Document Text Content
The Seventh Sense
Power, Fortune and Survival in the Age of Networks
Joshua Cooper Ramo
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Part One: The Nature of Our Age
In which the revolutionary character of our era is explained. The need for a new
instinct is introduced. The historical stakes are weighed.
Chapter 1: The Master
Chapter 2: The Age of Network Power
Chapter 3: The Unbuckling
Part Two: The Seventh Sense
In which we regard the world with a new sensibility. Connection, we discover, changes
the nature of an object.
Chapter 4: The Jaws of Connection
Chapter 5: Fishnet
Chapter 6: Warez Dudes
Chapter 7: The New Caste
Chapter 8: “A mechanism and a myth”: The Compression of Space and Time
Part Three: Gateland
A guide to power in the world that becomes newly apparent with the Seventh Sense.
Chapter 9: Inside and Out
Chapter 10: Defense in Depth
Chapter 11: Citizens!
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Preface
Three hundred years ago the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution began
their pounding work on the foundations of an ancient order. Like twin hammers,
these forces demolished most of what once seemed permanent: Kings, alchemists,
popes, feudal lords – they were all undone.
Today, a fresh hammer is cracking away at our world. The demands of constant,
instant connection are tearing at old power arrangements. The formation of
networks of all kinds, for trade and biology and finance and warfare and any of a
thousand varied needs, is producing new and still dimly understood sources of
power. They are eroding the roots of an older order even as a new one is beginning
to appear. In fact, this process is only beginning. The networks ahead of us will be
even faster than those we have today. They will also be informed by artificial
intelligence. The combination of these two forces – instantness and thinking
machines – will further deepen an already profound change.
That last great shift of the Enlightenment was a violent and wonderful
transformation. It produced winners and losers, triggered tragedy and lit fresh
triumphs. What lies ahead of us is the same. A new landscape of power is emerging
now. This book is its story, and the tale of the instinct that will divide those who
master it from those who will be mastered by it.
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Part One: The Nature of Our Age
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Chapter One:
The Masters
In which the immortal problems of power are discussed, and the possibility of a new
instinct is introduced.
1.
One morning in of 1943, a Chinese writer named Nan Huai-Chin packed his bags in
Shanghai and began walking out of the city. He was headed west, and traced a route
along the Huang Pu river, as he headed out towards E’Mei Shan several thousand
miles away in Western China. E’Mei Shan – Eyebrow Mountain – was and is one of
the holiest Buddhist sites in China.
Nan was an unusual young man. At fifteen, he had won a national sword fighting
competition against men twice his age. At sixteen he had been admitted to the best
university in Shanghai, where he excelled in the study of natural sciences and
philosophy. If you look at photos of Nan in those years, more or less at the moment
he left Shanghai for the mountains, you see a clean-shaven, and soft-skinned man.
He is handsome, with electric eyes. You can see, if you know to look, the rough
intensity of the man he’d become during the anti-Japanese war: A toughness in his
stance; some hint too in his grimace of a sword-fighter’s mercilessness. This was
long before Nan was regarded as one of the finest living exemplars of the Chinese
Buddhist tradition, before he became known as Master Nan. This was before his
flight from China with the Kuomintang in 1949 once the communists came to power,
before his decades of wandering, and his eventual return to the mainland. All that
lies ahead of the man you see in the photo. The man in the photo is young, energetic.
He is certain.
In Nan’s youth, in his early sword fighting days, he had come to understand that
mastering the blade of his sword involved really training his internal spirit to the
highest possible level of sharpness. The spirit moved first, then – instants later – the
sword. It was his desire to sharpen that inner blade that led him to E’mei Shan and
the study of Ch’an Buddhism. Ch’an – you may know it by its Japanese name, Zen – is
the steeliest of the Buddhist traditions, bred through the combination of the
Buddha’s ancient Indian teachings with the mystical philosophical habits of Chinese
Daoism. Its adherents explain that enlightenment in Ch’an demands concentration
strong enough to make and then smash diamonds. It produces, as a result, an
unmatchable form of enlightenment. So, with the anti-Japanese war still smoldering,
Nan traveled for a month through his convulsing country and up E’mei Mountain,
where he found a Ch’an lamasery near the peak. Once there, during three years of
constant effort and meditation and deprivation, he achieved a breakthrough to
samadhi, that state of spiritual alignment in which the world and your own soul
become as transparent as water. Fear vanishes, as does lust or any real confusion
about the deeper currents of life. You become, the priests like to say, as resilient as a
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natural mountain spring: No matter what mud is thrown in, it is simply and
naturally bubbled away into clarity.
From E’Mei temple, with this fresh, clear-running mind, Nan began a quest to
sharpen his spirit even further. The journey took him, for nearly a decade, from
master to master in China, from monastery to university to rural huts. These were
the places where the last bits of some of China’s most ancient traditions had been
carried, places where classical wisdom had survived a hundred years of national
chaos. Nan’s wandering education resembled the way in which, in millennia past,
monks would make spiritual marathons around China, seeking an ever-sharper edge
to their insights. Solitary monks would stride into packed monasteries and engage
in tests of insight, contests to see who could feel the underlying nature of the world
with greater fidelity. The aim was, always, to touch the energy flows moving, just
unseen, below our lives. “Ten thousand kinds of clever talk—how can they be as
good as reality?” So the famous Ch’an master Yun Men, who himself trained four
great masters, faced down a King with pure silence in one such a battle. 1
Nan was trying to cultivate in himself deep ways of feeling and sensing the world.
During his wandering study, he followed a path that would lead him to
enlightenment in more than a dozen different schools of Buddhism. He mastered
everything from medicine to calligraphy. His youthful success and energy at sword
fighting, it emerged, was a sign of a prodigal genius. He became, in the 20 th century,
recognized as one of those crucial human vessels by which really ancient tradition is
preserved and carried forward for new generations.
After a few years of study, Nan saw the descending madness of Mao’s China and
slipped out of the mainland for Taiwan. He lived for decades between Taipei and
Hong Kong and America. During this time his fame as a teacher grew. In the mid-
1990s as China opened, Nan returned to the mainland. He had been invited by some
of China’s most powerful families, the children of communist revolutionaries who
were groping for a sense of history and identity. They wanted to absorb the lessons
of Chinese culture that Nan had internalized, they hoped to bend them into tools
they could use to shape a Chinese future. Might the old habits of the country, with
their ancient roots, have something to offer a nation nearly splitting with the
energies of modernity? Nan agreed to set up a private school. He selected a site on
the shores of Lake Tai in Zhejiang Province, not far from Shanghai. He chose the
location carefully: The still lake water near his campus was like a giant bath of
calming yin energy that balanced the urgent, uncertainly aggressive yang energy of
1990s China into a kind of harmony. Ash trees shaded the study rooms in the
summer. Wild peonies erupted in pink and white each spring.
1 So the famous Ch’an master: “Yun Men’s Every Day is a Good Day” in Thomas
Cleary, Secrets of the Blue Cliff Record: Zen Comments by Hakuin and Tenkei. (Boston,
Mass.: Shambhala, 2002) 39. Fir an excellent introduction to the thinking of Master
Nan, see Diamond Sutra Explained (Primodia Media 2007) and To Realize
Enlightenment: Practice of the Cultivation Path (York Beach, ME: S. Weiser, 1994)
6
It was here, when he was 92 years old, that I first came to know him.
2.
Before I moved to Beijing in 2002 a friend took me aside and offered this thought:
“Your life in China will change the way you see the world. But if you want to get the
most out of it, you have to understand that as important as being bilingual is, it is as
important to be bicultural.” I had not honestly thought of this as part of my plan, but
it seemed like good advice. I have hewed to it as a personal law ever since. From my
first days in China, I lived almost entirely among the Chinese. I can, for instance,
nearly number on one hand the meals I shared with Westerners over my years
there. This advice to learn to be bicultural really did change my experience of living
in China. It changed how I saw the world. It presented moments of really honest and
searching confusion. I had conversations where I understood every word and yet
had no idea what my interlocutor meant. I had periods where I did not know which
culture was pulling on my mind. But the decision produced, at least, a fortunate
encounter that led me to Master Nan’s school.
Several years after I arrived in Beijing, I was out for dinner one evening with a close
Chinese friend. My friend is a remarkable woman. If you ask how China has gone
from poverty to prosperity in record time, it is partly because of people like her. She
had studied in the Chinese educational system, had moved overseas and mastered
the technical arts of economics and finance, and had returned eagerly to help in the
construction of modern post-reform China. Nearly any time the government had
some new and difficult financial problem to manage, she would be shuffled into the
nervous hands of some baffled Minister or Vice Premier. She had, in her various
activities, helped put the Chinese stock exchange on its feet, rebuilt bankrupt banks,
and had overseen the construction of China’s first sovereign wealth fund. Though
only a few years older than me, her unique skills and absolute loyalty meant she had
seen much of the development of China’s speed-train economy – part miracle, part
near accident – from zero-distance range.
As she and I were finishing dinner that evening, a door opened to a private dining
room near us in the restaurant. Chinese often eat out in private rooms, and the best
restaurants are usually warrens of well-appointed secret spaces, a reminder that in
China door after door after door leads to ever more secure sanctums—think of the
nested power architecture of the Forbidden City. When the door near us opened, a
stream of senior Chinese party figures paraded past, hovering around an intense,
square-jawed and smiling man who was soon to become one of the most powerful
figures in China. As this man walked past, he nodded hello to both of us. I asked my
friend once he had left: “How do you know him?” I expected her contact with senior
leaders on financial matters would explain the connection. Her answer surprised
me.
“We both,” she said, “have the same Master.”
7
I had only been living in China then for about four or five years, so I was still a bit
surprised to learn in this unusual way about what I would later come to know – and
see and even experience myself – as the spiritual life of China’s communist officials,
particularly those at the absolute top of the system. The Master my friend was
referring to was Master Nan. Though he was largely unknown outside of China – I
am sure you had not heard of him until a few pages ago – in China he was an icon.
After his return to the mainland in the 1990s, his books about Buddhism and
philosophy sold millions of copies. His lectures are watched on DVDs and the
Internet, and he owns a fond fame that reaches across generations and transcends
politics or art or philosophy. You are as likely to find a copy of his book on the desk
of a university President as stuffed into the back pocket of a tea-server in Chengdu.
As you can imagine, when my friend first introduced me to the idea of someone like
Master Nan serving as a spiritual mentor to the figures struggling to master this
huge country, figures I had met and worked with in the brutally rational business of
everyday life in a modernizing China, it raised all sorts of questions. We both have
the same master? But in China, one thing you discover pretty quickly is that honest
understanding of anything isn’t achieved by asking lots of questions, particularly not
the direct sort. Yun Men had it right: Ten thousand kinds of clever talk get you
nowhere meaningful. But with her one sentence, the dinner conversation, which had
been moving pleasantly enough through the eddies of China’s politics and
economics, passed into deeper water, where it has stayed in the years since.
Master Nan’s particular passion, I learned that night, was a branch of Chinese Ch’an
Buddhism that had, about 1000 years ago, provided the seeds for the Japanese
school of “instant illumination,” known as Rinzai Zen. Rinzai is famed in the west for
asking students to grapple with koans, the sorts of puzzles – “What was your face
before your were born?” or “What is the sound of one hand clapping?” or just “Mu!”
– that can never be approached or answered by reason alone. They require nothing
but pure, trained instinct. Koans are not like math problems or word puzzles, so
much as questions that have to be answered with your whole soul. We don’t really
have an educational concept like this in the west, but the aim of Rinzai meditation
and learning is to arrive at kensho (jianxing in Chinese), a sudden and complete
understanding of the true nature of the world. Such “instant illumination” marks a
very eastern sensibility: Real truth resists the grasp of mere logic. It can’t be simply
explained, or taught with words alone. It calls on more immediate feelings, in the
way we might fall in love or get angry. In Rinzai study, the aim is to tighten and
compress your mind with meditation and focus and exercise – and the occasional
slapping sharpness of a hardwood “enlightenment stick” – as a way to open it, with
the goal of instant, blazing enlightenment. In such a moment, all sorts of invisible
relations become unforgettably obvious.
I had been a student of Rinzai since I was 16. So it was that, in the springtime of the
year after that dinner in Beijing, I was surprisingly, luckily invited to Master Nan’s
campus.
3.
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It is often said that during the days when Master Nan’s Lake Tai campus is open for
training, when hundreds of rich and connected elites from all over the Chinesespeaking
world converge there, it is the best networking spot in the country. But on
the weekend of my first visit, the Tai Hu center was closed to outsiders. Only about
ten of us were present. We were all, together, students. On our first morning we
walked to a large hall overlooking the lake and sat down quietly on benches and
meditated for three hours. And on our first evening, Master Nan sat with us during
dinner, looking young and vital and 20 years short of his 92, barely eating. Above the
bridge of his nose, I noticed, was a small marble-sized bump. This is the mark that
emerges, according to Buddhist tradition, when your self-cultivation and meditation
has led you to deep breakthrough, when energy begins to slip out of your head at
that “third eye” spot and into the world, leaving a little bump as evidence.
As we finished dinner, Master Nan turned the conversation to me and asked me to
speak about what was on my mind. In later years I would learn this was his habit, to
hand the floor over to his guests for a bit – whether they were politicians or
industrial titans or innocent visitors – before entering into his own reflections. He
pursued me with careful questions, his voice purring with a thick coastal accent. The
questions seemed removed sometimes from my main points, but I quickly came to
see them as needles. (“When he uttered a phrase,” it was said of Yun Men, “it was
like an iron spike.”) Many of those present were jotting notes: Whatever Master Nan
thought important, his students felt, must be worth putting down.
I knew that the records of Nan’s lectures and discussions were often circulated by
email. With subject lines like “Understanding This Chinese Generation” or “Master
Nan Answers Questions About Chinese and Western Knowledge,” they were realtime
maps of the usually invisible dance our daily lives do with history and
philosophy. We live now, of course, but Nan was always aware that we lived within
an historical flow too, in a particular moment amidst constant change. Remember
that the foundational text of Chinese civilization is the 2500-year old Yi Jing, The
Book of Changes. If Westerners are accustomed to consistent historical, Chinese
begin with the idea of a flux of forces as the only constant. A world of ceaseless
change means that valuable, useful education is less about facts than about the
training of a vigilant instinct for reaction. 2 It was a version of this same aim that was
at the heart of Nan’s teaching, and that made his ideas so magnetically appealing.
The circulation lists on his lecture notes were the Chinese equivalent of a roster that
included Ben Bernanke, Colin Powell, and Warren Buffett. They reflected the
breadth of curiosity about his ideas, and the hunger to understand and digest
changes in China and the world. “I just had a very senior leader here,” Nan told me
during a visit several years later. I had seen the high security at the compound and
2 A world of ceaslesee change: See Francois Jullien, The Silent Tranformations
(London: Seagull Books, 2011) 70, and David Hall and Roger T. Ames, Thinking from
the Han Self, Truth, and Transcendence in Chinese and Western Culture (Albany, N.Y.:
State University of New York Press, 1998) 150
9
the military cars whipping in and out all day. “He asked me what books I could
recommend to understand this period we are living in. I said, ‘I could give you some
books, but you wouldn’t understand them.’” Nan laughed. The iron spike. “This can’t
be understood by reading!” Nan was trying to educate his students in the original
principles of Ch’an: a set of psychological and physical tools to reveal deeper
patterns in the world.
After wearing his guests down with relentless dinner-time questioning that first
night I was at Lake Tai, Master Nan began to offer his views of our age. What he saw,
he explained, was a world pressing too hard on a fault line. We faced, he said,
choosing his word carefully, an “ephocal” quake. We were at a moment when the
river of change he had spent a lifetime feeling out was about to shift its course over
the landscape, drowning many of the reliable, old routes. The origins of this change
were buried in the very things we hoped might, in fact, save us from shock: money,
information, speed. “People are now constantly connected to computers and
machines, and this is changing the way they think. People just cannot make sense of
what is happening,” he said. “There is no respite. The world is going to go faster and
faster in this regard.”
“In the 19 th century the biggest threat to humanity was pneumonia,” he continued.
“In the 20 th century it was cancer. The illness that will mark our era, and particularly
the start of the 21 st century, is insanity. Or we can say, spiritual disease.” He paused.
“This next century is going to be especially turbulent. It has already begun. And
when I say insanity and spiritual disease, I don’t only mean inside the minds of
individuals. Politics, military, economics, education, culture and medicine – all these
will be affected.”
I could sense the logic behind Master Nan’s argument. The industrialization and
urbanization of the 19 th century had packed much of the world into Dickensian
urban pits. These became petri dishes for pneumonia. Too much industry and
urbanization, too fast. The 20 th century of plastics and artificial, untested, unsafe
materials had torn away at our genetic base and worsened cancers. Too much
science, too fast. In our age, in the 21 st century he felt a wasting disease would be
carried by information, by cell phones, by packets of data, by every bitstream we
jacked into our lives – and it would go right for our brains. Our institutions and our
ideas about power and stability would fall apart. The remapping of force that the
information revolution represented was a profound, destructive shift – what Nan
called a jieshu, the Chinese word for a rupture in the fabric of human history. In such
an era, the once reliable old habits would become useless, even dangerous. All that
would matter were your instincts. Frankly, all you would have would be your
instincts because no existing map could guide you through a completely new
landscape. In fact, the existing maps, should you stubbornly continue to use them,
would lead you along dangerous paths towards catastrophes you could not even
imagine.
�
4.
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The dining hall around us was dark as Nan finished his discussion that night. At our
table we sat in a pool of dim light and waited on the Master as he considered his
next thoughts. I knew that some of what drew China’s great minds here to dinners
with him was a sense that those old ideas of Chinese philosophy – born in an age of
chaos and dating back to a time before rational calculation and scientific progress –
offered hope. I asked Master Nan where he would begin on a quest to understand
this age and how best to prepare. How to cultivate oneself?
“You know you can’t just understand this easily,” Master Nan said sharply. He was a
little angry with me, I could see, for asking such a direct question – and he was also
using the Chinese teaching technique of taking students through a range of emotions
to accelerate their learning. Chinese philosophers believe we learn differently
depending on how we feel, so a teacher making a student scared or insulted or
proud is often just an educational tactic. Nan was working on my humiliation bone
now: “This isn’t like some idea I can sell you and then you can just go and use,” he
continued, his voice rising. “This is going to be hard.”
Master Nan inhaled on his cigarette and waited a moment. “If you work, though,
maybe you can be like Su Qin,” he said, “the man who wrestled 20 years of peace out
of 300 years of war.” Su Qin was the hero of the Warring States period during which
China collapsed into total chaos. He is remembered today, two thousand years later,
for the way he had penetrated the madness of his age and how he found there
deeper fibers of truth that he lashed into a stable peace. “Su Qin started as an
idealist. He failed.
“You know, Su Qin was humiliated in trying to advise kings. Even his kin were
embarrassed. His sister and mother refused to let him return to the family home. He
was in so much pain over this embarrassment that he sat in front of a desk and read
every book of history he could find for seven years. He tied his long hair to a beam
above his desk so that if he fell asleep it would hold his head up. Sometimes he
would stab a knife into his thigh to keep awake.” Nan’s voice was rising, his speech
picking up pace. “But in the end, he learned. Su Qin learned. You should study him. If
you do this, if you are sincere, if you work hard, if you learn these ideas, you can
understand. Can you be that disciplined?” The room was dead quiet now. No one
looked at me. In the silence, one of the guests passed around a plate of cut fresh fruit
and cherries and sweet dried dates.
Nan’s relentless, intense Ch’an Buddhism sort of enlightenment, delivered only after
painful years of carbon-crushing intellectual intensity, expressed a clear ambition:
To learn to feel through invisible relations and balances and to construct something
promising and hopeful on the other side. Nan’s long sessions of mediation or sword
play, his furious pursuing philosophical dialogues that reduced students to an
embarrassed sweating state, these were all aimed at sharpening a blade so as to
instantly carve at the energy flows of our age. Did “spiritual illness” really linger
ahead of us? What sort of tragedy did that suggest? What was it that, hair tied to the
5.
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ceiling, penknife jabbed into his leg, Su Qin had learned in those long, effortful years
of study? What secret had he penetrated? What sort of education had he finally
received at the end of his humiliations and breakthroughs? He had mastered the
energy of his age – and the exact right sensibility to use it. Might we, Nan seemed to
be asking, do the same?
7.
Faced with the mad unsettling of his world during the Industrial Revolution of the
mid 19 th century, the German philosopher Friederich Nietzsche once mused that
survival and greatness would depend on having what he called a “Sixth Sense”, by
which he meant a feeling for history. Surely, he felt, an instinct for ancient balances
and truths would provide a guide rail of sorts as the world lurched into a new age,
along an uncharted road. 3 If you could say “This has happened before” or “This is
how we got to where we are,” Nietzsche believed, it was the first step towards
knowing where to go next. Nan and Kissinger knew the need for something else for
our age as well, for a different instinct. It wasn’t just about knowing your history or
feeling the real possibility of human progress or tragedy. Rather it was about feeling
out the roots of the present in a certain way. All of our ideas – from how we love to
what we think of politics – are taken from the feedback and experience of our lives,
from what we’ve seen and done and felt and learned. We are the sum total of our
experiences, in this sense. But what to do if changes happen at some deeper,
insensible level where the old ideas and instincts, where the tools of sight and smell,
of feel and taste and hearing don’t fully answer? What to do when we are confronted
with what we’ve never experienced before? Never even dreamed of, perhaps?
This book is the story of a completely fresh way of feeling our world. By this I mean
a sensation that is as newborn as the lively sense of connection, of freedom, of
electric uncertainty and hope that come with the knowledge that we are unboxing a
new age. If Nietzsche’s era demanded a feeling for history, our own age insists on a
3 Surely, he felt: Nietzche describes the “Sixth Sense” in Beyond Good and Evil in the
following way: “The historical sense (or the capacity for divining quickly the order
of rank of the evaluations according to which a people, a society, a human being has
lived, the ‘divinatory instinct’ for the relationships of these evaluations, for the
relation of the authority of values to the authority of effective forces): this historical
sense, to which we Europeans lay claim as our specialty, has come to us in the wake
of the mad and fascinating semi-barbarism into which Europe has been plunged
through the democratic mingling of classes and races—only the nineteenth century
knows this sense, as its sixth sense. The past of every form and mode of life, of
cultures that formerly lay close beside or on top of one another, streams into us
“modern souls” thanks to this mingling, our instincts now run back in all directions,
we ourselves are a kind of chaos. In the end, as I said before, ‘the spirit’ perceives its
advantage in all this.” See Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche and Rolf Horstmann. Beyond
Good and Evil Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future, (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2002), 224.
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sensation alive to the pull of constant, instant connection. This Seventh Sense reacts
to what none of our other senses can notice, to the subtle undercurrents of a
networked age. That moment of first connection you once had – to a computer, a
friend, a fast-moving financial product, a miracle medical cure, an idea, a smashed
up sound – is like the first time you looked at a Matisse painting or heard Beethoven
(or Orbital). It switched on a new sensibility. But you have probably had – or will
shortly – another moment. This is the instant a cold and creeping chill hits you,
started by the uneasy sensation that something you’ve done has been recorded or
predicted or watched and manipulated in some way you’d not quite imagined. That
some strange force from a great distance has slammed into your life. This feeling is
the sudden shudder of a bill come surprisingly due: You wanted to be connected?
Okay, here’s the cost. And the addition on both sides of the ledger, the massive
benefits of our links and the rather terrible potential of those same threads, is still
being settled. We can say at least that the sum of all the revolutions wrought by the
instant mingling of the world’s soon-to-be connected billions with each other and
with machine intelligence, biological innovation and the tremors of a globalizing
world will be, to use Master Nan’s word, “epochal.”
Most of us find ourselves torn now. Not just between future and past; not merely
between the habits and loves of a slower age and the ceaslesss promise of
something fast and new. We are trapped, as well, between two groups. An older
generation now in power, blind to the laws of networks and connection, uses old
ideas to battle problems of a connected age and makes them worse, ever faster.
Terrorism. Financial chasms. Environmental imbalance. At the same time, an
emergent class of powerful technologists fingers more influence than perhaps any
group in history. Machines watch, learn, think and increasingly control nearly every
element of our lives. This digital-age group understands networks; but if they have
ideas about virtue, philosophy and justice, (mostly they don’t) these feel susbsumed
by their confidence in networks and control. Each group pulls at the legacy of the
Enlightenment – our liberty. And, so far, we’ve no way of defending ourselves. No
new instinct for life in this still unfathomable age of connection. The Seventh Sense
is a feeling for just what constant connection means – and the start of (finally) a
confident knowledge of how to construct our future and protect ourselves against
what is even now descending upon us. A consciouness exists in the world, Master
Nan would say. It extends over borders, across differences, between people. And it
becomes, on networks now, visible in new, powerful and hopeful ways.
What I mean by a sensibility is really a kind of instinctive notion, a way to sense and
then use the energy flows of our age that hovers perhaps just below what the
rational mind alone can tell. Master Nan used to recall a famous story from the 2500
year old Daoist masterpiece Zhuangzi, about the butcher who worked for a famous
and powerful Duke. One day the Duke saw the butcher cutting meat, his blade
singing and moving with almost no effort. “Ah, this is marvelous. Imagine such
mastery,” the Duke said. “How have you achived this?” he asked. “What I follow is
The Way,” the butcher said, referring to the idea of a spiritual force, a natural energy
which Daoisim tells us infuses everthing, from trees to the human heart. “When I
started butchering, all I could see was parts of the ox itself. After three years, I could
13
see the the whole ox. Nowadays, I meet the ox with my mind and spirit rather than
see it.” 4 The butcher was not looking at his work; he was feeling the energy of the
task. “A good cook goes through a knife in a year, because he cuts,” the butcher
concluded. “An average cook goes through a knife in a month, because he hacks. I
have used this knife for nineteen years. It has butchered thousands of oxen, But the
blade is still like it's newly sharpened.” He was cutting not with his knife, but with an
instinct – and the result was the highest form of mastery: accomplishment with
nearly no effort. This our our aim: To see the world with our mind, not our eyes. So
much of what will affect us in the future is invisibly stashed on a connected
landscape we’re only now learning to feel. It will emerge from the complex, adaptive
sea of links expanding around us. We must tune our own instincts for this power,
which will make our moves almost effortless. The ever-sharp mental knife laid upon
the thick challenges of a new age.
There will be moments ahead for all of us – the most dangerous or terrifying or
wonderful ones – in which things will happen that none of our old ideas or senses
can help us understand. The truly new. We’ve had previews of such moments often
enough in recent years: innovative devices, surprise attacks, unexpected and
permanent economic quakes. A cracking of the old physics of wealth and power is
underway around us, largely invisible to most of us, except perhaps in its strange
and unnatural effects: everywhere terror, instant billionaries, the failure of ideas
and institutions, millions of migrants loosed and drifting across old borders, but
tethered to deeper fields of connection, data, and ideology. The Seventh Sense is the
ability to see why this is happening. And to use what you see. This is not merely
about brain power or sharpened intellect; it’s about a gut reaction. Just as the
demand for liberty or industry was once invisible and insensible to an age
accustomed hundreds of years ago to feudal, agricultural habits, so we’re likely blind
to urgent pressures of our own. Surely you’ve felt this creeping anxiety yourself, the
exciting nausea of movement coming from you know not where? The ability to sense
and feel the deeper chord changes of history has, always, been the decisive mark of
leadership and success in revolutionary periods.
Consider, for instance, Charles, the Duke of Brunswick-Wolfenbuttel who faced
down Napoleon on the fields of Jena in what is now central Germany in October
1806. Brusnwick-Wolfenbuttel was then 71 years old. He was considered one of the
most courageous soldiers of his age, with a record of astonishing victories. He
looked over the sun-dappled fields along the Saar river on that fall day and saw
nearly certain victory in the coming battle. He had Napoleon outmatched two
soldiers to one. His men were masters of the subtle techniques of Frederick the
Great, tactics that had delivered victory in far more perilous moments. But
Napoleon, less than half the Duke’s age at 37, stared across the same undulating
land, the same poised armies and saw in the landscape something completely
4 When I started butchering: I’ve finessed the always-unstranslatable Zhuangzi.
See for reference Burton Watson, Burton, The Complete Works of Chuang Tzu. (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1968)
14
different and totally, lethally correct: An interlocking set of murderous gears that
could be set loose by his artillery 5 .
In the course of the French victory the next day Brunswick-Wolfenbuttel was first
blinded by French musket shot and then bled to death. It was a poetic end. He had
been, like so many of the Generals who would tumble before Napoleon in coming
years, absolutely blind to forces perfectly clear and visible and usable to the
revolutionary upstart. Napoloen’s European opponents would come to fear and
admire nothing so much as the Emperor’s specific, almosty mystical sort of
battlefield vision. He could look at a battlefield and see possibilities – certanties, in
fact – that eluded older, famous men. They named his masterful insight the “Coup
d’Oeil”: an instant, apprehending glimpse of power waves 6 . He saw forces and facts
in war that were obscured from his enemies by their own habits of mind and the
limits of their creativity. The great Prussian military strategist Carl Von Clausewitz,
who was made prisoner by Napoleon during the massacre at Jena, used his time
locked up to begin compiling notes for his classic work of Western strategy, On War.
“Genius,” he later wrote, “rises above the rules.” Mastery of strategy, Von Clausewitz
explained, was not merely the result of steely courage, geometric calculation or even
luck, as earlier writers had figured it. Rather, it was derived from the ownership of a
sensibility that could discern the secretly running lines of power that made the old
ways instantly irrelevant and appallingly dangerous.
Historians who mark out and consider the really long, century by century movement