“Dante would hate venture capitalists.” This Easter, let’s consider Silicon Valley’s place in hell
An oldie from PandoDaily,
Apr 5 2015
A couple of weeks back, I wrote about the
similarities between the Ellen Pao vs Kleiner trial, and a much older
legal battle — that involving Ellen Colton and her 1883 suit filed
against the so-called “Big Four” businessmen who built Central Pacific
Railroad.
Today is Easter Sunday and maybe it’s the church bells
ringing outside this coffee shop, mixed with my
unsatisfied comprehension of the moral issues raised by Pao, that
prompt me to look even further back. All the way, in fact, to 14th
century Florence, which was experiencing its very own innovation-led
boomtime, today remembered as the crucible of our modern civilization,
the birthplace of the light that dispelled Europe’s medieval darkness.
But
whereas today Silicon Valley has to make do with humble tech reporters
like me, the people of Florence had a far more adroit, and celebrated,
commentator on the behavior and morality of their city’s wealthiest
citizens. His name: Dante Alighieri.
During the lifetime of
Alighieri (1265 -1321), incredible new wealth was amassed in the central
Italian city-state, on the success of innovations in the banking and
textile industries. Alighieri wrote his epic trilogy The Divine Comedy
in part to poke holes in the narratives propagated by Florence’s new tex
billionaires.
“The elite in
Florence at that time wanted everyone to believe that their wealth was
based on virtue, that it was the result of smart, virtuous people
running things in a way that took care of everyone. That the rich would
look after the poor and not merely enrich themselves,” said Steven
Botterill, an Associate Professor of Italian Studies at UC Berkeley, and
an expert on Dante.
Why, I asked Botterill, did Dante condemn
Florence’s usurers deep in the pit of hell (tortured by flames while
wearing sacks of lucre emblazoned with their coat of arms about their
necks), while the prideful, avaricious and prodigal enjoyed lighter
pains at his pen? The avaricious, those insatiables who’s treasure was
never quite enough, are forced to lie on their bellies in the dirt. The
overly or unduly proud shuffle around the escarpments of Mount Purgatory
with great stones on their backs. Still, their humiliations have an
expiration date.
“Dante did not think that money and intelligence
were bad things. He believed in the dignity of hard work and that it
should be rewarded. Those who maliciously defrauded others, who set out
to bilk them of money, were obviously meant for hell. But he also
believed that the overwhelming arrogance of those who benefit off the
work of others deserved attentention. It was pride – the belief that you
are better or more worthy than others, or a general sense of
entitlement – that Dante saw as the root cause disrupting the social
harmony of Florence,” Boterrill said.
“Dante
would hate venture capitalists,” he added later, as we discussed the
many parallels between Dante’s Florence and our own historical moment.
The reason? “He wouldn’t recognize what they do as actual work, and
Dante’s chief nemesis was Pride.”
In the Divine Comedy, the
first-person pilgrim passes through the Inferno, Purgatory and Paradise
in turn, encountering contemporary and classical characters all along
the way and learning of their treatment after death. Dante’s pilgrim was
led by Virgil, because Virgil had made writing in Latin cool, but
didn’t make it full Angel simply because he was born too early to avail
himself of the One and True God who later revealed himself through the
Roman Empire. Perhaps today a similar tour of the Silicon Valley
afterlife would be guided by Gene Rodenberry, because he created Star
Trek but died in 1991, too soon to witness the triumphant rise of the
futurist technologists, who revealed themselves through venture funding.
With Gene as our guide, where might we find William Shockley, Eugene Kleiner or Steve Jobs? What would they tell us?
Back
in 1300 CE Florence, Dante could call upon the widely-shared Christian
concepts of Virtue to impugn the powerful. Today things are more
difficult for writers of similar aspirations. The very idea of a unified
morality system has been dashed stinking to the rubbish bin of communal
abstraction – with the possible exception of economics, Adam Smith
having been a severe Protestant and believer that Christian morals hold
greed and excess in check. But even Smith’s moral theories are less well
remembered than The Wealth of Nations, and today when isolated
ethical conundra burble up on the front pages, our newly-minted titans
of industry have learned just to grin and endure them, perhaps enlisting
the aid of top-notch PR talent to speed along the forgetting....MORE
