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If our minds, consciously or duty to defend the country, is completely different from the duty to defend the material, because Descartes believes that if awareness of participation in order to play in the universe, Newtonian physics as what it means, can we have the natural thing? We are foreigners, in a strange world, and against a set apart from our physical environment. Therefore, we set up a subdued nature, and an overwhelming her and use her for our own purposes and has not not been satisfied with the consequences.           The Alienated Man     [There is a] sense of alienation that follows from a feeling that we human beings are somehow strangers in the universe, merely accidental by-products of blind evolutionary forces, with no particular role to play in the scheme of things and no meaningful relationship to the inexorable forces that drive on the larger world of brute, insensate matter.   ... The roots of this alienation run deep in our culture, going back at least as far as Plato's philosophy with its distinction between the realm of Ideas and the world of experience, and later drawing on Christianity's denigration of the body in favor of the soul.   But by common consent, the strongest influences in our modern culture derive from the philosophical and scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, which encompassed the cultivation of Cartesian doubt and the birth of Newtonian, or classical, physics. Both changed radically the way we look at ourselves and our relation to the world. Cartesian philosophy wrenched human beings from their familiar social and religious context and thrust us headlong into… our I-centered culture, a culture dominated by egocentricity, by an overemphasis on "I" and "mine." Newton's vision tore us out from the fabric of the universe itself.   Classical physics transmuted the living cosmos of Greek and medieval times, a cosmos filled with purpose and intelligence and driven by the love of God for the benefit of man, into a dead, clockwork machine.   The Copernican revolution had already displaced the earth, and hence human beings, from the center of things, but Newton's three laws of motion and his mechanical model of the solar system were the blueprint for entirely lifeless design. Things moved because they were fixed and determined; cold silence pervaded the once-teeming heavens. Human beings and their struggles, the whole of consciousness, and life itself were irrelevant to the workings of the vast universal machine.   Throughout history we have drawn our conception of ourselves and our place in the universe from the current physical theory of the day. Thus physicists and nonphysicists alike these three hundred years have found their personal philosophies, their own sense of identity, and their notions of how they relate to the world and to other people colored by this bleak Newtonian vision.   The immutable laws of history portrayed by Marx, Darwin's blind evolutionary struggle, and the tempestuous forces of Freud's dark psyche all, to some extent, owe their inspiration to Newtonian physical theory. All, together with the architecture of Le Corbusier and the whole vast array of technological paraphernalia that touches every aspect of our daily lives, have so deeply permeated our consciousness that we each see ourselves reflected in the mirror of Newtonian physics. We are steeped in what Bertrand Russell called the "unyielding despair" to which it has given rise. ... "How," he asked, "in such an alien and inhuman world can so powerless a creature as man preserve his aspirations untarnished?"   ... Most written accounts of our century, and the experience of a great many people who have lived through it, paint a picture of considerable dissolution. On every side—morally, spiritually, and aesthetically—our culture seems to be under stress. Many of the "old values" and generally held beliefs have ceased to be unquestionable. We find ourselves grounded in nothing larger than ourselves, and the great mass of people have been forced willy-nilly to live in the age of the existential hero—defiantly indifferent to the dead God, becoming makers of their own values and guardians of their own consciences. This is the experience of "modernism," and its cost in terms of both personal and cultural unrootedness has been high.   In our relationship both to ourselves and to others, the Newtonian influence runs deep. If we are nothing but accidental by-products of creation and pawns in the play of larger forces wholly beyond our control, how can we exercise much meaningful responsibility either for ourselves or towards others?   How, with our existence temporary and our purposes futile, tossed this way and that by the dynamics of the id or the undercurrents of genetic or class struggle and history, can we really be held accountable for anything? So much of modern sociology and educational theory, indeed our whole psychology of the person, follows from such thinking—as does our peculiar twentieth-century violence, a natural reaction to so much impotence.   Equally affected is our attitude towards Nature and the material world. If our minds, or conscious selves, are wholly different from our material selves as Descartes argued, and if consciousness has no part to play in the universe as Newtonian physics implies, what relationship can we have to Nature and matter? We are aliens in an alien world, set apart from and in opposition to our material environment. Thus we set out to conquer Nature, to overwhelm her and use her for our own ends, never minding the consequences.   "Man is a stranger to the world," says Michel Serres, "to the dawn, to the sky, to things. He hates them and fights them. His environment is a dangerous enemy to be fought, to be kept enslaved..." The twentieth-century desecration of the environment and the mindless proliferation of ugly, man-made material structures follow from his sense of alienation from Nature and from matter.         — Danah Zohar, The Quantum Self                   Indexes/14