In one of my favorite lines from my song Strangers, I posed a rhetorical question: “Who can trace the mysterious chain of events that now bind us?” Although in the song I was talking about a long love affair, it’s a question that applies more generally to everything about our lives, how we become who we are, and what combination of willful acts and serendipity shapes the reality and the history we experience. It’s a question I’ve mused about throughout my life, which probably explains my love of stories about time travel, looping repeated lifetimes, and the multiverse. Most of you probably have thought about it too.
Imagine my delight, then, to discover Brian Klaas’s best-selling new non-fiction book Fluke, which explores these very topics of random chance, chaos, the role of unpredictable and unexpected events in our lives and the world around us, and how our own choices and actions interact with those of others and our environment to shape our lives, and the greater reality in which we live.
Klaas draws us in immediately with an introductory chapter, in which he tells a true story about a historical figure whose personal experiences decades before, and his subjective emotional response to those experiences, prevented one mass casualty event, and led to another one instead. He uses this dramatic example and several others to lay out his intentions for the book: to dispel the comforting but (in his view) false notions most of us have that the world operates in ways that are predictable and comprehensible in terms of causality, and that we can identify and shape the course of events through reason and the choices we make.
In essence, the book is a social scientist’s thoughtful exploration of the “butterfly effect” – the familiar theory in philosophy that even tiny forces, like the pattern of a single butterfly’s beating wings, can alter the whole course of history. Klaas makes the case for the notion that even small flukes, or unexpected events, really can have tremendous impacts on the course of events in our lives and world.
In making that case, he introduces a corollary: that we are deeply enmeshed in the lives of others, their choices and the random events that affect them too. In other words, we aren’t ever really in control of our fates, no matter how hard we try to guide the course of our lives through rationality or our actions. We still have to navigate events over which we have no control, and often don’t see coming.
One conclusion he draws is that we should feel empowered by our knowledge of the effects of random events to do things we believe in, even if it might seem that nothing will come of it. The author suggests this is true, exactly because we really don’t know what effect our actions will have on others. If we’re trying to influence others, for example, we might be ignored and not much will change at all as a result of what we said or did. But it also might change everything, or have an unexpected effect on others far greater than we expected.
The phenomenon of a social media post, or a music or video clip “going viral” would be obvious examples of that kind of unexpected impact on others. Or it might be nothing more than a quiet conversation that changes someone else’s life trajectory or opinions forever. There are an endless number of things we can do to affect others, and the world around us, so the author suggests there’s no reason not to try, even if we might doubt it will really change anything.
I thought about this book the past two weeks, as the situation involving President Biden’s age and whether he should run for President again or not has played out in the national news. I haven’t usually been someone who wrote letters or emails to politicians, but in this case I did. And I did so, knowing my messages (along with those of many others) might help shape events and exert influence in a direction I preferred, but also realizing the ultimate outcome was unknown, and might arrive via any number of other unexpected and unrelated possible events.
In other words, it was strangely comforting to realize based on the ideas in Fluke that I could take actions in furtherance of my preferred outcome, and that they might even make a difference, but also accept with equanimity that my actions’ consequences and effects on developments like this are ultimately unknowable and unpredictable. I guess you might call that learning to “be philosophical”.
I’ve long enjoyed the writing of Malcolm Gladwell, because of the intriguing ways he challenges ordinary beliefs and assumptions, and takes us on a journey to look at things we think we already know or understand, but from different perspectives. In challenging what we think we know, and providing us with new information and analyses we might not have heard before, this kind of curious counter narrative can change us, and forever alter the way we view the world around us.
Brian Klaas is taking us on that same type of contrarian intellectual voyage in this book, with a similarly lively writing style and considerable success in making his case. I found it fascinating, and a pleasure to read and reflect upon. Highly recommended.
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