If the mind had a mechanism that automatically shut off anger, keeping it in check, the world might—nay, would--be more peaceful. But there’s a catch. Conflict isn’t always a matter of emotion. Sure, emotions play a significant role in individual and group conflict, but reason also plays a role, especially in larger conflicts. Although there are psychological mechanisms useful in quashing anger and calming the inner brain by connecting it to the outer brain, such as Dr. Christian Conte’s successful Yield Theory, * there is a need for some mental mechanism that keeps those larger conflicts driven mostly by the outer brain from growing larger.
Conflict engendered by the frontal lobe is often the driver of violence between and among nations, especially when the leaders of a country reason they have something useful to gain through conflict with another country, such as its energy or metal reserves or maybe some maritime or continental trade route. Frontal lobes can justify almost any action through a philosophy of utilitarianism.
World War II’s Pacific Theater battles were a consequence of an island nation with few natural resources invading other countries. Japan’s invasions of the Asian mainland and various islands was motivated in part by a need for oil. Its attack on Pearl Harbor was its reasoned response to a major obstacle to its acquisition of resources, especially in the context of sanctions imposed by America after the invasion of China.
Utility can drive a runaway rationality that justifies conquering and enslaving. It has been used to justify slavery and serfdom since the rise of agriculture and widespread commerce, and, as in the case of the Pacific Theater in the mid-twentieth century, to justify conquests of foreign lands. No doubt, utility will provide the rationale for future conflicts that will, like those of the past, grow large as reasons pile on reasons till the tower collapses. Japan needed resources for its growing population and military. Japan conquered resources. The United States reasoned differently. Japan attacked. The United States reasoned a response. And so on and so on until the reasonable conclusion in 1945 was to drop atomic bombs “to save lives” under the premise that an invasion of Japan would cost a predicted million casualties. Thus, in utility, “only” the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were killed. Seemed to be reasonable actions to Truman and the US military.
In a study of cell growth published in Science by Marco D’Ario and others, the researchers revealed that eukaryotic cells can assess and maintain sizes endemic to their species by regulating the amount of KRP4, a protein. The protein “inhibits the progression to DNA synthesis.” ** In short, to keep their size “normal” and symmetric in a plant species, cells regulate their growth by waiting for KRP4 to accumulate or by waiting until excess KRP4 is diluted. Cells, in effect, adjust their “growth period before DNA synthesis.” The process avoids both stunted growth and runaway growth; KRP4 serves as a control on homeostasis and on mutant forms. It is neither emotional nor reasonable; it is simply a cellular process that governs size.
We need an analog of KRP4 on a global scale. The United Nations doesn’t effectively serve as an analog because it reacts to, more than anticipates, conflict already ballooning. In contrast, cells anticipate. They control mutant growth before growth begins. Is it not strange that on the simplest level of organized life, there is an effective control on growth that doesn’t exist on life’s most complex level of human interactions?
D’Ario et al. showed that KRP4 serves as a repeatable mechanism that dampens cell size variability and runaway growth. There’s utility in that. And it might be praiseworthy for humans to find a similar mechanism to keep battles from becoming wars. In the absence of historical knowledge, we might expect the frontal lobe, the seat of utilitarianism, to reason that an expanding war is detrimental to the species. But we have a history of warfare based on rational utilitarianism that reveals the “utility” of one nation, which seems rational, can run counter to the perceived utility of another country. That circumstance has occurred over and over on a planet with geographically unequal distributions of resources that are made more unequal by national, and therefore, artificial borders.
Because of historical and ongoing incidents of hegemony based on unequal distribution of resources, some people argue that there should be no borders, no ownership. Their argument, however, seemingly based on a general utility and a rational way to eliminate conflict, fails by omission: It leaves out the role played by that other driver of conflict, the inner brain. Those who believe that borders are the root causes of conflicts believe that reason is the key to peace. Millennia of warfare generated by utilitarian reasoning don’t play a role in their worldview. That’s a naïve perspective.
Utilitarianism’s appeal as a rational system misguides; we have evidence in slavery and war. In the American South before and during the Civil War, one argument for the continuation of slavery was the practical need for cheap and abundant labor on large plantations. It was, of course, a time before rapid advances in technology made machine labor available. Slavery, however unethical and immoral, was “utilitarian.” But the inner brain always plays its role. Working in the cotton fields was one matter; serving as household butlers, maids, and sex slaves, another. The former was driven by utilitarian reasoning; the latter, by the “utility” arising from the selfish inner brain.
Reason. Emotion. Both can generate inhuman conditions, injustice, injury, death, and war. Both have their utility. Both allow small cells of action to grow either geometrically or exponentially. Both establish patterns of behavior that can be detrimental. Both have convinced theologians that war can be justifiable and that destroying, injuring, and killing in a “justifiable war” are moral acts. Thus, out of Buddhism, we have a 2,000-year history of monks trained in martial arts, supposedly originating in part from the reasoned need to defend monasteries like the famous Shaolin retreat from bandits. Seems reasonable; seems utilitarian. We have the biblical wars between the Jews and their civil and religious adversaries, such as the followers of Ba’al. We have the religiously motivated conquests of Islam. We have the religiously motivated Crusades and the wars in the Americas perpetrated by the Conquistadores. We have the religiously motivated wars of the Europe’s Reformation Period. We have the centuries-long wars and battles based on slight religious differences in England and Ireland. We have today’s jihadists. We reasoned in each of these circumstances from a combined moral and utilitarian justification in a feedback loop between emotion and reason always with the same dire consequences. Recall the famous lines from Wilfred Owen’s “Dulce et Decorum Est.” After describing the horrible death by chlorine gas of a soldier in World War I, Owen writes in the context of seeing the man die, “My friend, you would not tell with such high zest/To children ardent for some desperate glory/The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est/Pro patria mori.” ***
Those who argue that they see utility in a borderless socialist world in which everyone has an equal share of resources must in their minds dismiss as inconsequential the machinations of nations, individuals, or groups intent fulfilling their perceived, reasoned needs and desires. They fail to consider how individuals have turned emotions and even faith into reasons for conquest and enslavement. They fail to see that utility is as utilitarians define. And they fail to realize that without a foolproof system of checks, such as that which individual cells employ with KRP4, runaway war is likely inevitable in every generation.
Notes:
*Conte, Christian, Ph.D. 2019. Walking through Anger: A New Design for Confronting Conflict in an Emotionally Charged World. Boulder. Sounds True Press.
**D’Ario, Marco, et al. 11 Jun 2021. Cell size controlled in plants using DNA content as an internal scale. Science. Vol. 372, Issue 6547. Pp. 1176-1181. DOI 10:1126/science.abb4348. Online at https://science.sciencemag.org/content/372/6547/1176 Accessed June 11, 2021.
*** Basically, “It is sweet and proper (or fitting) to die for one’s country.” Owen got the line from Horace. The year before the First World War, the Latin quotation from Horace’s Ode III was inscribed on a chapel wall of the Royal Military College at Sandhurst, England.
Conflict engendered by the frontal lobe is often the driver of violence between and among nations, especially when the leaders of a country reason they have something useful to gain through conflict with another country, such as its energy or metal reserves or maybe some maritime or continental trade route. Frontal lobes can justify almost any action through a philosophy of utilitarianism.
World War II’s Pacific Theater battles were a consequence of an island nation with few natural resources invading other countries. Japan’s invasions of the Asian mainland and various islands was motivated in part by a need for oil. Its attack on Pearl Harbor was its reasoned response to a major obstacle to its acquisition of resources, especially in the context of sanctions imposed by America after the invasion of China.
Utility can drive a runaway rationality that justifies conquering and enslaving. It has been used to justify slavery and serfdom since the rise of agriculture and widespread commerce, and, as in the case of the Pacific Theater in the mid-twentieth century, to justify conquests of foreign lands. No doubt, utility will provide the rationale for future conflicts that will, like those of the past, grow large as reasons pile on reasons till the tower collapses. Japan needed resources for its growing population and military. Japan conquered resources. The United States reasoned differently. Japan attacked. The United States reasoned a response. And so on and so on until the reasonable conclusion in 1945 was to drop atomic bombs “to save lives” under the premise that an invasion of Japan would cost a predicted million casualties. Thus, in utility, “only” the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were killed. Seemed to be reasonable actions to Truman and the US military.
In a study of cell growth published in Science by Marco D’Ario and others, the researchers revealed that eukaryotic cells can assess and maintain sizes endemic to their species by regulating the amount of KRP4, a protein. The protein “inhibits the progression to DNA synthesis.” ** In short, to keep their size “normal” and symmetric in a plant species, cells regulate their growth by waiting for KRP4 to accumulate or by waiting until excess KRP4 is diluted. Cells, in effect, adjust their “growth period before DNA synthesis.” The process avoids both stunted growth and runaway growth; KRP4 serves as a control on homeostasis and on mutant forms. It is neither emotional nor reasonable; it is simply a cellular process that governs size.
We need an analog of KRP4 on a global scale. The United Nations doesn’t effectively serve as an analog because it reacts to, more than anticipates, conflict already ballooning. In contrast, cells anticipate. They control mutant growth before growth begins. Is it not strange that on the simplest level of organized life, there is an effective control on growth that doesn’t exist on life’s most complex level of human interactions?
D’Ario et al. showed that KRP4 serves as a repeatable mechanism that dampens cell size variability and runaway growth. There’s utility in that. And it might be praiseworthy for humans to find a similar mechanism to keep battles from becoming wars. In the absence of historical knowledge, we might expect the frontal lobe, the seat of utilitarianism, to reason that an expanding war is detrimental to the species. But we have a history of warfare based on rational utilitarianism that reveals the “utility” of one nation, which seems rational, can run counter to the perceived utility of another country. That circumstance has occurred over and over on a planet with geographically unequal distributions of resources that are made more unequal by national, and therefore, artificial borders.
Because of historical and ongoing incidents of hegemony based on unequal distribution of resources, some people argue that there should be no borders, no ownership. Their argument, however, seemingly based on a general utility and a rational way to eliminate conflict, fails by omission: It leaves out the role played by that other driver of conflict, the inner brain. Those who believe that borders are the root causes of conflicts believe that reason is the key to peace. Millennia of warfare generated by utilitarian reasoning don’t play a role in their worldview. That’s a naïve perspective.
Utilitarianism’s appeal as a rational system misguides; we have evidence in slavery and war. In the American South before and during the Civil War, one argument for the continuation of slavery was the practical need for cheap and abundant labor on large plantations. It was, of course, a time before rapid advances in technology made machine labor available. Slavery, however unethical and immoral, was “utilitarian.” But the inner brain always plays its role. Working in the cotton fields was one matter; serving as household butlers, maids, and sex slaves, another. The former was driven by utilitarian reasoning; the latter, by the “utility” arising from the selfish inner brain.
Reason. Emotion. Both can generate inhuman conditions, injustice, injury, death, and war. Both have their utility. Both allow small cells of action to grow either geometrically or exponentially. Both establish patterns of behavior that can be detrimental. Both have convinced theologians that war can be justifiable and that destroying, injuring, and killing in a “justifiable war” are moral acts. Thus, out of Buddhism, we have a 2,000-year history of monks trained in martial arts, supposedly originating in part from the reasoned need to defend monasteries like the famous Shaolin retreat from bandits. Seems reasonable; seems utilitarian. We have the biblical wars between the Jews and their civil and religious adversaries, such as the followers of Ba’al. We have the religiously motivated conquests of Islam. We have the religiously motivated Crusades and the wars in the Americas perpetrated by the Conquistadores. We have the religiously motivated wars of the Europe’s Reformation Period. We have the centuries-long wars and battles based on slight religious differences in England and Ireland. We have today’s jihadists. We reasoned in each of these circumstances from a combined moral and utilitarian justification in a feedback loop between emotion and reason always with the same dire consequences. Recall the famous lines from Wilfred Owen’s “Dulce et Decorum Est.” After describing the horrible death by chlorine gas of a soldier in World War I, Owen writes in the context of seeing the man die, “My friend, you would not tell with such high zest/To children ardent for some desperate glory/The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est/Pro patria mori.” ***
Those who argue that they see utility in a borderless socialist world in which everyone has an equal share of resources must in their minds dismiss as inconsequential the machinations of nations, individuals, or groups intent fulfilling their perceived, reasoned needs and desires. They fail to consider how individuals have turned emotions and even faith into reasons for conquest and enslavement. They fail to see that utility is as utilitarians define. And they fail to realize that without a foolproof system of checks, such as that which individual cells employ with KRP4, runaway war is likely inevitable in every generation.
Notes:
*Conte, Christian, Ph.D. 2019. Walking through Anger: A New Design for Confronting Conflict in an Emotionally Charged World. Boulder. Sounds True Press.
**D’Ario, Marco, et al. 11 Jun 2021. Cell size controlled in plants using DNA content as an internal scale. Science. Vol. 372, Issue 6547. Pp. 1176-1181. DOI 10:1126/science.abb4348. Online at https://science.sciencemag.org/content/372/6547/1176 Accessed June 11, 2021.
*** Basically, “It is sweet and proper (or fitting) to die for one’s country.” Owen got the line from Horace. The year before the First World War, the Latin quotation from Horace’s Ode III was inscribed on a chapel wall of the Royal Military College at Sandhurst, England.
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