Recently, I had to be on a long road trip and though I don’t usually find time to read fiction, this trip provided me with just that; time to delve into Tolstoy’s ‘Anna Karenina’. It was an exceptionally great read. I must add, I have not read such a remarkable piece of art since ages. I have often noted that true genius is always light-years ahead of his/her time, and Tolstoy is no exception. Although there are many things that make this novel great but in this post I want to stress on a vision of Tolstoy, which has the potential to change the foundations of psychology and sociology today.
On 11th May 1873, Tolstoy wrote to his friend and critic Nikolai Strakhov, “I am writing a Novel”. This novel was to become ‘Anna Karenina’, one of the greatest works of literature ever produced. Tolstoy later wrote to Strakhov :
In everything or almost everything I have written, I have been moved by the need to bring together ideas that are closely knit, in order to express myself, but each idea, expressed separately in words, loses its meaning, is enormously impoverished when removed from the network around it. This network itself is not made up of ideas (or so I think), but of something else, and it is absolutely impossible to express this network directly in words: it can be done only indirectly, by using words to describe characters, acts, situations.
When I first read this in introduction of the penguin edition of Anna Karenina I was reading, I couldn’t believe my eyes and to convince myself I had to read it over and over many times. This idea of thinking systems as interacting network as a whole with properties that tends to ‘emerge’ on the very scale of that network and disappear as we reduce the network to its components, is not old. It is definitely not as old as Tolstoy! This idea only took up roots 15 or so years ago. Although it seems simple but for centuries scientists and all kind of philosophers tried to understand systems by breaking them up in bits and pieces or the building blocks which makes up systems. This is termed as a ‘reductionists view’. Quite recently in biology a paradigms shift occurred that enabled researchers, for the first time, to observe and address the whole complex system as a whole and study its properties. This led to the advent of systems biology which is changing every aspect of biology and medicine. It led to the ‘invention’ of first synthetic organism by Dr. Craig Venter and colleagues in 2010. And recently in 2012 it led to the development of first virtual cell. Due to this paradigm shift it is estimated by British Actuarial Society, that synthetic and systems biology is going to be the top wealth driving activities in 21st century. And most importantly it has made it possible for us to understand complex diseases on the finest scales for the very first time in history. This holistic approach for studying systems where special properties emerge as a consequences of the underlying architecture (or network) of the system seems to be the formalism that was needed to understand these systems better. Social and psychological systems behave very much the same as complex systems in biology and although it took quite a time for scientists to understand this paradigm in biology, it makes one wonder what a great genius Tolstoy possessed at his time. Just imagine, applying this paradigm to social and psychological systems, which might give these fields success of the same magnitude enjoyed by biology today. Or imagine applying it to psychiatry, which might give psychiatry the most important thing this subject of study is lacking today; the Foundations!
Reference:
Penguin Edition of ‘Anna Karenina’, Translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky
コメント