Behold! Behold!
What lo?
A ramble! A ramble!
What? No!
‘Tis so! ‘Tis so!
-
I think we often take for granted the hidden knowledge built into our cultures, our institutions, our norms, to the degree that we take the results of these structures, of this genetic code for our society, as just a given. I must say that, when I was younger, the more radical beliefs I held at the time were in part motivated by the accumulated noise, junk, I perceived in those structures about me while ignoring the information also contained therein; now, I have more respect for the hidden knowledge in such systems and the hidden assumptions on those systems and their knowledge.
So, I recently read Girard’s “Violence and the Sacred”. In it, Girard discusses the idea that all society, all culture, even all symbolic thought is the byproduct of what he calls a sacrificial crisis, which entails a cycle of reciprocal violence and violent undifferentiation within a community, that culminates in the elimination of a sacrificial victim, whereby the community unites against one member of the community and, in a generative and bonding moment, releases their violence upon that member, thus expelling their violence from the community. According to Girard, religion enshrines this sacrificial crisis and victim, and ritual allows for the re-enactment of the crisis and victim to expunge the violence within the community. (Girard’s, say, over the top, argument is that this crisis-victim is the foundation of all community and culture, and that trying to understand the crisis-victim is what caused symbolic thought to emerge. Side note – I mention symbolic thought with regards to the financial system in this post.)
Thinking on it, I can see the sacrificial crisis culminating in a sacrificial victim, and the ritualized enactment of such an event, applied within communities in the world in which I live today. As Girard discusses, while sacrificial victims may be selected at random in the midst of a crisis, surrogate victims used during the ritualized replay of the sacrificial crisis are often chosen both because they have ties to the community (and so can be substituted for it) and yet because they are outside it (and so have little potential to inspire reciprocal violence). When I look at, say, news of late, where “obese” people seem to be sacrificed in the war on health care costs, I cannot help but see parallels to the surrogate victim in primitive religious rituals (irrespective of any opinion held on the matter).
There is an interesting misdirection noted by Girard as well, the belief that violence stems from something outside of humankind, such as the gods or the dead. This too it seems is visible today in much rhetoric. People speak as if violence itself stems from a gun or from a video game or from a car, from these sacred and powerful items that are outside the world of people, external objects capable of infecting people with violence when they descend upon a community. (I am ignoring any correlation that may exist between these objects and people’s propensities toward violence.)
Regardless of views, the importance of violence, or rather, the expulsion of violence from, within the community appears to be hugely important to, and completely buried in, the very foundations of society as we know it today, at least in the culture in which I reside. This seem to be so much the case, that we take the end result for granted.
For example, Girard points out the significance of the judicial system in replacing religion, such that the judicial system takes on a higher authority as a impartial and superior body, that metes out revenge, relabeled a transcendent term, justice, upon parties of established guilt in the name of the community. The very sublime nature of the institution makes the act of revenge the judicial system deals out beyond revenge, and so it breaks the potential chain of reciprocal violence.
We often take the incorporation of the judicial institution into our culture for granted, as we assume such institutions and such cultures are a given, natural. But, violence has been with us long before such institutions existed. Nature is violent at times, and it makes sense that we have evolved a potential for violence ourselves; we have survived over the long course of time both in spite of and because of violence. As such and in broader terms, I am beginning to think that taking current culture, current norms, current institutions for granted is quite dangerous.
This idea of the generative and community building aspects of violent unanimity also seems in line with Peter Turchin’s ideas “War and Peace and War” (mentioned in this post, particularly bullet point 2) that a common struggle against, say, a foreign enemy can bring people together, that it builds the capacity for collective action. Great nations are forged in the frontier life, in the world of violent interactions between similar peoples with less similar peoples. In this light, Girard briefly notes wars with foreign nations as an example of unifying violence, in that the foreign nation becomes the sacrificial victim, the embodiment of violence that is outside the community ,and yet a violence that has been brought to the community and must be violently expunged.
Girard notes that change is often feared by primitive communities as a potential trigger of violence, and often there is lots of ritual performed around change to relieve any potential for violent buildups, such as at times of seasonal transitions or the coming of age of a child. In bullet point 2 of the aforementioned post, I noted that “radical change can cause instability” along with a slightly broader discussion of change or adaption in a follow-up post. Additionally, Schoeck notes in Envy that extreme envy and envy avoidance, such as that in exhibited in primitive communities and small towns, can often stifle innovation, creativity, and achievement, all of which have undertones of change. So, combining this with Girard, we can see envy threatens violence, and, violence being contagious, such a threat could wipe out a whole community, which leads us to innovation, creativity, and achievement, as purveyors of change, being punished and avoided.
Now, it is easy to forget walking down the street in NYC just how much everything around us requires this breaking of the chain of reciprocal violence. In the past, when men could easily descend into a tornado of violence and everything else was swept aside by it, the world as we see it now in NYC could not exist. The weak would have to huddle together and perhaps flee the storm, and the strong could tear everything down in a moment of rage.
That is not to say that violence is not still present, but that most people tend towards non-initiation of violence, and the rare initiation of violence tends to end at the time it begins. Self-defense is acceptable at the moment of being attacked, but, after the fact, we rely on law enforcement and the judicial system to catch and punish the aggressor; vigilante-ism and personal revenge are frowned upon and punished, norms that reinforce a breaking of reciprocal violence. (In some communities in NYC and the USA in general, reciprocal violence may still run free, such as gang violence or the eruption of riots; however, those are the exceptions and not the norm.)
Evolution is the way of nature and, as such, ourselves, and I rather enjoy this spiraling progression, much as I like the evolution of what I consider to be my self as I grow older. As noted by Turchin’s “War and Peace and War” or in Michael Flynn’s scifi-esque “Introduction to Cliology” (inspired by Asimov) or even Barrow’s “The Artful Universe”, we live in cycles within cycles, in this chaotic nature, and so we must. But, I maintain a certain sense of caution when unraveling the fabric of our modern world, as pulling at the strings of our norms, cultures, institutions, communities, etc. without properly considering their hidden store of knowledge, and the hidden assumptions one might be making, can have quite profound and completely unintended consequences, for better or worse.
-
I mentioned “the map is not the territory” in this post. How about another? “Correlation is not causation.” This is one of those great insights that we so often fail to see. I have made this mistake at times in this blog.
So, if I had remembered nothing else from Judith Rich Harris’ “The Nurture Assumption”, then the wit, and the clear and concise explanation of “correlation is not causation” that makes the concept easy for me to explain to others, would have made the book worth it. An excerpt of her fictional example to illustrate correlation is not causation,
[...]Our method will be straightforward: we will ask a large number of middle-aged people how much broccoli they consume and then, five years later, check to see how many of them are still alive.[...]
[fictional results showing a statistically significant correlation between eating broccoli and longevity in men but not women]
Our study appears in an epidemiological journal. A newspaper reporter happens to read it. The next day there’s a headline in the paper: EATING BROCCOLI MAKES MEN LIVE LONGER, STUDY SHOWS.
But does it? Does the study show that eating broccoli caused the male subjects to live longer? Men who eat broccoli may also eat a lot of carrots and brussel sprouts. They may eat less meat or less ice cream than broccoli shunners. Perhaps they are more likely to exercise, more likely to buckle their seatbealts, less likely to smoke. Any of these other lifestyle factors, or all of them together, may be responsible for the longer lives of the broccoli eaters. Eating broccoli might even have been shortening our subjects’ lives, but this effect was outweighed by the beneficial effects of all the other things broccoli eaters were doing.
-
The 0.2.1.x branch of Tor has gone to release.
Tor 0.2.1.18 lays the foundations for performance improvements, adds status events to help users diagnose bootstrap problems, adds optional authentication/authorization for hidden services, fixes a variety of potential anonymity problems, and includes a huge pile of other features and bug fixes.
Bravo.
-
Attacks only get better.
In this paper we describe several attacks which can break {\it with practical complexity} variants of AES-256 whose number of rounds are comparable to that of AES-128. One of our attacks uses only two related keys and $2^{39}$ time to recover the complete 256-bit key of a 9-round version of AES-256 (the best previous attack on this variant required 4 related keys and $2^{120}$ time). Another attack can break a 10 round version of AES-256 in $2^{45}$ time, but it uses a stronger type of {\it related subkey attack} (the best previous attack on this variant required 64 related keys and $2^{172}$ time). While neither AES-128 nor AES-256 can be directly broken by these attacks, the fact that their hybrid (which combines the smaller number of rounds from AES-128 along with the larger key size from AES-256) can be broken with such a low complexity raises serious concern about the remaining safety margin offered by the AES family of cryptosystems.
) And, of course, a consensus answer gives better results than each individual answer here.
