How did a couple's holiday save Kyoto from certain ruin? How did a landslide contribute to the Revolutionary War? Basically, how have chance encounters and decisions influenced the history of the United States?Don is joined for this episode by Brian Klaas, author of 'Fluke: Chance, Chaos, and Why Everything We Do Matters'.Brian is a political scientist, a contributing writer at The Atlantic, and an associate professor in global politics at University College London.Produced by Sophie Gee. Edited by Nick Thomson. Senior Producer was Charlotte Long.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. You can take part in our listener survey here.All music from Epidemic Sounds/All3 Media
Chapter 1: What is the butterfly effect and how does it relate to history?
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It's American History Hit here. I'm Don Wildman, your host. Welcome back. Human history can be viewed as one event leading to another, which leads to others in a constant phenomenon of cause and effect. That's certainly the view of most historians, I'd say, who work diligently to order events and present a coherent, defensible record of whatever happened and how it came to pass.
But there is another dynamic at play in history, never mind in the whole of existence, where random occurrence is as much a factor as logical order. It's the butterfly effect that borrows from the mathematical ideas of chaos theory. Unicorn moments that just happen because they happen, and then steer historical consequence in one direction or another, banal or profound.
leads to all sorts of what-ifs and counterfactuals that provide so many enlightening hypotheticals on how our world could be so different if one or another choice had been made, or if another door had been knocked upon, or if, well, you get the idea.
And there's a new book about this notion, and it's called, appropriately, Fluke, Chance, Chaos, and Why Everything We Do Matters, written by Brian Klass, who is a political scientist working at University College London as a professor. He is a contributing writer at The Atlantic magazine, and today, Randomly, a guest on American History Hit. Hello, Brian. Nice to have you. It's great to be here.
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Chapter 2: What role do random events play in shaping historical outcomes?
Thanks for having me on the show. All my halcyon days living in New York City, I rode my bike chaotically through Manhattan, dreading that one car door that would randomly open my path, altering the course of my life and others.
I had free will not to be an idiot on a bike in Manhattan, but it is some kind of illustration of the idea of your book that random ideas that occur and don't occur are so often the pivotal forces at work in history. What drew you to consider this notion and write a book about it?
I think that there's a lot of the world that we try to explain with neat and tidy stories, right? And I'm a social scientist and social science is trying to sort of use trends and patterns and say where we're heading. And we always sort of, you know, I think we overly simplify the world to do that.
And sometimes when you're writing historical narratives, the same thing happens that, oh, of course, this was inevitable because the great trends of history brought us to this moment. Every time that I started to look more deeply into anything that happened, whether it was in history or a case that I was studying in my social science research, all of that sort of fell by the wayside.
And it became utterly clear to me that the idiosyncratic personalities, the small decisions, the tiny little flukes were things that swayed history forever. And of course, We don't know when they're going to be consequential, right? I mean, this is the thing is that sometimes a tiny decision doesn't really sway history that much. And other times it redirects the course of the future forever.
And I think that the sort of narratives that we build around telling stories of where we, how we ended up where we are today, write that out. They pretend it's meaningless noise. And so I'm trying to correct that and argue that the small stuff really matters.
It's like the counterfactuals, a fascinating lens through which to study history and turn it on its head and considering the strange and pivotal moments that happen, which are all absolutely true. I mean, we rely heavily, of course, on the historical inquiry that has been done for us by proud and smart individuals. But the truth is, history is as random as it comes.
Every day of our lives, we know this. One thing could happen and another thing does. How do you organize the book? I mean, it's a series of examples of this.
Well, it sort of builds the narrative sequentially through a series of sort of claims, right? So the first one is that the world is much more swayed by the arbitrary and the accidental than we imagine. And I start with a story about the atomic bomb, which I think we'll probably get to in a moment. So I won't talk about that yet.
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Chapter 3: How did a box of cigars change the course of the Civil War?
Yeah. I mean, the people in Kokura didn't know that they were the target until it was declassified. I believe it was like two decades later. So, of course, you know, all of a sudden they declassify this thing. And all of a sudden the residents of Kokura have been told you very narrowly escaped being Nagasaki. I mean, just an incredible, incredible facet of history.
So much of what we're talking about here are wartime stories, which of course have these dramatic pivotal moments. I imagine there's many more examples of flukes in history that have nothing to do with the war, right?
Yeah, of course. I mean, war is one that's obvious because you can imagine so easily how if the victor had changed or if the destruction had been different, that the consequences would be enormous. I mean, one of the arguments that I'm making is that, you know, these things have really long tails. And one of the aspects that I think is really difficult for us to grapple with
When you think about history is whenever I point these aspects out, you know, these tiny details of the cigar or the vacation that Stimson took, the people who push back against me will say, well, yeah, but like the U.S., the Union would have won the Civil War anyway because it had structural advantages or the U.S. would have won against Japan because they would have dropped the bomb elsewhere.
And of course, you know, that's probably true. There's some aspects of this that are probably true. But the point that I make is the way you lose conflicts, the way that history unfolds is not just a series of discrete events, right? It's not like the war is now over and now we enter a new chapter of history.
The way the war ends affects the way the next war begins or it affects the way the economy recovers, right? If Kyoto is not part of Japan's economy, Japan in the 20th century maybe has a different history. Right. And so the argument that I'm making is that the wars are the most obvious, but everything matters. Right. That these little details are always reshaping history.
And it's just these little glimpses we get when we can actually make the counterfactual make sense. That is why I use warfare very often in illustrating the points. Right.
How much of this idea, having written this book, do you understand is baked into the decision and policy decisions that people are making on the ground? Like the idea of creating contingencies, let's see all the possibilities here, is obviously part of any planning situation.
But in government thinking, analysis of choices that presidents have to make, especially in wartime, you have to consider all the possibilities. Has this increased over time as people have realized these things?
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Chapter 4: What was the significance of the Battle of Antietam?
Chapter 5: How does chaos theory explain historical events?
And so they have this sort of moment where the finest specimens were supposed to be reserved for the king. And they made this sort of etching onto the bark with what was called the king's mark, this broad arrow shape that was imprinted on these trees with three blows from a hatchet. And it was marked as the king's trees, right?
And of course, this produces an illicit trade because the settlers in America want to use these trees and they sort of hope they can get away with it. Now, eventually, this all comes to a sort of showdown because the resentment between the king claiming the trees and the settlers wanting them and the colonies...
They eventually have this big sort of showdown in a place called the Pine Tree Tavern in New Hampshire. This happens in April of 1772. And the king's sort of, you know, enforcer gets attacked by this violent mob. And so this spurs what's called the Pine Tree Riot. And it's the hidden story that many people don't know about that's sort of this precursor to the Boston Tea Party.
It's one of these parts of sort of an initial defiance of the crown in America. And because they were treated with a relatively light slap on the wrist, it emboldened those who wanted to sort of challenge the sort of royal power. And so it's viewed as one of these sort of catalysts of the Revolutionary War.
And when you think about this, I mean, if we sort of zoom out from what's going on here, there's this aspect in history where to tell this story, you need to have the history of sort of Doggerland, this aspect of why Britain gets cut off and becomes an island. You have to have the story of empire. You have to have the story of the sort of geography of Britain's forests.
the geography of America's forests, the colonization of America, and then this little trigger, which is the Pine Tree Riot, along with the sort of resentment and the need for trees. And all of them combine, right? And the reason I tell stories like this is because any one of these factors being different might have created a different trigger for war.
I mean, eventually you may have had the Revolutionary War anyway, but it might have started differently. And of course, one of the things that I think is really profound about this example is that the initial American Navy sailed under a white flag with a pine tree on it. And so if you look it up, you'll see this as this is the first naval flag for the United States.
And it's because of this attempt to sort of seize the American trees for the Royal Navy. And, you know, when I was writing this part of the book, I didn't have time to go into a lot of the detail. But the ripple effects of this continue because you have things like Captain Cook then goes on these expeditions and his ship breaks off the coast of Hawaii and he gets killed.
And part of that may be because they lost the supply line. It's tied to this question of supply lines for tall trees and whether you have good timber and all these things. So every story around naval history in this period is somehow linked to this question of supply lines around trees. And we sort of take for granted, okay, now let's look at the naval battle
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