The Age of Chance

Gambling in Western Culture

Gerda Reith

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• eBook ISBN: 9781134680290
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This fascinating and extensive study, enlivened by interviews with British and American gamblers, will be enthralling reading not just for those interested in the cultural and social implications of gambling - researchers in sociology, cultural studies and the history of ideas - but for anyone interested in how we create meaning in an increasingly insecure world.

1
THE IDEA OF CHANCE

THE AGE OF FAITH: THE ORIGINS OF CHANCE

In the late twentieth century, chance is understood as a constituent part of the world, codified in the rules of probability theory and, in the branches of quantum mechanics and chaos theory, an irreducible feature of modern science. However, this theoretical perspective is a recent development and represents the apogee of a long historical process that culminated in the separation of ‘chance’ or random phenomena from broadly religious notions of divine providence and fate.

Strikingly, in ancient, classical and ‘primitive’ thought, there was no such thing as chance! The random event was everywhere regarded as a sacred sign of the gods which, although meaningless in itself, could be interpreted to reveal a more profound message from the transcendent ‘beyond’. In such worldviews, various forms of divination and fortune-telling were utilised as means of communicating with the realm of the sacred, and were also often inseparable from the recreational pursuit of games of chance.

In the seventeenth century, the separation of ‘chance’ from broadly religious beliefs finally began. During this period of mercantile capitalism, a system of enumeration and a secular appreciation of risk flourished, creating both new ways of looking at the world and of expressing such viewpoints. In a climate favourable to the scientific calculation of probability, chance came to indicate, not the favour of the gods, but an absence of knowledge. From being a sacred, it now became an epistemological, category. This transformation was intimately connected with gambling, the latter of which provided a practical focus for the resolution of probabilistic problems. However, as we shall see, it was a long time even after chance had emerged as a distinct secular category before it finally shed the last vestiges of its earlier religious meaning, and it was only when it was thoroughly secularised into a ‘meaningless’ determinism in the nineteenth century that a path was cleared for its emergence as a genuine part of the world. By the twentieth century, chance had been stripped of its sacred and metaphysical attributes to become a secular tool of scientific explanation, so that what were once regarded as divine laws came to be understood as statistical probabilities. For the first time, chance became radically autonomous; an ontological category in its own right.

This process can be regarded as a secularisation of chance, and it is this, as well as its implications for the removal of metaphysical meaning from the world, that are the subject of this chapter. In the process of drawing a broad picture of the intellectual climate in which the notion of chance existed and developed, this discussion lays the groundwork for an examination of its purely recreational pursuit in the form of gambling games, which is the subject of Chapter 2.

The origins of chance

The prevalence of chance in creation myths is indicative of its essential contingency, in an anthropomorphic universe, on the idea of the sacred; on notions of the will of the gods and of divine providence. In these myths, the world exists in a primal state of chaos, from the Greek χaos: ‘the first state of the universe, a vast gulf or chasm, the nether abyss, empty space’ (The Oxford English Dictionary 1989, vol. 3, p. 22). This is the state of ‘primal nature’, ‘full of disorder’ that is imagined by Plato in the Statesman . In it, God feared that ‘all might be dissolved in the storm and disappear in an infinite chaos’, whereupon he ‘brought back the elements 5which had fallen into dissolution and disorder’, so creating order and the world as we know it (Plato 1987a, pp. 588–589).

The image that continually reappears in these world-creating transformations is one of gambling. In Greek mythology, Poseidon, Zeus and Hades divided the world between them in a dice game; possession of the land of Norway was determined by a dicing match between two kings and backed by the hand of God, while the Ases of Scandinavian mythology, like the Hindu Siva, determined the fate of mankind by throwing dice (Huizinga 1949; Onians 1988; Ekeland 1993). In every case, order is conferred on chaos through the activity of gambling.

We see in these myths an image of chance as something intimately connected with the falling of dice or lots; an image which befits its derivation from the Latin cadere, to fall. The noun cadentia means ‘the falling out or happening of events, the way in which things fall out; fortune; case’ (The Oxford English Dictionary 1989, vol. 3, p. 10). The word ‘chance’ literally refers to that which falls to us; a sense which is still evident today when we speak of the fall of the cards or dice, or of good or bad fortune befalling an individual.

Chance and divination

From the symbiotic relation of chance to notions of fate and divine providence derives the efficacy of divination as a means of communicating with the transcendent ‘beyond’. Regarded as meaningless in itself, in divination ritual, chance operates as a cypher for the expression of the will of the gods, and it is in this crucial relationship that the earliest conceptions of chance are to be understood. Because ‘alea signifies and reveals the favour of destiny’ (Caillois 1962, p. 17), in divination, chance becomes a vehicle for sacred meaning. The word itself, from the Latin divinatio, clearly highlights the derivation of the activity from the divine. In divination the expressive function of the chance event was deliberately courted so that the gods might intercede and determine an outcome to a question put to them, which was then interpreted as a divine pronouncement. In this way, divination indicated the future course of events as well as the approval or disapproval of destiny with regard to human actions.

Divination was universal and pervasive, a wide range of techniques¹ being practised in societies as diverse as ancient China and Greece, medieval Europe, and among North American tribes. Its ubiquity was recognised by Cicero in his De Divinatoire when he wrote: ‘I am aware of no people, however refined and learned or however savage and ignorant, which does not think that signs are given of future events, and that certain persons can recognise those signs and foretell events before they occur’ (Cicero 1971, p. 223). The variety of natural phenomena which could be interpreted as divine signs was almost unlimited, ranging from the flight of birds, regarded by Euripidis as the ‘messengers of the gods’, to the formation of clouds, known by the Hindus as ‘castles in the air’. Divination by an animal’s liver was believed to be a particularly efficacious ritual by the ancient Babylonians, the Chinese analysed the cracks in turtle shells, while the Germans, who, Tacitus tells us, had ‘the highest regard’ for lots and omens, utilised strips of bark and even horses in their divination rituals (Tacitus 1982, p. 109). Dreams also played an important role in divination, for when the body relaxed in sleep, ‘the reasoning portion of the soul was languid and inert’ (Cicero 1971, p. 291), and so was open to communication with the world of the supernatural. Oneiromancy—the interpretation of dreams—thus found widespread acceptance as a means of divination.

In every type of divination, chance events were possessed of a sacred significance and nowhere was this more evident than in the practice of cleromancy—the drawing or casting of lots. As a mechanism for the articulation of the Divine Voice, the lot was the earliest and most basic application of the random event for divinatory purposes. A simple action, such as the tossing of sticks, arrows or animal bones, would be carried out by a suitably qualified individual—a priest or shaman—and a question addressed to a deity or fate. The formation of the falling objects would then be interpreted as the ‘answer’ of the god, for the disposal of the lot was always recognised as divine intervention.

Cleromancy was widespread throughout the ancient world and, despite the strident criticism that it would later direct at all blasphemous, ‘pagan’ practices as lot casting, Christianity was not initially opposed to the activity. References to it appear regularly throughout the New Testament; for example, in Numbers 26: 55 the allocation of the lands of Canaan among the Israelites is decided by lot: ‘And the Lord spoke unto Moses saying…the land shall be divided by lot…. According to the lot shall the possession thereof be divided by many and few.’² Such a faith in lots indicated that to its practitioners, divination was never a resort to meaningless chance, but an appeal directed at transcendental powers, which, in the Judaeo-Christian tradition, happened to be God.

Divination played an important role in ancient society and was used primarily as a means of making—or at least consolidating—decisions. Before being undertaken, all enterprises of importance were referred to a diviner or prophet, who would establish whether or not they would succeed, and if so, which times were most propitious for such success. Van der Leeuw and Levy-Bruhl have drawn attention to the important (but often overlooked) point that in consulting the gods, enquirers frequently wanted to know not necessarily what would happen next, but whether or not what they wanted to happen would occur, repeating their questioning until they got the desired result (van der Leeuw 1967, p. 379; Levy-Bruhl 1966, p. 142).

Here we see an essentially practical, even irreverent, orientation towards the still very serious matter of man’s relationship with destiny. It is an attitude recognised by Flaceliere (1965) in the ‘genuine wisdom’ and ‘credulity’ shown by the Greeks towards their divinatory practices. He points to the strand of scepticism which ridiculed the efficacy of divination and which existed within a society which, while considered to be the womb of enlightenment and reason, still had widespread recourse to such practices. Such ambiguity is typical of human life, for, while propitiating the gods on the one hand, individuals were under no obligation to take their advice, and in fact often used them as an excuse if a suggested course of action went wrong!

Social life is seldom demarcated into clear-cut areas, and it is often out of these ambiguous crevices that the most fertile insights can be found. Within the seriousness of divine ritual there was also room for some frivolity and equivocation, an attitude which provided a space into which other, less serious states of mind could grow. This was manifest in the intrusion of the play spirit into serious matters of ritual, for the rituals and the implements involved in divination were frequently identical to those utilised in gambling games (Tylor 1913; Caillois 1962; Levy-Bruhl 1966; David 1969; Halliday and Fuller 1974). In the process of divining the future, interested parties could entertain themselves by betting on the outcome of rituals—in a sense, attempting to pre-empt the will of the gods. Such a concurrence has frequently been utilised in evolutionary arguments as evidence for the development of one activity out of another. According to Tylor, ‘primitive’ gambling originated in the practice of divination (Tylor 1913, p. 78), while David holds that the wager, and hence gambling, grew out of the drawing of lots and the interrogation of oracles ‘which have their roots deep in religious rituals’ (David 1969, p. 7). However, far from presenting itself as evidence for evolutionary progression, it can be argued that the association supports the far more complex and subtle conflation of game and ritual which exists in the same instance as part of the irreverent attitude discussed above. It is not a case of one ‘growing out’ of the other, as the evolutionists have suggested, for the two were conjoined from the very start, each part of the same outlook. There existed a playful aspect to divination as well as a sacred aspect to gambling. The latter did not simply emerge, as a secularised version, out of the former, and in any case, the prophetic connotations of gambling have never been completely extinguished, either formally (for example, in the case of fortune-telling with cards), or in the mind of gamblers, whose beliefs will be studied in Chapter 5. The relationship of divination to gambling will be examined further in Chapter 2.

Chance, fate and necessity

Nowhere in ancient or primitive cosmology do we find systematic consideration of chance as a phenomenon in its own right. Instead, its occurrence was consistently conflated with notions of destiny and the will of the gods. Roberts et al. state categorically that ‘explicit theories of chance do not appear in primitive cultures’ (Roberts et al. 1959, p. 602), where the unexpected event instead has a meaningful place as part of an anthropomorphic universe of spirits and powers.

It is in classical Greek philosophy that we first find anything approximating a consideration of chance, but here, as in primitive thought, the approach was never entirely divorced from religious ideas of the existence of the gods. From Socrates and Plato, through to the Stoics and Boethius, the existence of chance (tyche), luck and also timeliness (kairos) was consistently subsumed under more important questions of divine providence, determinism and the role of free will. An individual would be lucky because of fated circumstances: it would be the right time, the favourable moment, for an event to occur. This ‘active’ or ‘dynamic’ time—kairos —was predetermined, so that, far from denoting contingency, both the notions of luck and chance referred to the fatedness of human life, and revealed the intentions of the divine plan in their unfolding (Nussbaum 1986).

In the Laws Plato articulated the notion of God as the final telos, to which all so-called ‘contingency’ was subservient:

One might be moved to say…that no law is ever made by a man, and that human history is all an affair of chance…and yet there is something else which may also be said with no less plausibility…. That God is all, while chance and circumstance, under God, set the whole course of life for us.

(Plato 1969, p. 1300)

Greek philosophy resonates with the notions of fate and necessity, as Cicero puts it, ‘applying forcibly to all things’ (Cicero 1991, p. 91). The deterministic Greeks —and especially the Stoics—argued that the contents of the universe were united by ‘universal cosmic sympathy’, governed by fate and overseen by the all-knowing gods. Their belief in divine foreknowledge was thus an argument for universal determinism within which the existence of the gods was synonymous with the efficacy of divination (Flaceliere 1965; Sharples 1983). There was no room for chance within this worldview, for in a universe in which ‘nothing happens that [is] not necessary’ (Cicero 1991, p. 69) the very conception of it as an independent entity could have little real meaning.

In Aristotle however, we do find a specific consideration of chance as part of the doctrine of final causes. In a teleological system in which nature exhibits purposeful processes, chance for Aristotle was not an absence of causality, but rather an instance of coincidence—a ‘coincidental cause’.³ In the Physics he cites an example, whereby A wants to collect a debt from B and one day meets him unexpectedly at a market on the very day when B is collecting subscriptions (Aristotle 1990, p. 209). This is not chance, but merely a case of the coincidental intersection of two separate causes, which, as Sharples (1983) points out, is not incompatible with determinism.

As the link between ancient and medieval thought, Boethius attempted to resolve the problem of divine foreknowledge and human freedom. In his On the Consolation of Philosophy, we see an explication of the harmony of divine providence, as well as an explanation of chance in essentially Aristotelian terms. Once again, there is no room for chance, for all things are linked in a great cosmic design. Thus ‘a certain ordering embraces all things so that what departs from its place in that order falls back into an order…so that in the kingdom of providence, nothing should be permitted to random chance’ (Boethius 1991, p. 115). What appears as chance is only a manifestation of limited human understanding, for things only appear ‘random and confused’ when the principles governing their order are not known. It is only as an epistemological category, then, that chance can be said to exist, for if it is defined some other way, for example, as an outcome produced by random events, without cause, ‘then chance does not exist at all’ and in fact nor can anything exist: ‘the world is, I judge, completely empty. For when God directs all things into an ordered pattern, what place at all can there be left for randomness?’ (Boethius 1991, p. 125). Having said this, Boethius goes on to give his own Aristotelian example of the appearance of chance as coincidence. A man who digs to cultivate a field but finds gold is not subject to chance, but to ‘unforeseen and unexpected coincidence’, for there are causes of fortuitous gain which are not dependent on the intentions of the agent. Neither the man who buried the gold nor the one who tilled the field expected the gold to be found; its finding was simply an intersection of causes which were explicable in terms of pattern and design.

In all these philosophers we can see a strict determinism which encompasses notions of fate, divine providence, order and cause, and which resonates throughout the classical world, consistently obscuring, or at best marginalising, the study of chance as pure randomness. These issues were carried over into the Middle Ages, a period in which, despite the subsumption of philosophy to theology, the heritage of the classical thinkers excited ‘fervent curiosity’ and frequently ‘deep respect’ (Marenbon 1983, p. 3). The medieval concept of chance was derived from the Aristotelian notion of an absence of purpose or design, and was profoundly influenced by Boethius for whom chance as an absence of cause simply could not exist. However, monotheistic Christianity added elements of its own; most importantly a Church that railed against all forms of secular knowledge and saw evidence of the hand of God in every earthly phenomenon. In such a climate, the concept of the random event was rejected as pagan. Many Christians sought to explain ‘chance’ events on earth with reference to notions of fate, astrology or the will of God, hence the explanation of divine intervention behind miracles.⁴ St Augustine anticipated the dominant...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• THE AGE OF CHANCE
• ROUTLEDGE STUDIES IN SOCIAL AND POLITICAL THOUGHT
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• ILLUSTRATIONS
• PREFACE: GAMBLING, CHANCE AND THE SUSPENSION OF REALITY
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• INTRODUCTION
• 1: THE IDEA OF CHANCE
• 2: THE PURSUIT OF CHANCE
• 3: PLAYGROUNDS—A MAP OF THE MODERN GAMBLING SITES
• 4: THE EXPERIENCE OF PLAY
• 5: THE MAGICAL-RELIGIOUS WORLDVIEW
• EPILOGUE
• NOTES
• REFERENCES