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

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

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