China and Japan engage neocortices

Sir, British physicist Lewis F. Richardson, who helped pioneer the mathematical study of international conflict, especially the outbreak of the first world war, observed some 70 years ago that war occurs because men do not stop to think – a proposition that triangulates neatly with Spinoza’s claim nearly 300 years earlier that violence occurs when passion overwhelms reason. That people do not stop to think during periods of threat has also been inferred from experiments where neuroscientists have observed that the limbic (emotional) brain overwhelms and overtakes the neocortical (thinking) when the organism is under stress.

This proposition offers some clue as to why, since September, otherwise “rational” political leaders in Japan and China have allowed their conflict over the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands in the East China Sea to escalate in a surreal, potentially catastrophic trajectory, with implications for even the US to be drawn in on Japan’s side. Gratifyingly, Japan and China have now taken the first steps towards mitigating the tensions aroused by their dispute (“China and Japan ease tensions”, January 26); ie Chinese and Japanese leaders met in Beijing on January 25 to explore “effective ways to appropriately manage and solve the problem through dialogue and negotiations”.

The high probability that our emotional brain can trump our thinking brain when we are under threat vexed Arthur Koestler who framed the phenomenon as “The Ghost in the Machine”. Fortunately, in the Chinese-Japanese case, it has been undermined and its relational directionality reversed, at least for the moment. This particular demonstration that we are not stuck in some evolutionary cul-de-sac can be attributed in part to the steady, increasing attention paid to the territorial conflict by global media, including the Financial Times, forcing the Chinese and Japanese to pause and “think” about the untenable situation in which they were increasingly positioning themselves, their region, and the global political and economic order.

The trick now is to do whatever it takes to maintain the ascendancy of the thinking brain by demonstrating to China and Japan that they can resolve their conflict in a manner that satisfies their interests and those of the US, but does not need a war with China to demonstrate the seriousness of its pivot to Asia.