In his book Guns, Germs and Steel, Jared Diamond coined something he called ‘The Anna Karenina Principle’.
It’s based on the famous first sentence of Tolstoy’s novel – “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
Diamond is an evolutionary biologist. He developed the Anna Karenina Principle to explain why only a handful of animals became widely domesticated across the world’s cultures: cow, sheep, goat, pig and horse. By domestication, he meant bred and modified from their wild ancestors to the advantage of humans – ie. the cow became smaller and more milk-yielding, the sheep became more wooly and less hairy. For an animal to be suitable for domestication, so many factors had to be just right – it must eat foods which are convenient for humans to supply, it must breed easily and grow quickly, it can’t be capable of easily harming humans, etc. If any one area is a problem, it spells failure.
If you’re familiar with the philosophical theory of necessary and sufficient conditions, we can phrase the Anna Karenina Principle this way – a thing can succeed if and only if all necessary conditions are met. Success requires a ‘perfect storm’ of traits, and the absence of just one trait creates failure.
In Gregory Bateson’s book Steps to an Ecology of Mind, he tells a sort of Socratic dialogue between himself and his daughter. The original is quite long, so here I’ll just quote Tony Robbins’ deft summary of it.
One day she approached him and asked an interesting question: “Daddy, how come things get muddled so easily?”
He asked her, “What do you mean by ‘muddled,’ honey?”
She said, “You know, Daddy. When things aren’t perfect. Look at my desk right now. Stuff is all over the place. It’s muddled. And just last night I worked so hard to make it perfect. But things don’t stay perfect. They get muddled so easily!”
Bateson asked his daughter, “Show me what it’s like when things are perfect.” She responded by moving everything on her shelf into individually assigned positions and said, “There, Daddy, now it’s perfect. But it won’t stay that way.”
Bateson asked her, “What if I move your paint box over here twelve inches? Then what happens?”
She said, “No, Daddy, now it’s muddled. Anyway, it would have to be straight, not all crooked the way you put it down.”
Then he asked her, “What if I moved your pencil from this spot to the next one?”
“Now you’re making it muddled again,” she responded.
“What if this book were left partially open?” he continued.
“That’s muddled, too!” she replied.
Bateson turned to his daughter and said, “Honey, it’s not that things get muddled so easily. It’s that you have more ways for things to get muddled. You have only one way for things to be perfect.”
So here is the truth behind Anna Karenina’s first sentence. By the time families fulfil all the necessary conditions to be ‘perfect’ (a viable marriage, adequate household income, offspring are provided for, what faith to raise the children in), they are essentially all alike. But all a family needs to do to get in a muddle is to miss one condition, any one.
I wrote this music while vacationing in the spa town of Rotorua in the north island of New Zealand. For a week I had a big 3-bedroom house on a river near Lake Rotorua, and ducks would visit my porch when I composed in the morning.
Was it perfect? Or was it muddled, since … the whole city smelled like rotten eggs.
Rotorua is the only city in the world that sits on an active geothermal field. The whole place is dotted with geysers, boiling mud pools and the hot springs. For centuries Maori people used the hot pools for cooking; today tourists bathe in the springs.
The city smells like rotten eggs because the geothermal vents fill the air with hydrogen sulfide gas. Sulfur made me think of brimstone, of vitriol – these are all different words for the same thing.
Heady from the fumes, I drifted away in free association. Sulfur and geothermal activity made me think thermodynamics (I majored in physics, after all), which made me think of entropy (the second law of thermodynamics), which made me think of order and disorder (that’s what entropy is), which made me think of Gregory Bateson’s ‘muddled or perfect’ story, which made me think of the Anna Karenina Principle.
Probably as an antidote to all the focus on heat, the music I wrote is cool – both cool in an icy way, and cool in a detached way.
The slow first part is icy, crystalline and sensuous. The tonal melody amidst the constellation of gleaming, atonal notes is from Domenico Scarlatti’s gorgeous, rarely heard D minor sonata (K32). The fast second part is a taut, virtuosic toccata with little brushfires of jazz. It’s as ornate as the first part is sparse.
The title came about because one of my Rotorua nights I watched a beautiful movie called Heights. A character recites deliberately out-of-order lines from the Edgar Allan Poe poem Annabel Lee.
I was a child and she was a child,
In this kingdom by the sea:
But we loved with a love that was more than love –
I and my Annabel Lee.
For the moon never beams without bringing me dreams
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;
And the stars never rise but I feel the bright eyes
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee.
In this poem, a man and a woman fall in love so powerfully that the angels, envious, kill her to separate them. But the man tells the story with no rancour. He sleeps every night by her tomb near the sea, still seeing her eyes in the stars, dreaming of her every time the moon shines. Many people have unconsciously decided that they can be happy if and only if all the conditions they’ve come up with are met. But how many could learn to sleep content like this man, who has more than one way for things to be perfect?
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