Tom Plate

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

In arguing against human exceptionalism, environmental philosopher Melanie Challenger observes that we respond to status threats as if they were existential challenges

With the US afraid of losing its pre-eminent status and China aiming to regain it, a clash seems inevitable, but it is eminently avoidable

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Tom Plate

Published: 1:30am, 14 Dec 2021Updated: 3:15am, 14 Dec 2021

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.”

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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.