INEWORD P

Monday, May 1, 2023 | Pinewood International American School of Thessaloniki can enable us to comprehend the true nature of our issues and truly advance as a species.

What modern people and governments call progress, is, unfortunately, very far from that. For the simple reason that it does not bring happiness. The dramatic majority of people use technology unwisely, and that is why, in the hands of many “smart idiots”, technology has brought about the destruction of earthly life. In Greek mythology, Zeus punishes Prometheus for giving people the fire, or otherwise, technology. He punishes him because he, being Zeus, the infinite life, (we should not forget that the name Zeus comes from the Greek word for life, “ζωή”) knows that man will misuse technology to the detriment of life…

We fail to realize that ironically, the term “ progress”, which connotes evolution and future development, is so integrally related to the past. We can have no intellectual progress by rejecting our past, our roots. As T.S. Eliot writes in his Four Quartets, “development” is a “fallacy / “Encouraged by superficial notions of evolution, / which becomes, in the popular mind, a means of disowning the past”. There can be no real progress by “disowning” our past. We have to move forward, but only, by learning from our past, from those moments in the past when the intellect has reached its zenith. Every nation needs to treasure these moments, their great intellectuals, their great authors, their civilization, and it is only by treasuring and respecting those, that our path towards the future will constitute a true progress, a true evolution, led by justice, by beauty, by truth!

Thank you! Eliot, T. S. Four Quartets. HarperCollins, 2014. Accessed 9 February 2023.

Bibliography

Gharat, Mahesh, and Kiran Antony. “The Sea Turtle: 'The Dumbest Creature on the Planet' - Provocative Wildlife Campaign in India.” Branding in Asia Magazine, 11 March 2020, https:// www.brandinginasia.com/the-seaturtle-the-dumbest-creature-on-theplanet/.