Editor's Letter: Fate's nonchalance

last updated 8 January 2015

We all have our good reasons for overlooking the role random chance plays in our lives. Our petty intentions and grand ambitions seem pointless if we’re too mindful of how easily forces beyond our control can obliterate them. Sometimes, though, the blinkers come off. This week, tornadoes skittered through communities throughout the South with erratic nonchalance, killing 12 in one North Carolina county while sparing close neighbors and friends. Most talk of tragedy, some of minor miracles, but in the end there’s no figuring it. And it’s not just nature that runs on such unfathomable logic. Political analyst Jeff Greenfield has just published a book of alternative histories (see Books) that explores how fundamentally history might have changed if, say, Gerald Ford hadn’t fumbled a debate answer and lost to Jimmy Carter in 1976. Greenfield’s point—a humbling one for any political prognosticator—is that “history is as much a product of chance” as it is of any forces we think we can gauge or even steer.

But it’s just not in our nature to accept that we’re being buffeted around by a fate we can’t control. On a recent vacation in Arizona, I visited the site of an extinct volcano that erupted in the 11th century, burying the surrounding countryside in tons of lava and cinder. A thousand years later, trees are still struggling to repopulate the blackened slopes. But what struck me most were the imprints in stone of the corn that farmers had placed at lava vents in hopes of appeasing an inexplicable force. A thousand years later, we know we can’t. But it won’t stop us from pressing on as if we could.