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I said earlier that I wanted to lay the Seventh Sense onto the problems of war and peace and grand strategy – and while the insights our new instinct reveals are life-giving for business and eye-opening for culture, it’s to the devious and unavoidable problem of global order I want to turn now. In a now-famous 1986 speech “You and Your Research”, the Bell Labs scientist Richard Hamming set three questions for anyone embarked on the exploration of new ideas: “1. What are the most important problems in your field? 2. Are you working on one of them? 3. Why not?”240 Well, the most important problem in the field of global affairs is the question of the future of world order, of how it will emerge – and what sort of aspect it may yet present. It is the problem to be working on. It also touches, like it or not, whatever the most important problem in your field is: Opening new markets, educating your kids, planning five years of corporate growth. Remember the distinction from earlier in the book, the difference between living at an ordinary moment and an historic one? The difference between Warsaw in 1539 and 1939? In one age, history is irrelevant; in the other it nearly throttles you. You can’t avoid being touched. We live in an historic era, not least because the connections that define our age means epochal quakes in one part of the system will rattle other bits too.

A feeling for history – Nietzsche’s old “Sixth Sense” – should fire up invisibly in us bit now as we think about what life in an historic age might mean for us. The surprises in our news every day. The creaking of our old institutions. What do they augur? The political scientists Charles S. Gochman and Zeev Maoz once made a survey of history to see if they could spot just when the world slipped from calm moments to epochally unsettled ones. They surveyed nearly 1,000 wars, big and small, hunting for patterns as you or I might look for trends in stock prices or sports scores. Increasing complexity, they discovered, almost always shook the world into conflict. States, armies, political groups, newly independent nations, ideological and religious forces emerge and then collide in their young energy, each driven by different aims and values and dreams. A cycle marks the process. First, disputes over small matters accelerate – as they are doing now. Everything seems open to question: Do you control this trade route? Who says we have to respect this arms limit? The combined pressure of so many simultaneous disagreements announces a shift in the pattern of all relations. A logical loop follows: “The frequency of disputes,” Gochman and Moaz explain, “appears to be an early indicator of system transformation…The rise in the number of disputes seems to indicate a decline in the degree of consensus on the ‘rules’ of the international order. This heightened dissensus (often culminating in large-scale wars) is followed by restructuring.”241 Pressure on the rules. Small cracks. Large scale war. Re-ordering. Like water moving from ice to liquid to steam and back, this cycle has a predictable logic. It ran in the age of Bismarck and culminated in World War One. It spun again in the age between last century’s great wars too, tripping into a second World War. And it ran as well in the

240 “What are”: Richard Hamming, “You and Your Research”, Simula Research Laboratory (Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 2010) Chapter 6
241 The politial scientists: Charles S. Gochman and Zeev Maoz, “Militarized Interstate Disputes, 1816-1976: Procedures, Patterns, and Insights”, The Journal of Conflict Resolution, Vol. 28, No. 4 (Dec., 1984), pp. 585-616

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