Marcusean Humanitas

All joy and all happiness derive from the ability to transcend Nature--a transcendence in which the mastery of Nature is itself subordinated to [the foundational values of] liberation and pacification of existence [abjuration of violence].

All tranquility, all delight is the result of conscious mediation, of [the praxis of] autonomy and contradiction. Glorification of the natural is part of the ideology which protects an unnatural society in its struggle against liberation. [Attempts to control women's reproductive capabilities] is a striking example. In some backward areas of the world, it is also "natural" that black races are inferior to white, and that the dogs get the hindmost, and that business must be. It is also natural that big fish eat little fish--though it may not seem natural to the little fish. Civilization produces the means for freeing Nature from its own brutality, its own insufficiency, its own blindness, by virtue of the cognitive and transforming power of Reason. And Reason can fulfill this function only as post-technological rationality, in which technics is itself the instrumentality of pacification [not militarization], organon of the "art of life." The function of Reason then converges with the function of Art.

ODM, 237-238.