FLUKE

In which the course of life becomes a series of dice rolls, each of no small consequence.

The history of humankind, writes Atlantic contributor Klaas, “is just an endless, but futile, struggle to impose order, certainty, and rationality onto a world defined by disorder, chance, and chaos.” Furthermore, our actions have consequences that can’t always be foreseen. The author begins with the example of American statesman Henry Stimson, who stayed in a posh hotel in Kyoto, Japan, in the mid-1920s and 20 years later ordered that the city be spared from an atomic bombing, leaving Hiroshima and Nagasaki to take the blow. What might have happened had Stimson not stayed there? The world, he writes, “seems to seesaw between contingency and convergence.” It is an infinite improbability that we are alive today, and yet here we are, thanks to an asteroid impact (and/or volcano eruptions) that incinerated the dinosaurs and ended the age of reptiles. Against all this, one should never be surprised when Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s black swans come home to roost. “Our lives are frequently disrupted by large social shocks such as financial crises, pandemics, and wars,” Klaas notes, and whenever we try to control the complex systems that drive them, we usually wind up on the losing side of the enterprise. Contingency rules, and, as the author sagely notes, we should congratulate ourselves less heartily for success and kick ourselves less savagely for failure. Yet in a world of chance, we still have an effect: “What you do matters. But it also matters that it’s you, and not somebody else, who’s doing it.” The book can provoke existential unease, but it also helps explain the cockamamie nature of the way things are, and it’s an always-interesting read.

A handy user’s manual to a surprising, improbable, “infinitely complex” world.