Hesiod Theogony: The Fate Of Evolution

The Fate of Evolution

As a society, we believe advancement in technology and science play an important role in our evolutionary process. But there is a price to be paid for these discoveries: our glaciers are melting, the oceans are rising in temperature and volume and the polar bears are dying because they are no longer able to swim the distances between remaining ice floes. In our advanced society, have we placed capitalism above all else?

When Zeus wanted to teach Prometheus a lesson for giving the human race fire, he created Pandora. Before Pandora, “human beings used to live completely free from evils and hard work and painful diseases” (Hesiod Theogony, qtd Morford et al 91). To punish Prometheus and his beloved human race, Zeus

ordered Hephaestus to create a modest maiden. Athena clothed her in ethereal garments, Aphrodite instilled in her longing and desire and Hermes “put in her the mind of a bitch and the character of a thief (Hesiod Theogony, qtd Morford et al 91). The final piece was the box sent with Pandora, containing evil, trouble and hope.

I think the story of Pandora speaks to many of our industries and our nature in general.

We, as humans, have difficulty being content with what we have. When our ancestors started logging in Northern Minnesota and Wisconsin, the wood from the trees was used to make homes for the settlers in this region. But our desire for profit caused loggers to clear cut major swaths of forest, leaving the wildlife without a home. The defense industry made major advances in the first part of the twentieth century, but were not satisfied, and as a result, most of Japan and parts of Asia were devastated by the atomic bomb. We blindly create the next thing without considering all possible outcomes, sometimes leading to major disaster. Just like Zeus and Prometheus, forethought, unfortunately, becomes afterthought and regret. But that doesn’t mean Prometheus shouldn’t have given us tools to evolve our society. I think living in a “perfect” world that didn’t require us to use our higher reasoning and problem solving skills would be very

boring.

Agriculture has been a necessary part of keeping our race healthy and productive for the last 2,500 years. As the earliest civilizations in Northern Africa, Mesopotamia, China, the Indus River valley and Peru acquired language, tool making, food production and morality, it was no longer necessary to do everything for yourself. The farmer would depend on the toolmaker, the toolmaker would depend on the scribe, the scribe would depend on a holy man and so on. Food production was expanded to provide enough for your community and this was maintained quite well for the next 2,400 years. In the twentieth century, agriculture became industrialized, and now a few farmers could provide mountains of grain for an entire country. As if this surplus of food wasn’t bad enough, those farmers were plowing up grasslands, essentially affecting the entire weather system across the North American continent--the result was the “Dust Bowl” of the 1920’s and 1930’s. There were reports generated to warn farmers about the blight they were causing, but their desire to make money was greater than their belief in conservation.

America is a very young civilization compared to those in Europe and Asia, and yet we have a difficult time remembering failure. As each new generation of lawmakers comes into their own, they succumb to the influence of money that keeps them in office. It seems that regulations put into place only twenty or thirty years ago to protect resources and stave off predatory industry can be simply thrown by the wayside once older legislators retire their voice, or rather the voice for those unable to speak--the air, the water and the land.

When Daedalus made the wings that were to take him and Icarus away from Crete, he warned his son, Icarus that if he would fly too close to the sun, the wax that was affixing the feathers to their bodies would melt, if he were to fly too close to the sea, the feathers would get wet and he would drown. Icarus got lost in his flight and wanted to reach the heavens, bringing him to his end. When something is going well for us, we don’t always want to listen to the warnings, we get lost in our triumph and ego. The problem is, unlike Icarus, who personally paid a price for his ego, our environment is usually the one to pay the price while a few elite reap enormous rewards.

I do believe it is important to strive for improvements in technology--for the last 4.5 billion years our planet has been evolving, it comes to us naturally. But we must be careful to consider all outcomes before implementing new technology, otherwise we have instances such as people in a vegetative state kept alive on life support. A machine can do all the things the most rudimentary part of our brain would do for us if it could. Do you think the person who invented the ventilator considered a family in that kind of situation before making their product available?

The fates were all powerful during the reign of the Greek gods, “according to some authors Zeus is supreme and controls all, but others portray a universe in which even the great and powerful Zeus must bow to the inevitability of Fate’s decrees” (Moreford et al, Classical Mythology, ninth edition, 132).

Perhaps the Greeks put so much importance on fate because there weren’t as many choices available to them in a less evolved society--that they were more likely to accept things as they were instead of taking things into their own hands. But that was not true for people like Galileo, Copernicus or Socrates, these men did not accept the teachings of society and pushed past beliefs they found to be antiquated.

Fate no longer carries the weight it used to and we consider ourselves able to utilize our higher reasoning to make choices and map out our future. When Paris’s mother, Hecuba, learned her child was destined to bring down the walls of Troy, she set the child outside the city gates and hoped the child’s fate would not come true. When we accept the state our society is in, because “my hands are tied”, or “I’m only one person, what difference can I make?”, it’s like we are accepting fate, and yet we don’t have

to!

I think some people still believe in fate while others don’t at all. Someone who “puts their problems in the hands of God” seems like one that accepts their fate. I personally believe that the divine force that lives within and among us provides all the tools we need (just like Prometheus) to accept or conquer whatever obstacles come our way. We must remember that when we are caught up in amazement of new discoveries, there could be a dangerous outcome, as Icarus learned in a hard and final way. Gandhi was one person, Rachel Carson was one person, Wendell Berry is one person and they have all said and written things that were not aligned with the status quo, and what they have given us is hope. I guess Zeus wasn’t so bad after all, when he put hope in Pandora’s box, he challenged us to use it and fight our challenges.