Cycles...............................

The classical world did not believe in linear progressions, but rather in cyclical ones, often using the metaphor of human birth, aging, and death as a natural referent. Cultures and nations start out in diapers like babies and often end in them too—as do aged humans. Civilization is certainly advancing along an arc of greater wealth and more sophisticated technology. But even that trajectory is not settled, as Hollywood’s apocalyptic Road Warrior and zombie films remind us. I do not think the arc of the moral universe of Mark Zuckerberg is any more likely to bend toward justice than was nineteenth-century J.P. Morgan’s, however postmodern the former’s social media products may be.


-Victor Davis Hanson, as excerpted from this essay