I read Tolstoi's War and peace 14 years ago, during a holiday in France. I was overwhelmed at the time. My life was never the same after reading. It changed my view on humanity and it redefined my ideas on religion. What I wasn't able to articulate then, is how the book can be read as a manual on complexity. I would suggest to use it as recommended reading for the accreditation course. It takes some time but it's worth it.
One of the fragments that has always stuck in my mind, has been the way Tolstoi systematically attacks all ideas about strategy in the Napolitatan war. Strategy is what the generals boasted about in hindsight. Tolstoi describes in great detail how all of the results attributed to strategy were in fact dictated by emergent processes rather than as a thought out strategy. This has influenced my thinking greatly. To give you only a few of Tolstoi's minor pearls:
Man's mind cannot grasp the causes of events in their completeness, but the desire to find those causes is implanted in man's soul. And without considering the multiplicity and complexity of the conditions any one of which taken separately may seem to be the cause, he snatches at the first approximation to a cause that seems to him intelligible and says: "This is the cause!"
The need humans feel to find rational and simple explanations is very strong indeed. We prefer to be mislead by what we think we understand than accept the vastness of interdependent causes that we are not able to grasp. This problem is growing under stress: the need for simple and quick solutions, and - preferably - stick to those rules. However this produces predictabilty:
Men can only be taken prisoners if they surrender according to the rules
of strategy and tactics, as the Germans did.
In order to escape that, we need more intuitive thinking. A bit like Kutuzof, an elderly man, either to wise or to stupid to be able to plan. However: he intuitively understands what to do and when:
Kutuzov's merit lay, not in any strategic maneuver of genius, as it is called, but in the fact that he alone understood the significance of what had happened. He alone then understood the meaning of the French army's inactivity, he alone continued to assert that the battle of Borodino had been a victory, he alone--who as commander in chief might have been expected to be eager to attack--employed his whole strength to restrain the Russian army from useless engagements.
(all citations from Tolstoi, War and Peace: http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext01/wrnpc12.txt)
Post a comment