Humanity’s two faces
An 18-month-old girl in England who was born without hearing can now hear almost perfectly, after a brief procedure that resulted from decades of research. Using a harmless virus to carry a specific gene into Opal Sandy’s ear, doctors at a Cambridge hospital compensated for the faulty gene with which she had been born. This leap in medicine was made public at the same time that the leader of “the world’s greatest nuclear power” (as Putin describes Russia) warned of the “danger of worldwide conflict.” Thousands of children have been killed in Gaza. And many scientists have expressed the fear that the planet’s heating is greater than the efforts to control it, posing a threat to humanity itself.
While science progresses geometrically, promising longer and better lives, humanity’s efforts to govern itself and to manage the Earth’s resources remain trapped in mentalities and behavior that threaten our species’ survival. In science, we look forward and build on whatever firm remains from the past. In politics, we talk about the future incessantly while reproducing past conflicts – between peoples, nations, and ideological and class rivals. Our collective problem is that geography and the Earth’s resources cannot satisfy the expansionist ambitions that are fired up by different groups’ idealized past and their indifference to the demands of today and tomorrow. What use the delirious grandiosity of Putin, Trump, Netanyahu and Erdogan if Earth cannot be saved? And yet, this “face” of humanity has always coexisted with that which promotes science, which fights for the Earth’s preservation.
In Greece, it is difficult to distinguish who looks forward and who insists on imposing his version of the past on the present. For a nation that boasts of its revolutionary spirit, we are very easily satisfied with what we have, and don’t fight to improve, to reinforce our strengths and limit our weaknesses. In research and innovation, for example, we can see our potential as well as how hard it is for us to make the changes that will bring success. In politics, our obsession with past glories and wrongs, with fantasies, continually complicates the present. And so, we remain dependent on others for our security and progress.
