My Renaissance

By Taylor Covington

During this summer, I have had the opportunity to start my own

renaissance. After several years of a school hiatus, I decided to start back up
this last summer. Although my learning didnt stop during that time in life,
my school education has gone through a dark age. I have found this to be
very similar in the readings this summer from philosophers on antiquity. Just
as civilizations go through dark ages, so does business. People being naive
and unaware of reality seem to be cyclical over the ages and causing
historical dark ages.
From the very beginning of my reading this summer, I learned about
what it means to think critically. This does not only mean to think outside of
the box. It is to detect errors in our day-to-day life. This means to know
what true reality is, and not to believe in something that you think is true but
it actually false. Sometimes in life, I feel like we conform to the norm of what
everyone else is doing and we dont try to have our own mental aberration.
Ive learned that we need to explore reality and make sense of life for
ourselves.
Through the reading, religion is often a large part of the conversation. I
myself am a religious person. However, through the reading I have often
found myself agreeing with the valid points being made about how religion
can cause our society to become stagnant and conformed. It also does not
allow reality to agree with the teachings of a divine being and an allimportant afterlife.
With that said, I one of the largest take away form the ancient
philosophers was finding ones serenity, or peace of mind. This is hard to
todays society. I feel like the majority of people nowadays live with
perturbation because of the way our civilization functions with greed, long
days of work, terror attacks, and low income with high expenses. I feel like
religion helps to create a serenity to live within society. It helps relief anxiety
of todays perplex environment by creating an alternative motive to this life.
Writers of the past have mentioned this has created civilization to forget
about life and its responsibilities and become torpid in these. Edward Gibbon
mentions that Christianity caused the fall of Rome! I found this very
interesting and understandable.

Out of the reading we have covered thus far, my favorite has to

be The Coming Race by Edward Bulwer and Lord Lytton. In the reading, we
discover an underground community of the Gy-ei. After learning more about
this community, I found it very similar to the way religions attempt to create
modern societies. For example, their belief in an afterlife is extremely
important to them; in as much they do not do anything to jeopardize their
ability to make it there. According to Edward Gibbon, this caused the fall of
Rome. Their community, however, has found serenity in which I look for in
my life as well. Because the Ge-ei people do not experience stress or
anxiety, they live longer lives! They do not praise, have ambitions, or
preeminence in their society, which is both bad and good. The reading made
me realize this is what causes a society to become stagnant and without
competition, people do not have a need to go beyond others. They do not
feel coveting, envy, or hate because they believe preeminence leads to evil
passions such as these. I also loved how they focused on education and
retiring young to enjoy the rest of their life! The reason I enjoyed reading this
the most is the idea of a community that can closely emulate the Gy-ei
people: to love and enjoy life to the fullest without greed and preeminence.
To work together to build a community in which the each person contributes.
The reading also made me realize you cannot have the best of both worlds,
with one there must be the other.
Although this reading is fiction, I feel that we can take a few key
takeaways from it to influence our generation. The desire to work together as
a community to gain serenity is a large part of why I like this. When I think of
possibilities to obtain this, I think the best possibility to obtaining this is to
start with the next generation. We need to teach our children these
principles of low stress and not praising greed and preeminence. We need to
teach youth about why these things are harmful to society instead of why the
make society great as capitalism teaches. Also, we need to understand and
teach reality instead of illusions of what man wishes for. We need to
understand what we can control at this time and what actually exists. This
reading does open my eyes to the possibilities of teaching community
serenity, and obtaining it myself. I would love to have peace in the
communities and the removal of greed in our minds.
Throughout the readings we have learned about how women and
children have been treated to gain a profit in business. As mass production
gained steam, so did the poor work conditions and slavery of people. Why
does money trump a human being? This class has tough me to ask these
questions and become aware of issues we still have in society today. Is

Capitalism really the best way to run a country? I work 40+ hours each week,
away from my family, just to survive. Each day, the people around me are
trying to get to the next promotion, to larger paychecks. With that, comes
longer hours and more anxiety. I have been able to think for myself now and
feel that I have an opinion on what I want in life, that is serenity or ataraxia.
Although business is very important to our society today, we must
learn from those of antiquity and remember what we have already gone
through in life. I feel like people today can live both with Christianity and
greed, which is why our society has not fallen. However, we need to use
critical thinking to remember what is most important in life. That may differ
from person to person, but my perfect life is living modestly without greed,
pride, and preeminence. There are so many points and readings that Id like
to point out, but what Id like my readers to know is the true importance of
business and life is to treat others with respect, business should be to
provide for others not just yourself, and life should be free of envy, pride,
greed, and domination.