Vico's World - History and Progress, Part I

The tech world sees exponential change everywhere. Are they right?

James Joyce reading Vico

Here’s a short piece I wrote which sketches different theories of history and introduces Giambattista Vico and cyclical views of history and progress. I hope you enjoy.

Erik J. Larson 

Most ancient civilizations embraced a cyclical view of history, with recurrence thought to be as predictable as the flooding of the Nile. In the Greek tradition, Hesiod, Plato, and Aristotle depicted humans working to build an impressive society, reaching a “golden age,” then falling victim to various moral and intellectual weaknesses, leading to decline. After reaching rock bottom—often through the agency of some calamity—people would pick up the pieces and start over. Ancient life was built on reverence for the status quo: the gods, the king, the forces of nature, all powers to which humans were meekly subservient.

The replacement of this static model of endless cycles came as the Roman world reached its apex and began its inevitable decline. Judeo-Christian thought introduced the idea of linear progress towards an end point or goal. St. Augustine and other church fathers popularized the idea that humanity was going somewhere (in the Christian context, either heaven or hell) based on human agency. By the time of the Enlightenment, Christian eschatology was replaced by science and technology as the driver of humanity’s upward progress and ultimate “salvation.” “Technoscience” lifted the world out of superstition, disease, and squalor, and cemented the idea of linear progress, not toward heaven, but toward a better life on earth.

Moore’s Law… Or Not

With the coming of the digital age, the idea of steady, linear progress was replaced by a new faith in exponential (ever increasing) progress. The progenitor of this idea was Intel chief Gordon E. Moore, who in 1965 stated his eponymous law, that computer power doubles every eighteen months. Doubling provides an exponential super-power. Doubling the penny would result in all the world’s wealth in surprisingly few steps (soon the Earth would be covered with pennies).

The idea of exponential change was eagerly embraced by futurists and technophiles, then business leaders, media, and the population at large. By the 2000s, talk of “disruptive” technologies driving exponential change had become an article of faith among Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and investors. Self-proclaimed business gurus wrote guides to managing the surge of amazing things to come. Futurists insisted that utopia, brought to us by super-smart computers, was no longer on the distant horizon but just around the corner.

The problem with this unbridled faith in exponential progress as a law of nature is that it isn’t. Even Moore’s Law has reached the end of the line. For all its futuristic rhetoric about reinventing the structure of everything from organizations to currency, Big Tech has succeeded mostly in bringing back bureaucratic corporatism, along with 1950s “Big Iron” computing in the form of Big Data AI. We’ve simply circled back to a recent past in which the zeitgeist embraced centralized control, if not monopoly power. Worse, we seem not to recognize that the world we’ve created is not new.

Vico’s World

The view of history and progress as linear is not the only offering on tap. In the late eighteenth century, Giambattista Vico, a little-known professor of rhetoric in Italy, argued that societies and nations progress and then inevitably regress, tracing circles or spirals in history, and after reaching a highpoint of affluence and success, end up repeating mistakes long forgotten. Nations (and empires) run their course this way, Vico argued. In his masterpiece, The New Science, Vico gave historical examples and—unsettlingly—insisted that history is inevitably cyclical. The apex will always be followed by a return.

Vico argued that our rise and decline can be traced in our language. Advanced nations lose their poetic, passionate language, and begin using legalistic and rational language—first to construct institutions for a common good, and later to turn on each other. The seeds of “the return” are planted in the very progress of the body politic. After the ricorso—the return—commonwealths might have degraded into bureaucratic monarchies. The use of language then shifts again. Rational-sounding discourse and “passions” leading to vice inevitably corrupt “manners” (not a bad gloss of social media today).

In other words, Vico’s ricorso is, in a sense, a historical Catch-22. It emerges because societies and nations must adopt legal and rational institutions and communication to survive and to prosper. But it’s this very framework that signals the eventual demise. The poetic imaginative core of humans, now denuded, can’t prop up all the legalese and supposed rationality.

A modern way of putting this is that societies become less innovative and more self-centered and querulous, which leads to the in-fighting and regression. Vico saw the degradation of constructive cooperation as the first sign of the return. If that’s true, it’s a telling indictment of our own increasingly fractured and polarized world.

Whether or not Vico’s theory of history is capital “T” true, I think his insight that civilizations and nations pass through phases connected with the use of language is powerful, and I think it’s particularly germane today, given the obvious litany of problems with social media we’re seeing. In a broader sense, too, we have lots of evidence for the cyclical nature of human societies—the Egyptian Dynasties are gone, and Rome really was sacked (two of Vico’s much discussed examples). Whether cycles are, as Vico argues, written into the nature of things is of course debatable. But radical and unending change is silly. Nothing grows exponentially for very long, so it’s a weak theory of history when widening the lens past microprocessors. The world today is much in need of better thinking about where we’ve been, where we are, and where we’re headed.

In Part II of this series I’ll dive a bit deeper into progress and history and Vico, and in posts that follow I’ll continue to explore how we came to this sorry state, and how we can use Vico’s insights, along with more recent scientific research, to reverse our stagnation and begin moving the cycle of history upward again.