NONFICTION : AMERICAN REPLACEMENT OF NATURE <i> by William Irwin Thompson (Doubleday: $20; 159 pp.)</i>

Cheez Whiz sprayed out of an aerosol can onto a Styrofoam potato chip, Cool Whip “smoothing out the absence of taste in those genetically engineered monster strawberries”--we eat these not so much because they taste good, veteran author William Irwin Thompson suggests, but because they are processed, and thus in a way sanctified, by our culture: “Any peasant with a dumb cow can make whipped cream, but it takes a chemical factory to make Cool Whip . . . In America, even the food is a moon shot, a fast-food rocket aimed away from Earth.”

Thompson first seems to be romanticizing communities based on nature--where people’s destiny was determined by blood ties or place of birth--and demonizing those based on culture: “noetic polities,” or mind-managed environments. Illustrating how the noise of modern life has become “the solvent of Renaissance individuality,” he visits places like EPCOT Center, nicknamed “Every Person Comes Out Tired” by its employees because “EPCOT is not fun. It’s serious business . . . every sound bite and image you experience is programmed . . . every gigantesque corporate pavilion seems to be saying to the little guy, ‘me Tarzan, you Jane.’ ”

But Thompson actually turns out to be rooting for Tarzan--i.e., the United States. He supported the Gulf War, for instance, because he believes that by replacing territorial and blood ties with a single world culture, we can eliminate ethnic wars. Ultimately, though, Thompson overestimates America’s capacity to “replace” nature, making the common mistake of assuming that if technology is changing rapidly, human nature must be too. Thus the current inability of Arabs and Jews to understand each other is seen as stemming from the confusion of living in “the cyberspace of the CNN electronic collage,” when the inability in fact has an older name: ethnocentrism.