Big Endians and Little Endians

The last post was a diversionary rant. I actually meant to talk about a bit of Gulliver’s Travels and got sidetracked with how it’s not so much a children’s book. Anyway, here’s the bit, as summarised by Wikipedia:

The novel further describes an intra-Lilliputian quarrel which involved a quarrel over the practice of breaking eggs. Formerly, in Lilliput, all eggs were broken on the larger end; but a few generations in the past, an Emperor of Lilliput had decreed that all eggs be broken on the smaller end. The differences between Big-Endians (those who broke their eggs at the larger end) and Little-Endians had given rise to “six rebellions… wherein one Emperor lost his life, and another his crown”.

It has been coopted by computer science. When a number is stored across several bytes, a big-endian machine architecture stores the most significant byte first and a little-endian architecture stores it last. It’s a pretty good use of the phrase but I don’t know how commonly known it is outside computer science. Have any of you heard of it? I hope it gains more exposure as it’s a wonderful way to highlight the ridiculousness and pettiness with which we often conduct our quarrels.

In the idea of Big Endians and Little Endians think Swift is saying two important things. The first and obvious thing is that some of the most intense conflicts are about really trivial matters. The second thing is a necessary complement: that to the people engaged in the conflict, the matter is of vital importance. It’s only when you put these two together that you get the full picture: the conflict is trivial only to an outsider. Conversely, conflicts that are very important to us personally will (often) be seen as trivial by outsiders.

This can lead to two biases. When you’re looking out: seeing a conflict as trivial can stop you from examining the deeper reasons for it. When you’re looking in: seeing your conflict as important can stop you from putting it in context. Which brings me to my favourite historical example of Big Endians and Little Endians.

The painting at the top of the post is a fragment of Boyarynya Morozova by the pre-revolutionary Russian artist Surikov. When I was young, my grandfather would show me albums of classical Russian paintings explaining them. He explained that the painting depicts a religious war in Russia in the 1600s: when you cross yourself should you use two fingers or three? Feodosia Morozova was of the old school and hence thought two. The painting depicts her being taken away to be arrested for this heresy. She along with her sister were starved to death as punishment in a monastery, whereas her 14 servants were only burnt at the stake. In the painting detail you can see her holding up two fingers in defiance, with the crowd of commoners laughing and jeering at her heresy.

I’ve never seen a better example. It’s literally a war (with many deaths and tortures) over the specific way to perform an action — which is as close as you can get to the proper way to break an egg. To us it’s ridiculous. To Surikov it was probably as ridiculous: the painting seems a clear bit of satire and social commentary about the fanaticism of the time depicted. And yet, the two ways of crossing yourself was of course just one of the superficial differences between a much larger schism: the Old Rite vs the New Rite in the Russian Orthodox Church.

The substance of the conflict was that in 1652, Patriarch Nikon noticed some discrepancies between the Russian Orthodox rites and the original Greek Orthodox rites. He made amendments to bring the Russian rite in line with the Greeks — all of them as nitpicky and trivial as the one mentioned about crossing yourself. Of course what this ended up being was a dispute about who has the authority to make changes to the rites, which were considered to be from God. Church authorities endorsed the change but many clung to the Old Rite, some of the Old Believers believing this was a sign the church was taken over by the Antichrist. The schism remains till today, with up to 10M Old Believers in Russia, the US and so on.

There’s another layer here: the above paragraph might have ended the Big Endian/Little Endian effect for many people say 50 years ago. Or even many people today. Because fighting over how many fingers to use is stupid — everybody knows that! But fighting about Theology and Authority and Tradition, well that’s a different story. And yet to me, and possibly to you, the above reasons aren’t much more trivial. Finally, for a modern example of Big/Little Endianism, see this video about a fight between the Egyptian Coptic Church and the Ethiopian Church over who is to occupy a small chapel in Jerusalem: a dispute that’s gone on for several centuries.

Are there any things you care about that others will probably be judged as Big/Little Endianism? Do you have any predictions about what Important and Topical Issues of Today future people will see as Big/Little Endianism?