Re:NYC Jails Want to Ban Physical Mail, Then Privatize Scann...
by anigbrowl on Tuesday January 24, 2023 @03:35PM
(#34509915)
Indeed so, but by the same logic it's not the person's choice to be hypocritical while reaping the mundane rewards of apparent piety.
Philosopher Slavoj Zižek argues that it is religion/ideology that allows for the commission of atrocities, by ascribing cosmic importance to otherwise banal conflicts over resources and prior injuries.
In nature, predatory animals might hunt prey to extinction and then die off themselves. But this is more likely to happen in theoretical models or very isolated/extreme environments with an unusually narrow 'fault tolerance. In more complex environments, adversarial populations wax and wane chaotically, selection pressure yield evolutionary innovations and arms races that allow breakouts from local minima, and so on.
A History of Warfare by John Keegan is a good introduction (with an excellent bibliography) to the anthropology of warfare, and has a particularly good treatment of initially adaptive social mores can end in catastrophe when they bump into resource limits or experience an external shock. Keegan emphasizes the role of technologies (both physical and social) which confer overwhelming advantages in conflict, which may or may not be sustainable. For example, pastoral herding/hunting practices developed on the large scale of the Mongolian steppe allowed nomadic hordes under leaders like Genghis Khan to overwhelm less dynamic agricultural societies. But lacking deep administrative foundations (quite literally, due to a lack of construction materials and incentives) they were unable to lock in their massive tactical advantages over a longer timescale.
War by Azar Gat has a deeper exploration of competition between socio-cultural systems and incorporates fresher scholarship, but at the price of being somewhat more tendentious and a much less engaging read.
Philosopher Slavoj Zižek argues that it is religion/ideology that allows for the commission of atrocities, by ascribing cosmic importance to otherwise banal conflicts over resources and prior injuries.
In nature, predatory animals might hunt prey to extinction and then die off themselves. But this is more likely to happen in theoretical models or very isolated/extreme environments with an unusually narrow 'fault tolerance. In more complex environments, adversarial populations wax and wane chaotically, selection pressure yield evolutionary innovations and arms races that allow breakouts from local minima, and so on.
A History of Warfare by John Keegan is a good introduction (with an excellent bibliography) to the anthropology of warfare, and has a particularly good treatment of initially adaptive social mores can end in catastrophe when they bump into resource limits or experience an external shock. Keegan emphasizes the role of technologies (both physical and social) which confer overwhelming advantages in conflict, which may or may not be sustainable. For example, pastoral herding/hunting practices developed on the large scale of the Mongolian steppe allowed nomadic hordes under leaders like Genghis Khan to overwhelm less dynamic agricultural societies. But lacking deep administrative foundations (quite literally, due to a lack of construction materials and incentives) they were unable to lock in their massive tactical advantages over a longer timescale.
War by Azar Gat has a deeper exploration of competition between socio-cultural systems and incorporates fresher scholarship, but at the price of being somewhat more tendentious and a much less engaging read.