The Great Blue Motorcycle: If Necessity Is the Mother of Inventions, What Are Inventions the Mother of?

I suppose it all started with Vico. (For all cultural historians a respectful glance backward to the “inventor” of our discipline is both necessary and proper. For an historian who proposes to say something about inventions and inventors it becomes mandatory.) “It,” in this particular instance, is the assignment of a profoundly historic role to technology and, with that assignment, an even more profoundly pessimistic vision of the consequences of the technological impact. In The New Science (definitive edition 1744) Giambattista Vico outlined a three-level historical cycle that began with man in a “bestial” condition in the Age of God and then saw him elevated through an Age of Heroes to the Age of Man. Yet it is in this final age that the threat of the return to barbarism occurs. And for Vico, the stage that brings to a close the Age of Man “arises from an excess of reflection or from the predominance of technology. This stage heralds an imminent new beginning of history.”