Anna Karenina principle

Ecologist Dwayne Moore wrote in his article “The Principle Applied to Ecological Risk Assessments of Multiple Stressors”, published in 2001: “Successful ecological risk assessments are all alike; every unsuccessful ecological risk assessment fails in its own way. Tolstoy posited a similar analogy in his novel Anna Karenina: “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” By that, Tolstoy meant that for a marriage to be happy, it had to succeed in several key aspects. Failure on even one of these aspects, and the marriage is doomed . . . the Anna Karenina principle also applies to ecological risk assessments involving multiple stressors.”

We can say the same about our presence in the universe too. We are astounded how everything seems aligned in order to let us live and thrive. Оne minor deviation in a basic law of physics can destroy everything. The presence of this fine tunning in the universe caused some thinkers to come up with the anthropic principle and even intelligent design. But if this tuning fails, the humanity might disappear. Which means that we will not be a happy family anymore and the anthropic principle does not hold. In such a case, our emergence and life will be classified as an accident. What is several millions years if compared with billions of the universe existence? Unfortunately, we have only one universe and cannot test any of such global statements, so we accept the hypothesis we like and continue with our everyday life.

By the way, this Anna Karenina principle should be properly called Aristotelian. Here what Aristotle wrote in the Nicomachean Ethics two thousand years before Tolstoy: “Again, it is possible to fail in many ways (for evil belongs to the class of the unlimited, as the Pythagoreans conjectured, and good to that of the limited), while to succeed is possible only in one way (for which reason also one is easy and the other difficult–to miss the mark easy, to hit it difficult); for these reasons also, then, excess and defect are characteristic of vice, and the mean of virtue; For men are good in but one way, but bad in many.”

Recently, the Anna Karenina (or Aristotelian) principle was popularized by Jared Diamond in his book Guns, Germs and Steel. Diamond uses this principle to illustrate why so few wild animals have been successfully domesticated throughout history, as a deficiency in any one of a great number of factors can render a species undomesticable. Therefore all successfully domesticated species are not so because of a particular positive trait, but because of a lack of any number of possible negative traits. With all my respect to Jared (I plan to write about him, probably next week), I do not think that just absence of unsurmountable obstacles is enough. Positive traits are needed too. Besides, we never know how complete is our success. It well may be that we actually failed in the cases where we assume we have made good enough progress to claim a success. For example, in case of the domesticated animals, are cats domesticated or not yet? What do you think?

And, finally, the entrepreneur and venture capitalist Peter Thiel starts his book Zero To One with a reference to the Anna Karenina principle, but turns it upside down: “All happy companies are different, all unhappy companies are alike in that they failed to escape ‘sameness’ or competition.”

So, how true is Tolstoy’s statement depends on the interpretation of the reader. Yes, all happy families seem to have a lot in common. But what about the unhappy families? Don’t they have much in common too? They do. Ask those in the business of the relationship counseling. They can give you a short list of traits that describes most of the broken families. And we also know that every seemingly happy family has a closet that we better do not open. Otherwise, the family might become an unhappy one. We are often get caught in the popularity of a phrase. The respect to the author, the ambiguity and the sound of the phrase, the possible (but not verifiable immediately) truth of it, contradiction… We are attracted by contradiction, because intuitively we know that its presence might indicate knew knowledge. As I have written before, contradictions are often the light houses that lead us to a new discovery. Here is the Tolstoy’s light that points somewhere. Let’s go and see, shall we?