The Myth of Luck

Philosophy, Fate, and Fortune

Steven D. Hales

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781350149311
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Épistémologie en philosophie

Humanity has thrown everything we have at implacable luck-novel theologies, entire philosophical movements, fresh branches of mathematics-and yet we seem to have gained only the smallest edge on the power of fortune. The Myth of Luck tells us why we have been fighting an unconquerable foe. Taking us on a guided tour of one of our oldest concepts, we begin in ancient Greece and Rome, considering how Plato, Plutarch, and the Stoics understood luck, before entering the theoretical world of probability and exploring how luck relates to theology, sports, ethics, gambling, knowledge, and present-day psychology. As we travel across traditions, times and cultures, we come to realize that it's not that as soon as we solve one philosophical problem with luck that two more appear, like heads on a hydra, but rather that the monster is altogether mythological. We cannot master luck because there is nothing to defeat: luck is no more than a persistent and troubling illusion. By introducing us to compelling arguments and convincing reasons that explain why there is no such thing as luck, we finally see why in a very real sense we make our own luck, that luck is our own doing. The Myth of Luck helps us to regain our own agency in the world - telling the entertaining story of the philosophy and history of luck along the way.

1 LACHESIS’S LOTTERY AND THE HISTORY OF LUCK

“How complex and misleading a thing is luck!”

—MENANDER, UNIDENTIFIED FRAGMENT, C. 300 BCE

Luck is a golden thread woven through the tapestry of the history of ideas, uniting gods and gamblers, philosophers and theologians, logicians, astrologers, emperors, scientists, and slaves. All have feared ill fortune and hoped for good luck, all have wondered what the fates have written in the book of their lives. Much of who we become is due to chance and yet we tell ourselves that we are self-made and our lives are wholly due to our own choices. Or when we have hard times we write it off to bad luck instead of our own mistakes. Even what we know and understand about the world around us is often just good fortune, not due to our own praiseworthy effort. We struggle to predict and control the events around us, and try to foresee what the future will bring. Most of all we attempt to explain our own lives to ourselves, and sort out what was chance and what was our own doing. Humanity has thrown everything we have at implacable luck—novel theologies, entire philosophical movements, fresh branches of mathematics—and yet we seem to have gained only the smallest edge on the power of fortune.

The present book will argue that we have been fighting an unconquerable foe. It’s not that as soon as we solve one problem with luck that two more appear, like new heads from a decapitated hydra, but rather that the monster is altogether mythological. We cannot master luck because there is literally nothing to defeat: we will see that luck is no more than a persistent and troubling illusion. There is no such thing as luck. Recognizing that fact will help us focus our energies on related phenomena that are real, like fortune and chance. What’s more, we’ll see that in a very real sense that we make our own luck, that luck is our own doing, our own perspective on how things turn out. Cleaning our mental house of dusty old concepts that we’re hanging onto because we keep hoping that they will one day be useful—that is liberating. To give up luck is to regain our own agency in the world.

The Myth of Er

Why did we ever think that luck was a vital notion? Let’s trace out the history of luck, and start with Plato. “Plato” was a nickname meaning “broad,” a reference to his beefy wrestler’s build, and he stands in antiquity shouldering the entirety of the Western philosophical tradition upon his mighty frame. One of the many pleasures of reading Plato is that you get this sense of nascent rationality emerging out of an older mystical tradition. The golden age of Greek philosophy (fifth to fourth centuries bce) arrives a mere 300 years after Hesiod’s origin stories of the gods in his Theogony and Homer’s tales of heroes, demigods, and monsters in the Iliad and Odyssey. Plato’s dialogues are at once filled with subtle and ingenious logic—indeed, they are the very invention of the Socratic Method—but then in the next passage one makes a left turn into the arcane. The end of the Phaedo reads like a Lonely Planet travel guide to Hades (“A good walk starts at the River Acheron and will take you past the new souls at the Acherusian Lake and down to the pit of Tartarus. Be sure to try the ouzo at a nearby taverna.”). We owe the legend of Atlantis to Plato: he is our oldest, original source on Atlantis and presents it seriously in Timaeus and Critias. In Phaedrus Plato even depicts the Egyptian gods Thoth and Amon as just as legitimate and credible as the speaking oaks at the sanctuary of Zeus.

Plato’s most famous dialogue, the Republic, is an extended discussion about the nature of justice, how to live a harmonious life, and the ideal political state. Yet the Republic wraps up with a curious folk tale of the afterlife that has come to be known as the Myth of Er. Not everyone appreciates Plato’s juxtaposition of reasoned debate and credulous recitation of the supernatural. The classicist Julia Annas characterizes the Myth of Er as a “vulgar, painful shock” and “a lame and messy ending” to Plato’s masterpiece.¹ But Er’s tale embodies the complex weaving of luck, fate, fortune, chance, choice, and destiny that we see in our own lives and in how we understand gambling, free will, moral responsibility, scientific discovery, social egalitarianism, and the nature of knowledge in the modern day.

Er was a Pamphylian warrior killed in battle. He was piled up with the other corpses for nearly two weeks until finally brought home and laid upon a funeral pyre. As the mourners came with the torches, Er sprang to life, as good as new, to relate what he had seen in the afterlife. (Plato does not comment on whether the attendees were at all surprised by this turn of events.) Er reported that after his death he journeyed with a large company of other souls to a “mysterious region.” In this place was a one-way tunnel leading into the Earth and another coming out of it, and there were two similar passageways leading up into and down from the sky. Judges sat before the entrances, deciding which souls were allowed to take the heavenly skyway and which were sent down the chthonic subway, and they affixed tokens of passage to each of the souls. Coming out of the road from the heavens was a procession of clean and cheerful travelers, whereas those exiting the underworld tunnel looked squalid and dusty. The judges did not allow Er to move on, but singled him out as an observer to recount what he had seen. All the souls newly delivered from Tartarus (the deep abyss of suffering) or the Elysian Fields (the halcyon isles of the blessed) mingled with the freshly deceased as in a festival meadow, swapping stories and striking up acquaintances. The mingling souls spent a week there before being allowed to move on. The whole affair is reminiscent of an international airport, with passport control officers who decide which stamps and visas to issue and where you are allowed to travel, the first-class passengers who arrive at the gates fresh and jaunty, and the rest who are haggard and weary. But everyone is trapped in the concourse for a week.

On the eighth day, Er and the others were sent on a five-day journey to a great pillar of rainbow light which fastened the heavens and the Earth. Plato’s description of the cosmos here is complicated, with nested colored whorls spinning in the vault of the sky, but the key element is that this is the Spindle of Necessity, turning on the knees of the goddess Ananke (Lady Necessity). She is attended by her daughters, the three Fates: Lachesis, who sings of the past, Clotho, who sings of the present, and Atropos, who sings of the future (it is hard not to see the Fates presaging Dickens’s Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Future). The travelers were directed to Lachesis, who held a box full of lots, like tickets to a raffle. Also in the box were patterns of different kinds of lives—short lives, long ones, tyrannies, lives of physical beauty or bodily strength, lives of low birth or high, exiles, beggars, even lives of animals. The prophet of Lachesis threw out the numbered tickets, and everyone (except Er, who was just watching) picked up the one that landed at their feet. Then the prophet tossed out the patterns of lives. Based on the number you drew, you got to choose the kind of life you would have when returned to Earth and reborn.

Certainly Er’s tale has much in common with other, later, accounts of the afterlife: that there is an afterlife, that you will be judged on the basis of your virtues and vices, and that you will be rewarded or punished. One part that did not catch on widely in the West was the idea of reincarnation. Early Christianity, for example, toyed with the idea of reincarnation for a few hundred years—the sixth-century theologian Origen of Alexandria was its most prominent defender—but ultimately rejected the doctrine as heretical. According to Er one spent 1,000 years in either Elysium or Tartarus before rejoining the migration of souls back into bodily forms. That too Christianity rejected to make rewards and punishments eternal instead. Classical Buddhism took these ideas in a somewhat different direction: deeds while living determined your karma, like bookkeeping entries in the ledger book of your life, and karma determined your life upon rebirth. There was no punishment or reward in an afterlife, but an automatic recycling back into the world.

Plato advises us to choose wisely in picking the kind of life we want to have upon rebirth. #1 in Lachesis’s lottery, freshly arrived from a millennium in heaven, chose to be a great tyrant upon rebirth, apparently failing to read the fine print of the job description, which included eating his own children and other horrors. Others chose to be a swan, a lion, a nightingale, and other animals. A well-known “buffoon” chose to be an ape. Plato emphasizes that we are responsible for our own lives, and that it is up to us to pursue wisdom and live virtuously. The prophet of Lachesis declares that the blame for a poor life rests on the one who chose it, not on the gods, and that even the soul who drew the last number in the lottery still has the opportunity for an acceptable life. According to Er, the final pick in the lottery went to Odysseus, who, after his previous life of stress and responsibilities, poked around the remaining possible lives until in the corner he found one for an ordinary, unambitious citizen. He was reportedly satisfied.

You might well wonder, though, how much of this “every possible life is minimally decent” is just divine propaganda. Despite the assurance of the gods, our lives seem very much out of our control, even whether we are able to adequately aim for a just life. Lachesis’s lottery itself is random; what number you draw helps determine which of the patterns of life remain for you to choose from. And not every life is as good as every other. Some are manifestly worse, and if you have the final number in the drawing, the options remaining to you may be unappealing—like being the last person at a box of donuts and nothing tasty remains. So what life you get to have is chance as much as choice. Even what you can make of that life is partly due to luck. Plato seems to recognize this when he says of the various possible lives that “the choice of a different life inevitably determined a different character.” The kind of person you are able to become may largely be fixed by the kind of life you have and the circumstances you are in.

Suppose that you get your numbered ticket in the afterlife, and these lives are available to you. Which do you choose?

1 You are a rich business despot. You will be divorced several times, your employees all hate you, and your children will fight over your estate.

2 You work in a factory, making parts for the robots that will eventually take over your job. Your back hurts.

3 You are a suburban parent, with a decent ranch-style house, three kids, and a spouse you usually get along with. You pay your bills and your job is OK. You could lose a few pounds.

4 You are a hippie who thinks organic gardening and yoga will undermine global capitalism.

5 You are a philosopher who insulted most of the prominent citizens in your town. You never got along with your spouse, never published, live in poverty, and will be executed by the state.

All of these lives have their pros and cons, but it would be foolish to suppose that the kind of person you become—the development of your character—is just the same whether you are a hippie, factory worker, autocrat, suburban parent, or Socrates. As University of Oklahoma football coach Barry Switzer famously said, “Some people are born on third base and go through life thinking they hit a triple.” Other factors that affect the goodness and value of your life also seem like a matter of luck: whether you are born with a heart condition or not, if you are shot in a firefight or just missed, whether you invested in Microsoft at the right time or the wrong one. Moreover, these vagaries of fortune are not evenly distributed. It may be that upon us all a little rain must fall, but some people are hit with Hurricane Katrina. Even the degree to which we can be credited for our knowledge may be the result of fortune. Er was no one special—just a random fallen soldier from an out-of-the-way spot—but he was picked to witness the design of the afterworld and return to tell about it. Er’s understanding is not really attributable to a virtuous intellectual character, his assiduous reasoning, or his relentless inquiry. He was merely lucky to be favored by the gods.

When the reincarnating souls had chosen a new form of life, they paraded before the Fates and Ananke herself, so that the goddesses could ratify the destiny of their lots and choices and make the web of their destinies irreversible. Only then could they drink of the River Lethe, forgetting their travels in the afterlife, and return to the world of flesh and blood. The idea that the patterns and ends of our lives should be locked in by fate and necessity is at odds with the conception of our lives as either subject to chancy luck or under our volitional control. How can we be responsible for who we are and how things turn out for us when on the one hand we have an inescapable destiny foreordained by the gods and on the other it is just good luck or bad?

While the Myth of Er nicely raises some of the core questions of the present book, we needn’t accept Plato’s theories of an afterlife, or really any theories of an afterlife at all, for these questions to be pressing in our own lives. To what extent is your life the result of your choices, the exercise of your skills, and the implementation of your will? How much of what happens to you—your successes and failures, where you live, what you do, whom you love—is simply luck? Can you count on your beliefs as trustworthy knowledge, or are you merely lucky if they are true? Some find it comforting to suppose that our lives are planned in advance, that they are essential components of a cosmic order. Perhaps even then it is luck whether the Fates have ordained that you are a big cog or a little one.

Tuche and Fortuna

For the Greeks, luck was personified as Tuche (or Tyche), the goddess of luck. In Olympian Ode 12, the great Greek poet Pindar wrote:

Savior Tuche, daughter of Zeus the Deliverer, I pray to you … But men’s hopes are tossed up and down as they voyage through waves of empty lies. No man on earth has yet found out from the gods a sure token of things to come; man’s perception is blinded as to the future. Many things fall out for men in ways they do not expect: sometimes their hoped-for pleasure is thwarted, sometimes, when they have encountered storms of pain, their grief changes in a moment to profound joy.²

Depictions of Tuche sometimes showed her with a ship’s rudder, indicating that it was she who steered our lives. However, as the playwright Menander of Athens noted, “Tuche’s current is swift to change its course.”

While Tuche was portrayed as unpredictable and changing, she was an agent of cosmic balance too: ba...