Jay Z’s Geopolitical Brain

Matt Yglesias had a post yesterday quoting Mark Lynch’s amusing discussion of the feud between Jay-Z and The Game framed in international relations terms.  At the end, Yglesias offers his thoughts:

One thing worth noting is that even when restraint can be identified as the best strategy, it’s often emotionally difficult to choose this path. When someone comes after you, you get angry. You want to respond in an intelligent and effective manner, yes, but there’s also a desire to do something that will make you feel better. And lashing out as per the Ledeen Doctrine (”Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business”) often can achieve that goal. And of course there’s a risk that members of Jay-Z’s camp who urge a policy of restraint will be accused of actively harboring pro-Game sympathies or otherwise failing to manifest a sufficient degree of loyalty.

Rap, international strategy, surely there must be a neuroscience angle somewhere in here.  The key point is Yglesias’ observation that “it’s often emotionally difficult to choose this path.”  It’s worth thinking about why we have those emotions in the first place, and that’s where neuroscience and psychology come in.

Emotions are a quick and dirty way to get an animal to act reliably in a particular manner under certain circumstances.  We don’t, of course, know exactly what emotions are like in non-human animals, but it’s safe the assume that they play some role in those animal possessing the same neurological structures implicated in our own passions.  Whether or not they’re widely experienced in the animal kingdom, however, they certainly played a central role in our development as a social species.

Emotions are somewhat more complex than habitual or instinctual reactions, but they’re far less sophisticated than what you might call our intellect.  To be sure, there is advantage in this simplicity.  Unlike cognitive control and deductive reasoning, emotions don’t burn through cognitive resources.  They prompt swift action unfettered by the niggling uncertainty that accompanies any serious attempt at analysis.  As for whether emotions or reason are objectively better?  It’s probably a pointless question.  They’re different animals, and each is better in the proper circumstances.

Increasingly, however, we find ourselves in circumstances that favor reason.  Lynch has highlighted two such instances.  I don’t really know much about rap, so I’ll stay away from that one.  But in the IR case, it’s clear.  When you actually sit down and think about it, it becomes unarguable that the emotional response is the wrong one.  If you want to get really technical and fully employ the powers of our neocortex, you can think about it in game theory terms.

International relations are not a zero-sum game.  We got angry after 9/11, and we tried to pick Iraq up and throw it against the wall.  Unsurprisingly, this did not go as well as planned.  Even if the post-Saddam occupation hadn’t been such a mess, the war weakened our alliances with the rest of the western world and severely alienated those in the Muslim world that might have otherwise been sympathetic.  We eliminated a country that was in no serious way a threat.  And on the Iraqi side, although Saddam Hussein was for sure a blameworthy dictator, it would be difficult to argue that life has been better these past 6 years for the majority of the Iraqi population, to say nothing of the thousands who lost their lives as collateral damage.

A more principled approach would surely not have lead to the Iraq war.   But the problem with intellect and emotion is that, even when they are opposite, they are not inverse.  Becoming persuaded that your emotions are wrong often does little or nothing to make them go away.  We can learn to control our emotions–it seems that this is a central role of the dlPFC–but the fact remains that it’s hard.  It requires constant effort.  And, perhaps most troublingly, there’s no real correlation between how wrong the emotion is and how easy it is to overrule.