A Return to Being Human In March 2007, the BBC broadcast in the
UK a three-part documentary called The Trap[i], by the
controversial British film maker, Adam Curtis. Its message was
that "a simplistic model of human beings as self-seeking, almost
robotic, creatures" plus an overriding belief in human
selfishness have created "a cage" for human beings in modern
society. The documentary argued that this predicament is in part
the result of a long process by which social and personal values
have become dominated by reductionist thinking. The Trap was
pessimistic in tone and did not offer any clear solution. The
question it left open, which this paper addresses, is whether it
is possible to reverse this process by establishing a basis for
values that would not be reductionistic, and that would offer a
way out of the present trap. Reductionism and human identity The
root of the problem is that our picture of human beings has been
gradually reshaped by the dominance of one particular mode of
thinking -- reductionis