The best books proving history isn’t driven by destiny, but by chance and (sometimes) choice

The modern age lumbers on like a wounded mammoth, but are its wounds fatal?

This is the question Hans Blumenberg asks in this magisterial, cathedralic book. The project and promise of modernity, Blumenberg points out, consists of the attempted rejection of all arbitrary forms of authority. That is, all powers that cannot justify themselves through human argument and agreement, whether this be derived from the arbitrariness of one’s birthplace or background, unquestioning adherence to tradition, or to nature’s blind and bloody precedent.

Abraded to its minimalist core, it is this kernel of the modern project—the birth of which Blumenberg traces to the late Middle Ages—that we can thank for later advances ranging from civil rights to women’s liberation. But, in the wake of the atrocities that split the previous century in half, the legitimacy of modernity came into question. Technoscience, the handmaiden of modernity, seemed a plausible culprit for gas chambers and atom blasts.

Accordingly, intellectuals began taking ‘modernity’ to task. They still do: its core precepts are still attacked across the political spectrum, from the reactionary right to the postmodern left. But Blumenberg provided a full-throated defense, one which stands apart. He didn’t mollify by saying the benefits outweigh the ills, but defended by reminding of the modern epoch’s long-forgotten roots: in the so-called “Dark Ages”, as a cry of human self-assertion against an oppressive cosmos, dictated by forces demonic and divine. That cry still rings true today. You don’t know what’s at stake in ‘modernity’ if you haven’t read how the medieval age itself birthed its own rejection.

Ignored by the Anglophone world, save for American philosopher Richard Rorty, this is more a monument than a book. It is about how humans boldly decided to attempt to forge their own future by emerging from the yoke of ancient ideas like predestination and fate.

My dad read sections of this book aloud to me when I was far too young to grasp anything inside. It is, after all, a book on Darwinism written by a paleontologist who specialized in macroevolutionary patterns. Such polysyllabic words were inscrutable to me. But, back then, I could look at the cover. The copy we had depicted a beautiful scene showing some of the earliest animals to appear on Earth. They are alien creatures—surprisingly unfamiliar—unlike anything alive today.

This left an impression on me: life was different in the past, shockingly different, which became an insight I extended to my study as a historian of ideas researching how human worldviews have also changed drastically over time.

It was fitting that when I returned to the book as a young adult—now old enough to understand it—it immediately became one of my all-time favorites. So, too, did Gould himself, who remains an intellectual hero of mine. He weaves together stories not only about the history of life but also about the history of humans figuring out life’s history.

The book tells the story of how the discovery of some unassuming fossils in the Canadian Rockies upended our view of life’s evolution, implying chance and lottery played a greater role than previously assumed. Gould masterfully illustrates this by asking us to imagine “replaying the tape” on life’s history, starting from the beginning and fast-forwarding into the future. He argued the results would be different—potentially unrecognizably so—every time.

Though fossils from 500 million years ago may seem distant from human matters today, there’s an awesomely powerful message here: if destiny doesn’t dictate the great movements of the world, then it's always possible for things to be otherwise, and the apprehension that the world can be otherwise is at the root of recognition that it can be made better. 

Hacking writes in pellucid prose. Reading this book—in an old, dusty library many years ago—is what convinced me, for better or worse, that uncovering the history of ideas was something not only that could be viably done but could be done rigorously.

Hacking’s book tells the story of the emergence of one of the areas of mathematics that arguably shapes our world today more than any other: probability. It governs financial markets as much as military decisions, carving up the edges of our world.

Rewinding to the beginning of the modern age, Hacking tells the story of how an Italian gambler from the 1500s—one Gerolamo Cardano—haphazardly discovered the science of measuring chances and the art of taking them, unwittingly creating the fields of actuary and insurance that shape the foundation of our modern world.

It is riveting stuff: don’t let the mathematical topic put you off. Though this book is Hacking’s best, a slightly weirder book of his is also a favorite: his 1998 Mad Travelers: Reflections on the Reality of Transient Mental Illness, which looks at the peculiar 1800s epidemic of people experiencing an irrational compulsion to travel, coupled with a total loss of memory and identity as they came to wander, aimlessly, across countries.

One of my favorite living writers is Rachell Powell. She writes on animal ethics, genetic engineering, and invertebrate intelligence, among other topics.

Powell’s brilliant 2020 book can be seen as a spiritual sequel to Gould’s aforementioned 1989 Wonderful Life. Hence, it makes sense to include both on the list. Powell takes Gould’s experiment on “replaying the tape” and updates it, given modern knowledge, while also establishing its relevance for the cutting-edge scientific field of astrobiology.

Astrobiology is the study of what we should look for when we look for signs of life beyond Earth. It’s a burgeoning field at the frontier of human knowledge, poised to provide revelatory knowledge about our own fate and future, regardless of whether the results of the search for extraterrestrial life are positive or negative. 

Assessing the role of chance in governing the course of biological evolution—whether here or elsewhere in the universe—is, as Powell shows, central to this search. If contingency plays a big role, there are less likely to be forms that are fated to recur and repeat across worlds, such that we can hardly expect other forms of life to even remotely resemble our own.

This links directly to another epochal question of our times: that of the Fermi Paradox, which asks why, in a universe as enormous as ours, we do not readily hear or see any evidence of other minds. Are we completely alone? If such riddles have ever kept you up at night, then this is a book for you.

Given I study old books, I wanted to include at least one. I was tempted to recommend either Lawrence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, for its sheer strangeness, or Christopher Smart’s Jubilate Agno, for including the best poetic lines ever written about a cat, or, otherwise, John Milton’s Paradise Lost. The latter can be read as an early declaration of human freedom in the face of the totalitarianism of nonhuman forces (be they demonic or divine), but, more importantly, one that is sensitive to the pitfalls of such self-assertion (“sufficient to have stood, though free to fall,” is how Adam and Eve are described). Now that thermonuclear weapons exist, this latter truth applies to humankind as a global collective.

But, numinous as Milton is, his work is familiar, so I decided to recommend a writer from his period who, albeit less famous today, is just as searingly good.

That would be the inimitable Sir Thomas Browne. Aside from producing what are some of the most ornate sentences in English, Browne also bequeathed to us a seriously impressive amount of coinages—such as “computer,” “electricity,” “hallucination,” “migrant,” “carnivorous,” “medical,” “technology”—proving that individuals can, sometimes, make history themselves by shaping the ways those of us in coming centuries talk and, thus, think. In terms of adding vital new buttresses to the sprawling architecture of the English language, Browne is only rivaled by S.T. Coleridge and Shakespeare.

What’s more one of his best essays focuses on what he saw as an epidemic of erroneous beliefs in his day. Browne did his substantial bit, overcoming circumambient error; we must each try to do our bit, no matter how small, today. With better knowledge about the world comes knowledge to make a better world.