Lake Michigan, when after contemplating suicide, he heard a voice saying “You do not belong to you. You belong to Universe.” But the true depth of his awakening and the powerfully committed and selfless pursuit of the truth that it engendered were not apparent to me until I saw him live.

To see him in action for yourself, check out this clip (6:21 minutes):

If you liked that and want to see more of his lectures from “Everything I Know” click here.

When the evolutionary impulse is manifesting in our experience as either an inspired act of creative genius or as a surge of spiritually illuminated wisdom or insight, it temporarily becomes the self, the Authentic Self of the individual. In those moments, we become animated by that same inspired energy and intelligence that initiated the creative process. This is when the ego is displaced by the presence of a higher consciousness and the self becomes illumined by that consciousness. When this shift of identity occurs, the Authentic Self becomes the driver of the personality and the personal self takes a back seat. In Evolutionary Enlightenment, first awakening to the evolutionary impulse and then striving wholeheartedly to become a living example of its expression, which is the Authentic Self, is both the path and the goal.

In the following excerpt from her groundbreaking article, “The Divine Feminine Unveiled,” EnlightenNext magazine senior editor Elizabeth Debold describes the challenging and sacred role that women need to play in the evolution of culture:

We women can move culture forward and create a future beyond patriarchy. But it will neither be easy nor necessarily feel “natural” if we see our nature primarily in terms of the roles we have played in culture over most of historical time….The goal would be to develop a consciousness that both includes our biological and cultural inheritance and also transcends it, so that a new, free space of relationship is created in culture in which to catalyze a new partnership between women and men. This would be a new expression of the feminine, and given how essential it is for transforming our world, such an endeavor is nothing less than sacred.

Join Elizabeth Debold on Saturday, November 7, 2009, for a FREE teleseminar presentation in the Women on the Edge series. The series also includesJean Houston, Barbara Marx Hubbard, and other visionary women leaders exploring the role that women play in creating the next stage of our collective evolution. Click here to learn more.

When you awaken to the evolutionary impulse behind the entire cosmos as your very own Authentic Self, you find yourself living in a new world. It’s not the small, personal world that your ego or separate self-sense has lived in since the day you were born. You may still exist and function in that world, but deeply, it’s no longer your home. Your home is the vast process that began the day the entire cosmos was born. When this kind of shift occurs irrevocably, the idea of living “for a higher purpose” doesn’t even make sense any more, because at an interior level, you and that purpose have merged and become one. You have become the actual manifestation of that higher purpose. It’s no longer external to who you are. To a significant degree, you and that higher purpose become indistinguishable. That’s what Evolutionary Enlightenment means. Your entire life becomes permeated by that evolutionary impulse, because that is who you have become.

Imagine what it must be like for Caster Semenya, the top South African female runner who was in the news recently because her sex has recently been challenged. By “sex” I am not referring to her sexuality, but to the physical, biological characteristics that determine whether one is male or female. That basically comes down to whether one has testes or ovaries. Her fantastically impressive victory in the 800 meters in Berlin recently raised questions about her sex—questions that she herself shrugged off as “a joke.” Semenya has no penis; all of her life, she has thought she is a girl—a very athletic girl who loves to run and compete. Actually, to say that she “thinks she is a girl” probably misrepresents that unthinking sense of simply being who you are, living the life that you have, in the context of the roles and values that are given to you as a male or female within your culture. That’s gender: the sociocultural expectations based on sex, usually related to different roles in sexual reproduction, related to normative notions of masculinity (for males) and femininity (for females).

For Semenya, sex and gender are not aligned—although she didn’t have any idea that this was so. It wasn’t until a much deeper physical examination prompted by her record-breaking speed revealed that, in fact, despite her lack of external male genitalia, Semenya had some form of testes, not ovaries. At the time that I’m writing, her fate as a competitive athlete has not been decided, but it seems pretty likely that she is no longer going to be allowed to compete as a female in the sport that she loves and has trained so hard for. And probably even more disturbing is that she may not be able to live as a young woman, which for the eighteen years of her young life is who she has always thought herself to be.

It’s a touchy subject. Semenya is still pretty much a kid. It’s hard not to feel that I’m simply rubbernecking at a scene of a cultural accident in blogging about her. It is humiliating for her and her family to have this most private of matters become the subject of public scrutiny. I felt it was important to do so in order to point out how we take for granted that the way we think about sex–male or female–describes a universal truth. And that our notions of masculine and feminine are likewise truth. (I’ve just done a presentation about those tricky concepts with my friend and colleague Cindy Wigglesworth at the Integral Leadership in Action conference that was held October 15-19. More on that in my next post.)

Another story of sex identity uncertainty, discovered by the ultimate postmodern philosopher Michel Foucault, shines a light on how the way we think about sex and gender has changed over time. Foucault found and republished the diary of Herculine Barbin, who, like Caster Semenya, lived into early adulthood as a woman, only to be examined and declared to be a man. Barbin, who was born in the first half of the nineteenth century in a small French village, grew up in a cultural context that was still primarily medieval—she started her life in a Catholic orphanage and attended a convent school. We assume that the Middle Ages were grimly repressive times where individual freedom was squashed by the rigid moral codes enforced by church dogma. But Foucault, in his introduction to Barbin’s memoir, tells us that this wasn’t so. At that time, individuals whose genitalia were ambiguous at birth were not considered monstrous or perverted because they violated the principle that every person must fall into one sex/gender category or another (that happens later). Medieval social structure was based on caste or class, which meant that your assignment to a specific class (the one you were born into) was irrevocable but your assignment as male or female wasn’t necessarily so. (In fact, there were quite a few popular medieval tales about women who spontaneously turn into men or vice versa….) As Foucault explains, “it was a very long time before the postulate that a hermaphrodite must have a sex—a single, a true sex—was formulated. For centuries, it was quite simply agreed that hermaphrodites had two.”

Having a single sex identity—male or female–that aligned with your gender identity as appropriately masculine or feminine, just wasn’t that important. Hard to believe, I know, but true. Foucault, who has dug into the historical details of the transition into modernity with the patience of an archaeologist, acknowledges that persons of indeterminate sex sometimes were executed in ancient and medieval times. Not because they were inherently “deviant” and thus dangerous—a view that still taints our discussions of hermaphroditism or intersex today. According to both church and civil law in the Middle Ages, he reports, someone of indeterminate sex was given a temporary sex identity by the infant’s father—the best guess at the time. Then, when the child matured and was of marrying age, s/he would decide which sex role s/he would fill: the individual was given the chance to change the earlier designation or keep it. However, if one kept switching back and forth, well, that wasn’t okay—that was considered to be disruptive to the social order because you were not staying in and fulfilling your role. ROLE was more important than some binary biological determination of male or female based on the characteristics of one’s body. You see, the medieval mind is actually very similar to the mindset that we see in kids around the age of seven when they become obsessed with the rules of games and are morally outraged (“Cheater!!”) at anyone who breaks them. So you might say that switching one’s sex identity was cheating, messing with the rules of society that provide distinct roles for men and women within each class.

I’m trying to make a subtle point—because it wasn’t that sex and gender were unimportant; it was just that the most culturally significant factor in determining your life’s course was social class or caste. Foucault writes about Barbin as an example of a human being caught in the transition from medieval traditionalism to modernism. As I have written about before, modernity gave us the ideology and values whereby gender roles and characteristics are considered to be binary and oppositional—where masculine and feminine are deemed to be mutually exclusive. In the diary that Foucault published, Barbin bemoans the fact that she cannot choose her own gender and that she cannot live as she wishes, rather than how the authorities decide that she should live. Within modernity, she has no choice: there are only two sexes, and they are binary opposites. So, her “true” sex had to be determined and she would have to live accordingly. This binary thinking that so characterizes modernity—and was very important to the development of human thought—was applied to sex/gender at the same time that society itself began to be divided into the male public sphere and the female private world.

I’m deliberately trying to mess with our unthinking sense that our notions of sex and gender are natural, true, and express some fundamental principles of the cosmos. Not to leave us in a swamp of relativistic indeterminacy, but to show that these aspects of who we are as human beings develop. They change over the course of human history and cultural evolution. We have not, as a culture, moved beyond a binary construct of gender as a central organizing principle for life and identity. Not even in our postmodern times of sexual and gender liberation—we just keep re-inscribing the sense of binary, dualistic difference rather than being free from it. Even in the most far-out fringes of gender bending—the world, say, of transsexual provocateur Kate Bornstein—the polarity of man/woman, masculine/feminine is still the binary construct that underlies one’s options for identity. Perhaps if we no longer held onto this binary notion of gender, individuals who exhibit what we now consider to be masculine traits but are in female bodies (and vice versa) wouldn’t feel compelled to change their sex. They wouldn’t need to–it wouldn’t matter so much.

Maybe one day someone like Caster Semenya will be able to compete as an athlete, and these questions won’t be raised. We’ll divide the competition by, say, weight and testosterone levels or something else that determines performance, rather than sex. That may be strange and hard to imagine. But it’s important to realize, when we think about our next evolutionary steps, that these aspects of life that feel so deeply natural will inevitably change in ways that we cannot now foresee.