Rolling the Dice: An Interview with Jackson Lears
In late spring 2005, the online gaming empire known as PartyGaming— home of the wildly lucrative website PartyPoker.com—announced that it would take its company public on the London stock market. Speculators predicted that, on the open market, PartyGaming would be valued at over $10 billion, just a few poker chips less than the value attributed to the venerable British department store chain Marks & Spencer. Despite historic attempts to control or marginalize games of chance as a socially disreputable practice, the multibillion-dollar gambling industry in both its virtual and physical incarnations—from online poker websites to lottery tickets and off-track betting parlors to suburban casinos and the emergence of Las Vegas as a cultural capital—seems to have never been stronger or more resilient.
In his recent book Something for Nothing: Luck in America (2003), Jackson Lears, the Board of Governors Professor of History at Rutgers University and the editor-in-chief of Raritan, asserts that gambling is a central component of contemporary culture. Lears argues that this is not because Americans are a nation of gamblers per se, but because gambling is a modern distillation of what can best be described as a “culture of chance.” For Lears, the concept of chance and its various metaphysical siblings Luck, Fortune, and Grace have profoundly influenced American life in everything from personal expression to social policy. With the rise of the market economy in the early nineteenth century, Lears argues, the culture of chance has fought tooth and nail for survival against the rational appeals of a “culture of control.”
The divinatory dimensions of chance through which Americans experienced the world, as embodied in games of luck and skill and as practiced by the confidence man and gambler, were transmuted into rational systems of forecasting and speculation practiced by the stockbroker and day trader. Trying to predict the future while trying to maintain control, Lears suggests, remains a ritualized component of both religious and secular cultures. The gambler’s dice, the soothsayer’s bones, the fortune-teller’s tea leaves, and the financier’s econometric charts are more closely aligned than we’ve been led to believe. David Serlin spoke with Lears by phone in June 2005.
Cabinet: How did you become interested in the study of chance or, as you call it in your book, the “culture of chance”?
Jackson Lears: There were a lot of different streams that came together in this book. Since my first book, No Place of Grace, I have thought seriously about the cultural longing for transcendence that survived the economic rationality of the nineteenth century. I perceived that there was some kind of longing for grace that animated the impulse to gamble, and once I had hit on that hunch I began to find evidence of it everywhere. I began to see that there were connections between the gambler’s dice and the soothsayer’s bones. The gambler and the diviner were brothers under the skin. This led me to situate gambling in the midst of what I call a culture of chance, which includes all sorts of rituals and practices that use chance as a way of knowing or a way of trying to discern the will of the cosmos, the meaning of the universe, or even—in the case of Calvinist casting of lots—the will of God. The notion of luck is always communicated as an unearned gift, a free gift. Luck, like grace, is something that happens to you. You don’t earn it. To me, this represented a very deep realization at some fundamental level of the futility of striving and trying to control all outcomes, which seems to me at the heart of our dominant culture, whether in religious or secular forms. I began to see gambling and the culture of chance as a kind of counterpoint to this.
The other stream that fed my interest in chance came about while I was on a subway platform in Manhattan. I was waiting in a short line to buy a subway token and noticed that there was a much longer line next to mine, snaking all the way around the platform, for the lottery machine. This was 1994. Newt Gingrich and his buddies had just won a huge victory in Congress, the “Contract with America” was in the air, and there were all sorts of messages directed at Americans to take responsibility for their own economic fate, pull themselves up by their bootstraps, and refuse welfare and other “handouts” that they didn’t deserve. The rhetoric of the self-made man was making a comeback. I looked around at these people waiting in line for the lottery ticket and I thought, these people work hard, but the fact that they’re in this lottery line suggests that they realize, at their core, that hard work is not the whole story. Sometimes you just have to catch a break. And catching a break is basically the secular American version of grace.
Cabinet: Was this epiphany—seeing working people spending their hard-earned money on lottery tickets—the origin of the distinction that you draw throughout your book between the “culture of chance” and the “culture of control”?
Jackson Lears: What I wanted to show in this book is that there was, and continues to be, a huge overlap between the culture of control, which relies on some predictability and systematic direction of fate, and the culture of chance, which is much less certain that diligence is the only path to success and is willing sometimes to roll the dice. These two cultures not only overlap, but they interpenetrate each other. One finds some combination of chance and control working together, whether you’re talking about sports or investment or religious faith. Some imagine life as a series of calculated risks, more like a poker game than a lottery, in which people realize that they can’t control all outcomes; but some also want to be able to use their skills to their best advantage, as one does in poker. Yet, at the same time, people recognize that they cannot control all outcomes and that, in the end, luck will play a role as well, and we have to acknowledge its power.
We find this invariable coexistence of chance and control on Wall Street and in the history of speculation. People debate whether or not speculation is mere gambling or whether it’s an investment. Huge sums of money are spent by investment banking firms and brokerage houses to persuade people that, in fact, they aren’t taking a risk when they invest and that they can put their portfolios together in various ways that can minimize if not eliminate risk altogether. Of course, anyone who claims they can eliminate risk ought to be brought up immediately on charges before the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
Cabinet: Your book describes how the culture of control secularized some of the religious or spiritual elements of chance. So is the oxymoronic concept of the “safe risk” or “safe beta” part of that process of secularization? There’s an unspoken sense that a “safe beta” is not a bet at all; it’s almost a guarantee, such as when aspiring students identify a college as their “safety school.”
Jackson Lears: That’s one of the paradoxes that we look at every day in the culture of capitalism. On the one hand, there has to be this promise of a magical reward of wealth without work; at the same time, this magic has to be stabilized and rationalized and made to seem predictable in order to cancel out, or threaten to cancel out, the elements of luck and risk. Since the turn of the last century, folks like J.P. Morgan have attempted to make speculative capitalism seem safe and predictable. Of course, this falls apart completely in the Great Depression and only begins to emerge again in the long bull market of the 1980s and 1990s. But there is something quite misleading about the attempt to be reassuring on the subject of risk, to say that what is genuinely a risk is not a risk but is, in fact, a safe option. I’m reminded of the celebrity cowboy Roy Rogers’s farewell to his faithful TV viewers in the 1950s, and it seems to me to be the signature advice of that era: “Be brave, but don’t take chances.” This is a perfectly self-canceling sentence. It says, in effect, “Experience the frisson of bravery, the excitement, the pleasure of feeling like you are doing something heroic. But never bet on anything less than a sure thing.”
Human beings want the excitement of risk, but they also want the safety that comes with containing its worst possibilities. I think that, in some ways, these paired desires capture the dialectic I was trying to get at in my book. The culture of control is not just rooted in a desire to dominate other people and the environment. It is rooted in a desire that is just as natural, I think, and as universal and timeless as the desire for risk and uncertainty and luck, and that’s the desire for stability and predictability....MUCH MORE
