Who we are and what happens: these are inextricably linked. If we care about an event, it's because it happened to someone, and that someone — we tend to believe — must have played a role in it. This is how we form narratives, including the narrative of our own agency.
Fluke: Chance, Chaos, and Why Everything We Do Matters is about this.
The author is Brian Klaas, a professor of global politics at University College London.
(I received an advance review copy from NetGalley. Fluke will be published by Scribner in January.)
Anything can change the course of our lives. A cloud moves, and a plane doesn’t take off or changes its flight path. It matters who is or isn’t on the plane, whether the plane crashes, or where the airmen drop the bomb.
We know that chance occurrences make a difference in the outcome, yet we resist this notion, partly because it seems unfair. Some people live, others die, due to luck? We might as well say they were saved or destroyed for no reason at all.
And "no reason" isn't what we mean when we say we want "the real story" of "what happened." With no meaningful connections between who we are and what happens, we can't track a narrative. “We want a rational explanation to make sense of the chaos of life,” Klaas says.
But these little reasons indeed seem to be the real reasons.
“Nobody tiptoes around with extreme care to make sure not to squish the wrong bug. Few panic about an irrevocably changed future after missing the bus,” Klaas observes. Yet how else, he asks, does the future get made?
If your parents hadn’t met, you wouldn’t be here. The same is true for your ancestors.
"We are the offshoots of a sometimes wonderful, sometimes deeply flawed past," and "our existence is bewilderingly fragile, built upon the shakiest of foundations." An asteroid killed the dinosaurs, which allowed all of us to be born millions of years later, and today you’ve subtly altered the future of humanity based on "whether you stopped to have coffee before you rushed out the door."
Yes, our actions are part of a chain of events. Turtles all the way down.
Could we have acted differently, though? Did we have free will then? Do we have free will, right now, to change anything at all?
When we look for a cause, we often see a fluke. The fluke isn’t nothing. It’s just not the meaning we originally hoped for. It’s something unexpected and unrepeatable, and we can embrace it.
Fluke is elegantly readable nonfiction, revolving thorny philosophical questions with ease. It poses the question: What theory makes the most sense to you?
You get to choose what you believe.
Or do you?
For more, see "Why Are We Here? Chaos Brought Us Together" (9 min read), which Books Are Our Superpower published today.
A couple years ago, I wrote about another book by Prof. Klaas: Corruptible: Who Gets Power and How It Changes Us. The article is "Why are powerful people so terrible?" (4 min read).
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