Cheerful sociopolitical scientist Brian Klaas somehow builds a bridge between deterministic and stochastic rationales for why and how humans do things in order to reach this curious book's thesis: although everything we do is predetermined, the very nature of randomness means we can predict nothing. "Each individual controls almost nothing, but influences almost everything" is the bright gloss he applies to his rather depressing construction, as he merrily avoids abject nihilism by insisting that because every little decision has an impact, it doesn't matter that we have no free will and that we inhabit a world whose only abiding law is chaos theory. And so let's sit back and contemplate an idea once put forward by an ancient Chinese proverb: the flapping of the wings of a butterfly can be felt on the other side of the world.
I recommend this book to anarchist atheists who strive to create positive change in the world for the randomly dispossessed, while maintaining that we must celebrate life right now because the world is both full of wonder and can collapse into destruction at any moment (basically my 1990s social circle). I also recommend this book to mainstream progressives who reject individualism, meritocracy, and pattern recognition while also upholding the importance of maintaining "shared reality" standards (basically my old friends now that they've grown up and have steady jobs). I do not recommend this book to people of faith, people who believe in free will and/or individualism, and people who reject disintegrating worldviews - no matter how upbeat that disintegrating voice may be.
Lest it seem that I am eyerolling away my experience of this complex yet often enervating book, I should make clear that Fluke is a worthy endeavor and overall a very interesting read. Brian Klaas is a commentator and writer for a host of liberal media usual suspects (CNN, MSNBC, Washington Post, Guardian, etc. et al) and a former policy director for the 40th governor of Minnesota; despite that resume, his mind is far from banal, his ideas are fascinating to contemplate, and his political outlook does occasionally diverge from the mainstream Democratic company line. I'm a paid subscriber to his occasionally Manichean1 but mainly compelling and mind-expanding substack "The Garden of Forking Paths" - so I knew what I was getting into when I made an advance order of this book. He's a confident writer with a strong voice and a compelling point of view on how the world works. Per Klaas, our world is not Convergent ("everything happens for a reason"), it is Contingent ("stuff just happens"). His combining the idea of the randomness of all existence with an insistence that human nature is predetermined and we are all creatures without free will certainly made for an often uncomfortable read, despite his positive tone. I appreciate uncomfortable ideas, even when I don't enjoy them. Are there many other political/social scientists or philosophers out there who have brought those two seemingly disparate ideas together?
On the plus side, I was happily surprised at the author's defense of "geography equals destiny" and the idea that where we live often impacts how we live (see Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies) - an idea that has been bizarrely misconstrued as racist. I also loved his thoughts on narratives and storytelling. From the strongest chapter of the book: "Reality doesn't have a narrative arc. We cram it into that form nonetheless, as our storytelling minds distort our view of the world."
On the "well that's interesting" side, I had very mixed feelings about how Klaas's perspective on humanity's supposed lack of free will - usually due to innate characteristics, genetic factors that can't be controlled, etc. - appears to mean that he will excuse criminal behavior coming from the mentally unwell. Because how can mentally ill criminals even help themselves. That is both a humane perspective and yet also such a condescending one, in its way. Of course, mental health is both context for and driver of behaviors - but that context should not necessarily be an excuse for those behaviors, let alone a reason to refuse recognizing the agency that even the mentally ill can often have in their choices. That said, I'm all too familiar with this perspective since it is a common one in progressive spaces - where I live - and I do understand how such an outlook helps us limit the kneejerk tendency to demonize the mentally unwell who commit acts of awful violence.
On the minus side, and it's a big one: he really didn't provide many examples of "why everything we do matters" - which I at first took to be one of the major points of the book. That subtitle eventually felt like it was some kind of a tonic that Klaas was giving himself so that he (and the reader) didn't become too depressed over a perspective on life that insists we have no agency and everything is random. He includes several absorbing stories that illustrate why random things matter, in particular his detailing of how unpredictable it was that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were eventually chosen as targets for nuclear destruction. Another striking example concerns the fates of two colleagues, one who was in the twin towers for a meeting on 9/11 and the other who decided to change his shirt at the last minute, and so survived. But this book needed examples that were less, well, obliterating. He does try. He uses the randomness of children - their births, their behaviors - as demonstration for his point that the flukes and chaos and inability of us to truly plan for the future is actually a beautiful thing. And he posits that because our decisions influence others, because they have ripple effects beyond us, our random actions still have importance and meaning. Sure, I agree. But the idea that we only do things because of our brain chemistry, and that we truly lack free will and the ability to make independent decisions outside of our predetermined mindsets? I'm sorry, but that is still a sort of nihilism, despite Klaas' insistence that we view that perspective as freeing. Not exactly what I'd call a revelatory point of view.
Ironically, Klaas recently criticized the Manichean worldview, using it to bolster his explanation of why conspiratorial right-wingers think the way that they think. But how can anyone who views American politics through such an obviously binary lens - e.g. the Left = Good, Trump supporters = racist, homophobic, misogynist conspiracists - not themselves be thinking with a Manichean mindset? And it should go without saying that the Left is often subject to its own kinds of conspiratorial thinking...