To understand US-China conflict, start with recognising its animal nature

International peace and stability, more vital to survival than ever in our epoch of pandemic proliferation and climate deterioration, requires a collaborative and responsible community. What is urgently needed is a global ethic of helping out and digging in for the common long haul, rather than pointing fingers and declaiming reasons for feeling so utterly exceptional or piously superior.

Grandiose moral judgments should be made only by nations that are themselves without sin – and there aren’t many of them, if any, as far as I can tell. The United States, for example, isn’t one and neither is China. But without both of these nations leading the fire brigade against common threats, how can the most oppressive conflagrations of our time ever be pushed back?

The national psyches of both are now preoccupied with the issue of status. China is aiming to regain it and America fears losing it. This reality helps explain the current tensions.

Some pertinent observations about animal and human nature by environmental philosopher Melanie Challenger could help here. Challenger has likened status threats in the mind of “humans” to nothing less than attacks by pathogens and predators. They are existential challenges.

In her new book, How to be Animal: A New History of What It Means to be Human, she writes: “Originally, status was about priority access to resources in situations of competition.” With Beijing and Washington, I would argue that it still is. Challenger adds: “Reductions in status might lead to a life-or-death scenario, sending alarm bells through the whole body of an animal.”

Challenger offers solid new science and resurrects overlooked past science to create serious doubt that humans can be elevated above animals on the dubious ground that they have a mind independent of their bones, tissues and fluids.

She does not deploy “animal” as mere metaphor. It is precisely who we “humans” are. There is no brain or consciousness-component divorced from our animal bodies, no “ghost in the machine” after decay and death propelling us to angelic being or holy eternal reward.

Her opening line of the book is uncompromising: “The world is now dominated by an animal that doesn’t think it’s an animal.”

Political man (or woman), then, is a political animal. Chinese, American and other “humans” roam the globe like the animals that they actually are without knowing this is who they are. And the essence of the political animal is no different, except superficially, from that of any advanced animal.

We think we “humans” are better than all other creatures, but there are other sets of animals that, for instance, do a better job at limiting destruction of the Earth or nurturing closely-knit communities.

For Challenger, it is anything but a put-down to say, as she does, “the truth is that being human is being an animal”, even though “this is a difficult thing to admit if we are raised on a belief in our distinction”. For her, “humans” are animals somewhat advanced up the Darwinian ladder, but that’s about it.

In a supportive essay on Challenger in The New York Review of Books, John Gray, political philosopher and emeritus professor at the London School of Economics, takes her animal-kingdom hypothesis to a higher level with the kind of insightful warning that makes most international-relations theory seem truly academic.

He says: “Rather than mankind acting as a single agent, some human beings will appoint themselves as humankind’s representatives. This group will then identify its values with those of humankind. Almost inevitably, human beings who do not accept these values will be regarded as less than fully human.”

Isn’t this the subtext of what China and America tend to say about each other?

Why weaponising democracy against China will backfire on the US

I was stirred by Challenger’s thesis and Gray’s endorsement of her ideas because the possibility of military conflict between China and America seems low on the Darwinian ladder and, with a decent dollop of compromise on both sides, utterly avoidable. So why do otherwise sensible and distinguished Chinese and US diplomats bark at each other like, well, animals?

Precisely because that is what we are, while believing we are something else. Denying that we are in a feral state of nature when snarling at one another is our true nature. Each side claims to be convinced they alone are at the centre of things while noting that the other side is at a lower stage of evolution. Both are wrong.

In years past, in interviews and conversations with Singapore’s first prime minister, Lee Kuan Yew, I missed few opportunities to sound him out about China and America. After all, it was known that he had influenced many Chinese economic reformers, including Deng Xiaoping.

Even so, Lee always said he viewed himself as no expert on China. Since then, I have often wished on the US’ putative “China experts” a similarly modest self-reflection. China fortune-telling is a giant gamble.

But Lee did appear certain of one thing while splintering “inevitability of war” arguments into so many toothpicks – no rational reason for military conflict between China and the US existed. Properly managed, as members of the world community, there is enough globe to go around.

But perhaps humans are unique and separate from Earth’s animal kingdom, and Challenger, Gray and other like minds have got it upside down. If so, we might start acting like it before humans turn themselves into an increasingly endangered animal. A turnaround in Sino-US relations is strongly recommended.

LMU Clinical Professor Tom Plate is also vice-president of the Pacific Century Institute in Los Angeles and author of the book “Conversations with Lee Kuan Yew”