In his magnum opus, The New Science (1725), Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico (1668-1744) proposed a cyclical theory of history. Unlike the Enlightenment philosophers of his time, Vico did not believe in linear progress. He saw history as a series of recurring cycles, each with three ages: an Age of Gods, an Age of Heroes, and an Age of Men.
For Vico, the key problem of advanced civilizations is that their language becomes too abstract. In the earlier stages of civilization, language is tightly bound to sensations and local conditions. Abstract language and symbolic systems allow for great technical and material progress, but also deception and manipulation. Most words and ideas circulating in advanced societies do not permit immediate confirmation or disconfirmation, so with great progress comes great uncertainty for most people with respect to most things.
The end of a civilization is therefore marked by a "barbarism of reflection," where the hyper-individualistic deployment of words becomes a war of all against all. Though people are "physically thronging together," they "live like wild beasts in a deep solitude of spirit and will," incapable of public deliberation.
Each cycle ends in a ricorso—a return to a primitive state and a new beginning. A Caesar is one solution, and invasion by a conquering force is another, but short of these two options then eventually Providence will intervene:
"If the peoples are rotting in this last civil illness and cannot agree upon a monarch from within, and are not conquered and preserved by better nations from without, then providence for their extreme ill has its extreme remedy at hand. For such peoples, like so many beasts, have fallen into the custom of each man thinking only of his own private interests and have reached the extreme of delicacy, or better of pride, in which like wild animals they bristle and lash out at the slightest displeasure. Thus in the midst of their greatest festivities, though physically thronging together, they live like wild beasts in a deep solitude of spirit and will, scarcely any two being able to agree since each follows his own pleasure or caprice. By reason of all this, providence decrees that, through obstinate factions and desperate civil wars, they shall turn their cities into forests and the forests into dens and lairs of men. In this way, through long centuries of barbarism, rust will consume the misbegotten subtleties of malicious wits, that have turned them into beasts made more inhuman by the barbarism of reflection than the first men had been made by the barbarism of sense. For the latter displayed a generous savagery, against which one could defend oneself or take flight or be on one's guard; but the former, with a base savagery, under soft words and embraces, plots against the life and fortune of friends and intimates. Hence peoples who have reached this point of premeditated malice, when they receive this last remedy of providence and are thereby stunned and brutalized, are sensible no longer of comforts, delicacies, pleasures and pomp, but only of the sheer necessities of life. And the few survivors in the midst of an abundance of the things necessary for life naturally become well behaved and, returning to the primitive simplicity of the first world of peoples, are again religious, truthful and faithful. Thus providence brings back among them the piety, faith and truth which are the natural foundations of justice as well as the graces and beauties of the eternal order of God."
In our own era, where the "barbarism of reflection" is accelerated by digital media, perhaps we are witnessing Vico's divine ricorso through a most surprising vehicle: the proof-of-work blockchain.
With the advent of digital media, Vico's "barbarism of reflection" becomes an unlimited many-to-many "sybil attack" across the entire social graph. At a time when anyone can broadcast anything to the public, and bad actors easily create multiple identities to manipulate narratives, there is no question of what Vico would say about Western civilization: It has reached its end and only God can save us.
In a sense, proof-of-work blockchains are a return to "primitive simplicity," befitting an Age of Gods, in which interactions are based on the natural laws of physics rather than the social agreements of "malicious wits." They are, as Vico might say, "religious, truthful and faithful."
The "desperate civil wars" and "obstinate factions" of the blockchain wars are, perhaps, the labor pains of the next civilization—one in which truth is grounded in the "sheer necessities," the objective realities of computation, cryptography, and physics.
