Tools and Weapons: The Promise and the Peril of the Digital Age

by Brad Smith

As Henry Kissinger has noted, China owes its millennial survival to “the community of values fostered among its population and its government of scholar-officials.”12 Kissinger has probably spent more time focused on China than any other American official of the past century. As he observes, the values that continue to guide official thinking in China today derive from teachings by Confucius, who died more than two centuries before the Qin dynasty was born. His teachings included a commitment to compassionate rule, devotion to learning, and a pursuit of harmony based on a hierarchical code of social conduct that included a fundamental duty to “Know thy place.”13 As Nisbett points out, the Greek philosophy that remains the foundation of Western political thought shared a strong sense of curiosity with Confucius’s devotion to learning, but was grounded in a different sense of personal agency—a sense that people “were in charge of their own lives and free to act as they chose.”14 As developed by Aristotle and Socrates, the very definition of happiness for the ancient Greeks “consisted of being able to exercise their powers in pursuit of excellence in a life free from constraints.”