For Want of a Nail

As Tolstoy saw it, the exact opposite was more likely to be the case, and the greater our confidence in our ability to achieve the greatest human happiness, the more likely we are to create the greatest human misery. “The ills of humanity arise,” wrote Tolstoy, “not because men neglect to do things that are necessary but because they do things that are unnecessary.”

In physics, it might be true that the complexity of observed phenomena could be explained by a few rules. But with respect to society and individual psyches, “the deeper we delve in search of these [fundamental] causes, the more of them we find. Things do not simplify, they ramify. Whatever regularities there may be are overwhelmed by sheer contingencies.”

Insignificant chance events can have concatenating effects, and so make an enormous difference. As in the old children’s rhyme, “For want of a nail, the shoe was lost / For want of a shoe, the horse was lost / For want of a horse, the message was lost / For want of a message, the battle was lost / For want of a battle, the kingdom was lost / And all for the want of one horseshoe nail.”

Tolstoy’s War and Peace, generally considered the greatest novel ever written, is an extended attack on the absurdity of the “moral Newtonians,” who believe that there can be such a thing as the “science of warfare” leading to predictable outcomes.