Transcript: Evolutionary Psychology and International Relations, with Jeremy Garlick

Below is a complete transcript of the episode. Thanks to CadreScripts for their great work, to Lili Shoup for checking and formatting, and to Zhou Keya for the image! Listen in the embedded player above.

Kaiser Kuo: Welcome to the Sinica Podcast, a weekly discussion of current affairs in China. In this program, we’ll look at books, ideas, new research, intellectual currents, and cultural trends that can help us better understand what’s happening in China’s politics, foreign relations, economics, and society. Join me each week for in-depth conversations that shed more light and bring less heat to how we think and talk about China. I’m Kaiser Kuo, coming to you from my home in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

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In 1959, C.P. Snow delivered his famous Two Cultures lecture, lamenting the divide between the sciences and the humanities, arguing that their mutual incomprehension — well, really, it was in one direction more than the other — was an obstacle to solving the world’s most pressing problems. That argument resonated deeply with me when I first encountered it, and it has lingered in the background of my own intellectual journey and kept alive a very acute sense of inadequacy as somebody who isn’t as fluent in the natural sciences as I really ought to be. Perhaps as a way of assuaging that guilt, I’ve always been drawn to works that attempt to bridge these disciplinary gulfs, most notably Consilience by E.O. Wilson, Edward O. Wilson, which makes a really compelling case for the unity of knowledge and the integration of natural sciences with the social sciences and humanities. I’ve also spent time exploring evolutionary psychology and sociobiology, reading many of the better-known books in those genres, and recognizing in them frameworks that can really help illuminate fundamental aspects of human behavior. And yes, recognizing also some of their potential for abuse, especially by men who want to rationalize their behavior or their deeply sexist attitudes.

And yet, when it comes to international relations, the study of how states interact, how power is distributed, how conflicts arise, I have been hesitant to look beyond traditional methodologies, even as I’ve sought to get down to first principles in trying to understand, among other things, the U.S.-China relationship and its broader geopolitical landscape. Increasingly, though, I have found myself drawn towards psychology as a useful lens. Concepts like cognitive empathy have proved invaluable in understanding the deeper drivers of political and diplomatic behavior for me. And yet, as much as I have championed multidisciplinary or interdisciplinary approaches to China, bringing history, sociology, systems thinking into the conversation, I had never quite crossed the boundary into the natural sciences, and perhaps this was out of a misplaced sense that such an approach would be too deterministic or too reductive or too removed from the textured complexity of human history. Or perhaps it was because IR itself as a field has just, over time, flattened and dehistoricized, especially with the ascent of realism and neoliberalism, which I think treats states as billiard balls operating in an anarchic system divorced from the human beings who actually run these systems.

Enter Jeremy Garlick’s new book, Evolution in International Relations, which takes precisely the step I have been hesitant to take, bringing the insights of evolutionary psychology, neuroscience, and even archaeogenetics into the study of global politics. Jeremy Garlick is the Director of the Jan Masaryk Centre for International Studies at Prague University, and he is a scholar of China’s international relations. He was the author of the book, Advantage China: Agent of Change in an Era of Global Disruption. For a fantastic interview with Jeremy about that book, make sure to check out his star turn on the wonderful China Global South Podcast, which, of course, is a part of the Sinica network. But today we are talking about evolution in international relations. Jeremy argues that IR has neglected the biological and psychological foundations of human behavior, and that by integrating these disciplines, evolutionary biology, evolutionary psychology, and neuroscience, we can better understand intergroup competition, cooperation, and conflict.

Today, we are going to discuss this fascinating and ambitious, but very short work, starting with the intellectual leap it takes to attempt such a synthesis, the methodological hurdles of bridging these two cultures, and whether this approach offers a corrective to some of the conceptual limitations of mainstream IR. We’ll then dive into the substantive claims of the book, examine its implications, I hope, for China and U.S.-China relations, and ask how these ideas might help us interpret the world as it stands today, including in the light of the conversations at the… “conversations,” if you could generously call them that, at the recent Munich Security Conference. Jeremy Garlick, welcome at long last to Sinica.

Jeremy Garlick: Yeah, thank you for inviting me on. I’m very happy to be here. I mean, I’ve known of you since I was in China in 2008, 2009, back then.

Kaiser: Well, it’s good to finally meet, if not in person, at least on video.

Jeremy: Yeah.

Kaiser: Jeremy, let me just say at the outset there that I probably can’t even get to half of the questions that just lit up in my head as I read this. I mean, this is just a great book. I cannot recommend it more highly. It’s super accessible. There are all these fantastic asides. You did this little exploration of metaphors in IR and metaphor in the development of human language, very George Lakoff stuff. I’m going to explore that in more detail, maybe, hopefully, in another conversation with you down the line. But today, we’re going to try and stick to the main axis and not go down too many of the alleys, however picturesque they might be. I guess I just used a metaphor.

Let me start with this, though. What gave you the confidence to attempt something as ambitious, some might even say as audacious, as integrating evolutionary science with international relations? I mean, was there a particular moment, something that you read or something that you observed that convinced you that IR needed an evolutionary framework?