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The Rape of Man & Nature: An Inquiry Into the Origins and Consequences of Modern Science

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Philip Sherrard
Philip Sherrard

Philip Sherrard was a British author known for his profound exploration of religion, philosophy, and mysticism. His works covered a wide range of subjects, including novels, poetry, and criticism. more

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“The world-picture, with man in it, is flattened and neutralized, stripped of all sacred or spiritual qualities, of all hierarchical differentiation, and spread out before the human observer like a blank chart on which nothing can be registered except what is capable of being measured. For Newton, the celestial spheres are a machine, for Descartes, animals are machines, for Hobbes, society is a machine, for La Mettrie, the human body is a machine, eventually for Pavlov and his successors human behaviour is like that of a machine. There is nothing that is not reduced either to phenomenon (fact) or to mathematical hypothesis (or, in less polite language, fiction). The whole physical world is regarded as no more than so much inanimate dead matter whose chemical changes are mechanical processes based upon the so-called law of the conservation of mass. Everything, including the mind of man," is aligned on the model of a machine constructed out of dissections, analyses and calculations.”

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“Already by the first half of the nineteenth century, if not earlier, scientists—and especial] scientists who would apply their knowledge—were beginning to move into the centre of the social and economic scene. Aided and abetted by hard-headed industrialists and bankers possessed by a single-minded devotion to making money no matter what devastation they produced, scientists began to turn their expertise to the practical exploitation of the world’s natural resources. It must be remembered, too, that they rode on the crest of the new ‘spirit of the age’. There was a feeling of optimism in the air, a sense of moving forward into the future under the aegis of a new divinity, the Reason, that was now extending its empire over the whole western consciousness. Man was naturally good. The world was a good place to live in. It could be a much better place if only its natural resources and man’s ability to put them to his use could be exploited more fully and efficiently.”

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“If efficient technical means for achieving something exist or can be produced, then these means must be put into action irrespective of what this thing is or of what the cost may be in human terms. Even those who were at first the victims of these processes—the industrial proletariat—have been seduced by their glamour and regard them as the magical talisman that will bring them all they need in life. As for the elite of our technocracy—those who manipulate its inexhaustible gadgetry of machines, devices, techniques, the computers and cybernated systems, the simulation and gaming processes, the market and motivational research, the immense codifications necessary to sustain and enlarge their empire of sterilized artificiality—their prestige is virtually unassailable because on them the whole edifice depends for its survival and prosperity. Moreover, if they are readers of Teilhard de Chardin, they can add ideological grist to their pragmatic mill, for he will have taught them that it is through the consolidation of the ‘noosphere’, that level of existence permanently dominated by the mind of man and its planning, that our species will execute its God-given task and fulfill its destiny.”

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“Moreover, it is not only our emotional world that is deadened. The world of our creative imagination and intelligence is also impoverished. The most average characterless type of mind is quite sufficient to master and apply the various skills, scientific and other, needed to run our society.At the same time, the objects which we now make or manufacture require little or no imaginative effort on our part; they are all the result of rational planning and design, of technical skill and efficiency, and we produce them—are forced to produce them—with the least possible personal struggle or commitment, entering into and becoming through producing them part of their objective, impersonal and pitiless nature. For these products—machines, commodities, organizations, programmes—are themselves totally devoid of any Imaginative quality: they mirror nothing which is not material, they are symbols of nothing, they are entirely consumed by their own lifeless and inorganic indifference; and man who must spend his days among them is reduced to a similar state. Indeed, what goes by the name of work for the vast majority of the members of our society rots the very soul and body. It is work which takes no account whatsoever of the personal qualities of the individuals engaged in it; it has no direct connection with what a particular person really is or with that by virtue which he is himself and not someone else; it is purely external to him and he can exchange it—if there is anything available—for an alternative which is equally impersonal and exterior. In relation to our work, the vast majority of us in our society are equivalent to mere ‘units’, or objects or commodities, and are condemned for all our wokring lives to purely mechanical activites in which nothing properly human exists and whose performance is not in any way consistent with our inner and personal aptitudes and identities.”

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“The result has been that theologians have largely failed to make any radical or effective critique of scientific epistemology, to elucidate the consequences of making the reason the supreme and sole instrument of knowledge, and to explain why this has meant a progressive falsification of our understanding both of ourselves and of the world about us. In view of this failure it is not surprising that so many students of our universities end up with no better ideology than some form of Marxist-Leninism, itself a translation into political terms of some of the most banal aspects of nineteenth century bourgeois scientific theory. When this same hotch-potch of rationalist-materialist constructs is taken over by—or, rather, takes possession of—the masses, then society is turned into a prison-camp in which everything that gives human life its value and dignity is systematically attacked and lacerated.”

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“...we demean ourselves and our potentialities When we take an unrelievedly pessimistic view of our fate. Yet equally we demean ourselves when we nourish ourselves on illusions. The social and cultural order that we have built and are continuing to build about us—our present—is one predominantly determined by the categories of a false philosophy and its practical application; and the consequence of our acquiescence on such a mass scale to what amounts to a lie about ourselves and the true nature of the physical world cannot but be an increasing divorce between this order and that of the human and natural norm. In fact, this divorce has now become so great that it is virtually impossible for the one to understand the other. We have all but lost the capacity to measure how far we have in fact fallen below the level of the human and natural norm.”

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“Modern science, then, ignoring the sacred aspect of nature as a condition of its own genesis and development, tries to fill the vacuum it has created by producing mathematical schemes whose only function is to help us to manipulate and ‘dominate’ matter on its own plane, which is that of quantity alone. The physical world, regarded as so much dead stuff, becomes the scene of man’s uncurbed exploitation for purely practical, utilitarian or acquisitive ends. It is treated as a de-incarnate world of phenomena that are without interest except in so far as they subserve statistics or fill test-tubes in order to satisfy the curiosity of the scientific mind, or are materially useful to man considered as a two-legged animal with no destiny beyond his earthly existence.”

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“The technical term that is often used for this is “interpersonally exploitative.” In short, because of the singular focus on fulfilling their needs, especially external needs, narcissists will use other people as objects to get those needs met. Other people often do serve literally as objects—a tool to get a job done. Because you are not in on this secret in the beginning, it can feel a bit depersonalizing—as though you are only valued when you are functional. It can feel manipulative, because your partner may compliment you excessively and then hit you with a difficult request or ask you to make uncomfortable requests.”

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