Do events unfold with purpose or are they merely outcomes of chance? Can we understand the complexity inherent in the world around us or are all attempts at prediction, learning and theorising hopeless efforts to climb over impassable epistemic barriers? Can we be said to have meaningful control over our lives and the world?
These are but some of the questions political scientist Brian Klaas sets out to answer in his new book Fluke: Chance, Chaos, and why Everything We Do Matters, published in January 2024 by Hachette. Dr Klaas, an associate professor at UCL, is a familiar figure for students of politics, known as the co-author of How to Rig an Election, the host of the Power Corrupts podcast, and a frequent TV guest. His status as something of a public intellectual is reflected in his latest book, which combines academic debates about the philosophy of social science with exploration of meaning in the world and in life.
Despite its somewhat trite title, Fluke is a genuinely insightful and enjoyable read. Klaas synthesises a disparate body of knowledge from evolutionary biology and physics to history and philosophy, whilst drawing on interesting anecdotes and going on thoughtful tangents. The first chapters establish basic notions in complexity theory, a discipline which attempts to understand unpredictable and non-standard systems, which he then applies to the world today. Given small changes in initial conditions can have vast casual effects, it’s difficult to see much space for agency and knowledge. Klaas argues, however, that we need not fear; accepting the (seeming) chaos can lead to a kind of contentment.
The core of Klaas’ argument is that chance reigns. This is not confined to so-called ‘flukes’ where improbable events coincide and have unbelievable effects. Instead, seemingly random coincidences are far more common than we might think. The book is filled with myriad examples highlighting this fact: for instance, nuclear bomb targets in Japan changing because of someone’s holiday plans made 20 years prior, pheasants shaping the history of WW1, and a lost battle plan affecting the US civil war. The point of these examples, though, is not to show that sometimes ‘strange things happen’. Instead, Klaas seeks to highlight that the world is always like this: what we consider incredibly unlikely, could in fact be the norm.
Klaas’ central arguments are underpinned by complexity science and chaos theory – namely the idea of ‘the butterfly effect’ which propounds that small changes in input can lead to massive changes in output (such as butterfly flapping its wings and influencing the course of a tornado). He repeatedly uses the image of ‘The Garden of Forking Paths’ from a wonderful short story by Argentinian writer Jorges Luis Borges. The central image conveyed is that of taking a step in a garden with each move shifting the realm of possibilities that could be faced in the next moment. Despite travestying the story, Klaas uses the analogy of the garden to capture the notion of path dependency – a concept in the social sciences that describes how events or decisions at point A limit the possibilities available at point B. The important observation here is that decisions we make result from things we oftentimes simply don’t consider. Even mundane activities, such as going to the shops, can lead to a chain of completely unforeseen events, leading one to find themselves in a situation that never would have occurred otherwise. This idea aligns with depictions of the butterfly effect in the arts. Klaas mentions the popular 1998 film Sliding Doors, but also Kieślowski’s 1987 Blind Chance (to which Sliding Doors owes more than a little), as well as the enjoyable 1998 thriller Run Lola Run.
The sheer number of unseen contingencies which shape the present day is what Klaas uses to argue against the illusion of control. Though we may feel that it’s our conscious decisions that determine how our lives unfold, ultimately chains of coincidence and contingency shape the world. In fact, even when we do make big decisions that are seemingly consequential, the very choice being presented to us is doubtless a coincidental effect of many other people’s decision-making. As Klaas puts it: ‘we control nothing, but influence everything.’
There are wider conclusions to be drawn from this idea. Klaas is very strong in arguing against what he calls ‘narrative bias’; that is, believing things because they fit a pleasing story. Whilst narratives are important pedagogical tools that can genuinely enrich understanding, there is a danger of misinformation being believed because it ‘sounds good’, rather than because of its grounding in reality. Indeed, populism conceptually is based on peoples’ willingness to accept simple and appealing narratives rather than facing complex facts. One such narrative which Klaas attacks is the application of meritocracy to current societies – the idea that rewards are based on merit, defined by individuals’ ability to perform effectively. He argues that intelligence, skills, and hard work are normally distributed (in an inverted U-shape), whilst wealth has a Pareto distribution (a power-law distribution) – the vast majority of people existing at the lower (poorer) end. If there was a direct correspondence between merit and wealth, Klaas contends, there would not be such a disparity between distributions. Instead, getting to the top (richer) end of the wealth distribution requires a big dosage of good luck. As he writes: ‘Due to their sheer numbers, luck is overwhelmingly likely to strike someone from the vast billions of middle-level talent, not the tiny sliver of übertalented geniuses.’ Thus randomness is an ineluctable component of the labour market.
However, Klaas fails to recognise an important distinction early on: the difference between ‘apparent randomness’ (as in the ‘chance’ of getting on a train and meeting your future lover), and ‘actual indeterminacy’ which implies that the universe by nature is unpredictable; that there are no laws of nature which say what will, without a doubt, happen. Whilst this doesn’t strictly undermine his arguments, failing to emphasise the difference between ‘apparent randomness’ and ‘actual indeterminacy’ forces Klaas to use phrases like ‘as if random’ throughout most of the book – an unnecessary confusion for the reader. Determinism – the concept that the future state of the universe is inevitably dictated by its past state combined with the laws of nature – is something that is either true or false. You might assume that science presupposes determinism; after all, Newtonian mechanics’ definitive statements about how bodies move applies into the future, while most technology relies on certainties about the physical world. Nevertheless, some interpretations of quantum mechanics suggest that there is randomness built into the fabric of the universe: in other words, the laws of nature are not deterministic.
Whilst this may sound quite abstract, the truth of this metaphysical proposition has enormous implications. The problem, as Klaas eventually discusses, is that if causal determinism holds, everything that has happened, happens, and will happen, is predetermined by the initial state of the universe. This means that the act of you reading this text was immutably fixed by the state of the universe billions of years ago. As you might imagine, this possibility is something that has exercised philosophers for millennia: how can free will exist if this is the case? It seems intuitive to believe that if an action was decided at the beginning of time, it cannot have meaningfully been chosen. This debate remains unresolved, though Klaas appears to lean towards an incompatibilist position, rejecting the conjunction of free will and determinism.
Towards the end of the book, Klaas also explores how issues of chaos theory relate to the methodologies of social science (his own academic discipline). In a tribute to David Chalmers, Klaas names his theses the ‘Easy and Hard Problems of Social Research’ (after the ‘easy’ and ‘hard’ problems of consciousness). ‘The Easy Problem’ concerns some of the well-known issues facing research in the social sciences: replication problems, publication bias, and insufficient rigour in data-handling. Klaas discusses issues such as ‘P-hacking’ – where researchers select their data to achieve statistically significant results – and a lack of oversight in peer review. However, these are what he considers ‘easy problems’ – issues which are ultimately solvable (and indeed being dealt with currently). More pressing is the ‘hard problem’ – the ‘universe of uncertainty’ – within which we live today. Klaas cites a fascinating study which demonstrates how researchers, when presented with the same data, reach vastly different conclusions through minor variations in how they process information. The lack of clarity in what a given data set tells us, means that even if all of our data is accurate there remains a ‘universe of uncertainty’ (as the authors call it) regarding what truth can be ascertained about the world,
These are hardly problems social scientists are unaware of. Indeed, the introduction of the influential (and controversial) classic on methodology Designing Social Inquiry (referred to as KKV after its authors King, Keohane, and Verba) states: ‘uncertainty is a central aspect of all research and all knowledge about the world’ (p. 9). Nevertheless, while chance is a significant factor in explaining specific events, we must not invalidate research which generalises patterns across space and time. As KKV argue later, if emphasis on uniqueness ‘is carried to the extreme of ignoring all regularities, the very possibility of social science is denied and historians are reduced to the aimlessness of balladeers’ (p. 43). Furthermore, while Klaas seems to register some discontent with social science’s treatment of causation – a deeply challenging topic with broad implications – what he has to say on the matter is ultimately unilluminating and lacking in philosophical discussion.
While Klaas’ emphasis on the need for caution and humility in the social sciences is absolutely correct, in terms of setting an agenda for disciplinary improvement his contributions are minimal – simply reiterating the inherent difficulty of conducting socio-scientific enquiry, something researchers have been aware of for centuries. Instead, the more lasting impact of Klaas’ book indubitably comes from its reflections on how we think about our own lives, as well the fate of others. Truly accepting the extent to which your life is underwritten by coincidences and contingencies, most of which you’ll never learn about, can appear disorientating at first. Klaas suggests however, that you might find reassurance in the idea that your actions will affect the world in ways you cannot imagine. If this minor satisfaction is meant to compensate for a near-complete lack of autonomy traditionally understood, however, it doesn’t leave one with much to hang on to.
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