Well Here We Are: What Are The Odds?

Mr. Lapham writes an essay.
From Lapham's Quarterly:

Dame Fortune

Spinning the wheel, meeting the Fates.

It is not difficult to be wise occasionally and by chance,
but it is difficult to be wise assiduously and by choice.
—Joseph Joubert

The evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins posts the odds on the chance encounter and then fertile union of sperm and egg in my mother’s womb at a number outnumbering the sand grains of Arabia. Long odds, but longer still because “the lottery starts before we are conceived. Your parents had to meet, and the conception of each was as improbable as your own.” Work back the thread of lucky breaks through all the antecedents animal, vegetable, and mineral that are the sum of mankind’s time on earth, and wherefrom consciousness and pulse if not at the hand of the bountiful blind woman, Dame Fortune?

The incalculable run of luck I’m unable to comprehend as a number; I hear it as a sound. Thirty-five years ago in a labor room at New York Hospital, the sonogram of my wife’s belly picking up the heartbeat of my youngest child on final approach to the light of the sun. He’d come a long way. Atoms wandering in the abyss, then in the womb for the nine months during which a human embryo ascends through a sequence touching on over 3 billion years of evolutionary change, up from the shore of a prehistoric sea, traveling as amphibian, fish, bird, reptile, lettuce leaf, and mammal to a room with a view of the Queensboro Bridge. I heard the sound then, hear it now, as the chance at a lifetime shaped from the dust of a star.

Albert Einstein didn’t wish to believe that God “plays dice with the world,” but the equations posted on the blackboards of twentieth-century physics—among them Einstein’s own proof of wave-particle duality, Werner Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, Max Planck’s quantum mechanics—suggest that chance is a force of nature as fundamental as gravity. So does the consensus of opinion in this issue of Lapham’s Quarterly. Except for sixteenth-century theologian John Calvin, who believed there is no such thing as fortune and chance, that “all events are governed by the secret counsel of God,” the witnesses called to testify on the pages that follow regard Dame Fortune as a presence to be reckoned with, visible to the eye of history, glimpsed across the bridges of memory and metaphor in the words of the occasionally wise.

Roman soldiers gambling over Christ’s tunic, detail of The Crucifixion, 
by Andrea Solario, 1503. © Godong / UIG / Bridgeman Images.

Heisenberg conceived of all facts as momentary perceptions of probability; so did Titus Lucretius Carus, the Roman poet who in the first century BC composed the 7,400 lines of lyric but unrhymed verse On the Nature of Things infused with the thought of Greek philosopher Epicurus, who in the third century BC taught that the universe consists of atoms and void and nothing else. No afterlife, no divine retribution or reward, nothing other than a vast turmoil of creation and destruction, the elementary particles of matter (“the celestial seeds of things”) constantly in motion, colliding and combining in the inexhaustible wonder of everything that exists—sun and moon, the wind and the rain, “bright wheat and lush trees, and the human race, and the species of beasts.”

Thomas Jefferson, when asked for the source of his philosophy, identified himself as “an Epicurean,” listing On the Nature of Things among the books from which he never ceased learning. He borrowed from it in 1826 to petition the Virginia state legislature for permission to dispose by lottery enough of his property at Monticello to settle a $100,000 debt. The legislature twice denied permission on the ground that games of chance are immoral. Jefferson had posed the question:

But what is chance? Nothing happens in this world without a cause. If we know the cause, we do not call it chance; but if we do not know it, we say it was produced by chance…If we consider games of chance immoral, then every pursuit of human industry is immoral; for there is not a single one that is not subject to chance, not one wherein you do not risk a loss for the chance of some gain.

The legislature reconsidered its decision, but before a lottery could be held Jefferson died bankrupt, his family forced to sell the property at a price favoring the buyers. One man’s gain, another man’s loss, but no moral in the tale because reality makes itself up as it goes along, a near infinite number of atoms encountering one another at unstable moments in time, made temporarily manifest as bank balance, bonobo, or butterfly. If physics is nature and nature is God (three worknames for the same tradecraft), God is free to throw dice with cause and effect because all the skin in the game is his own.

E.M. Cioran, Romanian philosopher, writing in 1969, finds in the comfort of pagan wisdom an escape from the dungeons of Christian theology. If “there is no misfortune that we cannot refer as we like either to a distraction of Providence or to the indifference of Chance, or finally to the inflexibility of Fate,” we shake free of “the morbid optimism which, despite all the evidence, identifies progress with apotheosis.” The ancient philosophies found the best chance to lead a sweet life and generate offspring in the embrace of beauty and the pursuit of pleasure—pleasure not as sensual debauchery but as the sense of well-being embodied in living justly and lovingly in a generosity of spirit....

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The Jefferson link above goes to another essay:

Venture Capital

Thomas Jefferson on the morality of chance. 

with this explanatory note:

Contributor

Thomas Jefferson 

From a petition to the General Assembly of Virginia. So burdened was the third U.S. president by a $100,000 debt that he feared losing his family property at Monticello. Jefferson went to the state legislature for permission to dispose of part of his holdings by lottery, which was otherwise prohibited by law. His petition was twice denied before it passed on February 20, 1826. The lottery never took place, as Jefferson died on July 4 of that year, and his family had to sell off most of his property, including Monticello.