War and Peace, an amazing work, which quite possibly justifies the blurb’s ‘greatest novel in any language’
[caption id="attachment_11985" align="alignright" width="238" caption="Leo Tolstoy, development guru"]
[/caption]
claim (who on earth decides these things and how?). I read it 30 years ago, but to be honest, I’m not sure I understood much of it then.
Tolstoy manages to combine the enthralling human saga of Russia’s experience of invasion by France under Napoleon, and the French’s subsequent retreat, with a profound meditation on the nature of history and change. I started it as holiday reading, supposedly time out from the day-job, but I couldn’t help wondering what Tolstoy would say about some current development debates. At times it feels as if in his frustration with the causal explanations of the day, he is banging on the doors of complexity theory. Some choice quotes, mainly from the concluding meditation on the nature of history at the end of Book Two:
Tolstoy on causation and attribution (are you listening, MEListas?)
‘It is beyond the power of the human intellect to encompass all the causes of any phenomenon. But the impulse to search into causes is inherent in man’s very nature. And so the human intellect, without investigating the multiplicity and complexity of circumstances conditioning an event, any one of which taken separately may seem to be the reason for it, snatches at the first most comprehensible approximation to a cause and says ‘There is the cause’……
There is, and can be, no cause of an historical event save the one cause of all causes [i.e. God}. But there are laws governing events: some we are ignorant of, others we are groping our way to. The discovery of these laws becomes possible only when we finally give up looking for causes.’
Tolstoy on Command and Control and the fallacy of hindsight (cf Ros Eyben’s work on aid)
‘History shows that the expression of the will of historical personages in the majority of cases does not produce any effect – that is, their commands are often not executed and sometimes the very opposite of what they order is done…. Every command executed is always one of an immense number unexecuted. All the impossible commands are inconstant with the course of events and do not get carried out. Only the possible ones link up into a consecutive series of commands corresponding to a series of events, and are carried out.
Our erroneous idea that the command which precedes the event causes the event is due to the fact that when the event has taken place and out of thousands of commands, those few which were consistent with that event have been executed we forget about the others that
were not executed because they could not be.’
Tolstoy channels Amartya Sen on Freedom and Wellbeing
‘All man’s aspirations, all the interest that life holds for him, are so many aspirations and strivings after greater freedom. Wealth and poverty, fame and obscurity, power and subjection, strength and weakness, health and disease, culture and ignorance, work and leisure, repletion and hunger, virtue and vice are only greater or lesser degrees of freedom.’
And finally, I’m definitely with Tolstoy on the meaninglessness of free (read ‘political’) will:
‘In history, what is known to us we call the laws of necessity; what is unknown we call freewill. Freewill is for history only an expression connoting what we do not know about the laws of human life.’
It’s 1500 wonderful pages – get stuck in. As for me, the boxset of the 1972 TV adaptation with Anthony Hopkins has just arrived (see pic). Good times.]]>