Lewis Lapham at Lapham's Quarterly:
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.
Playing with Dice, Lahore, India, c. 1890. © Royal Asiatic Society, London / 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.....
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