Ed Smith’s book Luck (2012), which I finished a little while ago, takes a while to move out of third gear. But the final third of the book is fascinating.
Smith is a former elite sportsman who played Test cricket for England, and now works as a journalist.
His description of being part of a rebuilding Kent cricket team that decided to stop talking about luck as part of the team’s “Core Covenant” is a clue to how the book turns out. He discovers that while “bad luck” might sometimes be a reason and sometimes an excuse, it also had an invaluable social role:
”Other days it was just a way of softening the blow for someone who felt distraught.”
In abolishing luck, the Kent team had “signed up to utopia”.
Counter-factuals
Of course, some of his interviews, with the beneficiaries of strings of good luck, lack counter-factuals. Smith is able to interview the Battle of Britain pilot who survived through good luck, but not the one who didn’t, although perhaps it doesn’t matter to his thesis.
When he does get to some counter-factuals, he’s on weaker ground. What if Churchill or Adolf Hitler had died when they were hit by cars in 1931, in New York and Munich respectively? What if Franz Ferdinand’s chauffeur hadn’t taken a wrong turn in Sarajevo?
Looking at these through a social sciences lens, it seems to leave out the question of social and political structures and conjunctures out of the question.
Yes, Norway’s vast Ekofisk oil field was found by chance after Philips had decided to abandon the search. But it would have been discovered sooner or later.
And yes, he met his wife through chance—on a train that neither of them had intended to be on—but, but, but.
The role of luck
It is in the last couple of chapters that the book gets to be interesting, in its discussion first of sports, then of societies, and the role of luck within them.
Sports need some degree of luck to make them interesting to spectators. He notes the Woody Allen film in which a tennis ball is poised on the netcord, and could drop either way. But, in practice, it’s unlikely to makes a difference.
A tennis match is played out over hundreds of points, and one or two lucky points make little difference. While there are days when players beat their ratings, they’re unlikely just to get lucky. Basketball, similarly; lots of scores mean that it’s hard to be lucky.
One bit of luck
But in football, where it hard to score a goal and a goal either way often decides the outcome, one bit of luck—a goal scored off a beachball, for example—can swing the game. Not over a season, where, as the cliche has it the table doesn’t lie, but certainly over the course of a single match, where the less fancied side has a chance of winning. So it’s a better deal for spectators.
And in Formula 1 the former Chief Executive Bernie Ecclestone mused about adding artificial rain to races because it would make races more unpredictable.
Societies without ‘luck’
What was true for Smith’s Kent cricket team is also true for societies. Smith quotes E.R.Dodds, who chastised the ancient Greeks for moving towards rationalism and then relapsing towards the Fates. But the evidence from societies that do not have a concept of ‘luck’ is not attractive.
The world of the Azande, who had no word for luck,
was characterized by mistrust, suspicion and jealousy between neighbours. No one ever simply died in Zandeland. Someone was always to blame (p228).
Similarly for the Dubuan people of Papua New Guinea:
In the absence of luck, it is impossible that anyone can ever be struck by lightning without an enemy having willed it out of envy. A neighbour’s harvest can only be better than yours due to black magic (p229).
Luck and ‘agency’
But, as Smith says, our modern language about ‘agency’ doesn’t help either. In its way that’s also a pretence that luck doesn’t matter:
We tend to consider the growth of ‘agency’—the opposite of blind luck—to be synonymous with the progress of human civilization. But the lessons of sociology and anthropology suggest we shouldn’t interpret words like luck, fortune and chance as signs of backwardness. In fact, we should be more worried when we stop believing in luck.
And in fact we know that the successful always have some luck (and sometimes some privilege) to help them along, while people who don’t succeed are often assailed by bad luck. (I wrote a Just Two Things on an article in Aeon on this subject a while back).
In a complex, emergent world, an individual can never act with reasonable knowledge of all the possible outcomes. Bad luck is always going to strike somewhere. It’s better to accept this—and have a forgiving safety net to catch people.
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A version of this article is also published on my Just Two Things Newsletter.
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