Chapter Seven: The New Caste
In which we meet a powerful group defined, enabled and enriched by their mastery of the Seventh Sense.
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Looking back over several hundred years of European history, the Oxford professor David Priestland found that the movement of power might be scored by reviewing the alliances and hatreds and hopes of three distinct, interacting groups. He called them “castes”: merchants, soldiers and sages. By merchants, Priestland meant the bankers, traders and industrialists whose capital, goods and political power bent Europe’s once-feudal economy into something modern and industrial.!®° The Medici, Dutch coffee traders, Scottish cotton barons. By sages, he had in mind the churchmen and later the technocrats of various empires, the men who helped birth and then manage the problems of an Enlightened, urban social order: Locke, Bismarck, Disraeli. And by soldiers he had in mind both the great aristocratic warrior classes of Europe and upstart, genius figures like Napoleon or Wellington - men who handled martial force with the fresh, surpasssing brilliance of a paintbrush or chisel, not an instrument of mass murder.
The aligned, shifting interests of these three castes, Priestland wrote, were like gears of sorts, each offering special leverage, meshing together to drive nations to great power. Mix the influence of France’s sage-bureaucrats with her artful soldiers and you get the French Imperial period. Marry the interests of Britain’s shrewd 17% Century trading bankers with her martially inclined sailors and globe-spanning Victorian dominance results. Today, of course, the merchants and soldiers and sages of our era are also at work. They sit in sovereign wealth funds, wired situation rooms and madrasas, churches and research labs. The force of America’s merchants and financiers, bolstered by Washington’s security caste, defines much of American power. No other nation could, at the moment, comprehensively replace what the country does with such breadth, intensity and speed. And now, all around the globe, we're seeing the emergence of what we might think of as a New Caste joining the merchants, soldiers and sages. This is the infotech caste.
What was going on in that field in Amsterdam back in the summer of 1993 was nothing less than the birth of the first figures of a connected technological era, of a new elite. This caste | have in mind is defined by their personal proximity and fingertip feel for the linked machines that drive so much of our world. They represent a tiny fraction of our population, but operate with non-linear, massive levels of influence. This New Caste clusters, in ever tighter circles of intimacy, around the systems and networks we depend on. They are building new connected
160 Looking back: David Priestland, Merchant, Soldier, Sage: A New History of Power, (New York: Penguin, 2013)
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