Reading Wagar plaints, I might once again recommend the 'time and motion' approach of the eonic effect.
The method both places man in nature, and yet keeps him distinct from that, at least as to a theory of absolute origins.The method is then empirical and proceeds to mix the high level history and the basic psychology of the individual, however that may have evolved, in a duet with that.
We may complain of reductionist theories, but we can't complain of the physics of school buses that carry non-reductionistically arrived at individuals.
The eonic model distinguish 'eonic determination' and 'free action', or more intuitively a large scale historical system, taking as empirical periodization, and the individuals relative freedom (relative in the sense that choice, if not free will, is real). In that context a model with no absolute beginning reaches the recent past and switches off in the alterantion of system and individual. Thus we get the best of both worlds, as theory is reduced to an empirical map, but only with respect to the past, while the present is freed from system for free action.
This is a useful way to make sure we can use theory, and yet have theory whisked away at the point of general action. The nature of that action then remains to be found, through self-knowledge, please note, and is not determined in advance by the statements about the large scale (world) system. Theory itself is a temporal component of that action, evolving in relation to that system, a severe limitation on its power to explain!
Wagar's impatience is understandable. Theory has gone nowhere since the birth of the social sciences in the nineteenth century.
The saddest part of it is that the reason is goes nowhere can be seen in the issues of philosophy of the time of Kant. Stop being snowjobbed by physics nerds. They are hoping that the mother lode effect of math matched to phenomena they find so easy to explore in physics will repeat itself in biological and cultural science. But it never happens. I was looking at the appendix to Berlinski's Tour of Calculus, where he suggests that the range of the beautiful Newtonian methods simply falls away as we move beyond that into biology, what to say of culture.
The reason is one of 'dimension', i.e. whole and part, perhaps. The physics works in a special case. Beyond that, nothing.
Anyway, the eonic model, once you adopt that approach, can be scary in its exactitude. But it never impinges on the ultimate enigma of consciousness, as such.