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Need Help? Outrageous fortune
Author: MALCOLM KNOX Date: 24/03/2012 Words: 1886 Source: SMH Publication: Sydney Morning Herald Section: News Review Page: 22

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The modern tendency to deny the existence of luck leads logically to blaming the victim. Since Samuel Smiles invented an industry with his 1859 book Self-Help, it has been a project of the capitalist age to abolish the idea of luck. Smiles, who outsold Charles Darwin and John Stuart Mill that year, opened with a line that said it all: "Heaven helps those who help themselves." The dogmas of self-help have remained religiously rigid. Since 2006, more than 21 million readers have bought Rhonda Byrne's The Secret, learning that success will come if you want it enough, and in the right way. Luck is not something for which you wait, passively, in hope; instead, it is a product you can make, a force you can attract. The assault on luck underpinned the rise of European democracy after the French Revolution; merit and hard work could earn a place in society, displacing the accident of "high" birth. Submission to chance had empowered both churches, who could mediate between humans and the forces that could, say, destroy their crops, and divinely-appointed monarchs. As such, minimising the role of luck is taken to be a modern, industrial disposition, which the self-help texts encoded and encouraged. The English writer Ed Smith, in his new book titled, simply, Luck, argues the contrary: that acknowledging luck is more progressive and modern than denying it; that to admit luck's place in our affairs is essential to understanding who we are; that to believe that we make our own luck carries the bitter corollary that those who are cursed by fortune do not deserve compassion. Smith's background is in sport - he played cricket for England - and he has witnessed not only the role of luck in determining personal careers and national success but also, just as tellingly, sportsmen's feverish attitude to omens. Smith, a professional sportsman - the ultimate modern, meritocratic pursuit - nevertheless was surrounded by men who had to put on their left sock first, step onto a field with the right foot, carry a lucky piece of coloured rag, or wear the same underwear as long as its "lucky" run lasted. England's greatest cricketer, W. G. Grace, once stopped Australia's captain Jack Blackham from tossing his "lucky" penny, because it kept landing favourably for its thrower. (When Grace seized and tossed it himself, he won.) As a laboratory of human behaviour, sport is remarkably unscientific. Smith cites the "most famous quote in sport", golfer Gary Player's comment that "the harder I practise, the luckier I get". Yet Player also wore black, head to toe, presumably because he acknowledged that beyond his tireless practice there was an element of chance that only the colour of his clothing could influence. Smith analyses different games through the prism of luck, arguing that the design of tennis makes it the least luck-dependent (soccer, by contrast, which can be decided by a single lucky moment, is among the most). We can have faith, Smith says, that Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal and Novak Djokovic were the best men's tennis players of the past decade because they repeatedly showed their superiority in a game designed to minimise luck. Nonetheless, Smith misses out on the extraordinary case of competitive surfing, surely the most luck-dependent sport of all because winning relies on three dimensions. Skill is one, but more influential are the subjective views of judges and, most of all, the arrival of a wave, the right wave, at just the right moment. And yet this most chancy of sports, which should spit out results like a roulette wheel, has been totally dominated by one man, Kelly Slater, who has won 11 world championships in 18 years. Surely he can't have been that lucky. Few believe Slater is that much more skilful than all other surfers. Seeking explanation, spooked rivals have wondered if Slater can actually bend nature to his will, so often has the right wave come for him at the right instant. At the very least, he is believed to have a Rhonda Byrne-esque secret, in that his powers of wish fulfilment are stronger than anyone else's. As Louis Pasteur put it 160 years ago, "Chance favours the prepared mind." But Smith might, had he considered Slater's run of championships, have put forward a radically different thesis: let's say that Slater's skill is roughly equal to his closest challenger each year, and there is a 50/50 chance of either Slater or another surfer winning. (This gives a great weight to Slater's skill - that the winner will be either him or any other surfer.) If that's so, his 11 world titles would be akin to a coin landing heads 11 times in 18 tosses. There is no law making that any more or less

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smh.com.au - The Sydney Morning Herald likely than any other result. Which is not to say that Slater has been purely lucky - his durability to the age of 40 certainly goes beyond luck - but to neglect the power of luck in his success is to give him literally supernatural gifts. It's easier to talk about luck in individual cases, say in sport or a person's artistic or business career, than to talk about the luck of nations or communities. As a country, can things simply go your way, in the etymological sense of the German Glueck, which means both luck and happiness? The Australian writers Mark Davis and George Megalogenis have in the past four years produced updates on Donald Horne's The Lucky Country. Horne didn't think we were a lucky country; but he thought we thought we were and had responded to our extraneous luck - mineral resources, geography, time of settlement and so on - with a gambler's carefree attitude. We were like Stanley in A Streetcar Named Desire: "Luck is believing you're lucky." While their viewpoints are opposed - Davis says we've screwed up our inheritance in the past 30 years, while Megalogenis says we've engineered our prosperity - both share a denial that dumb luck had much to do with where we're at. These responses attribute a great power to decision makers, quoting, with approval, Paul Keating's line, "If you change the government, you change the country." Megalogenis says our governments have managed the current minerals boom well. Paul Cleary, on the other hand, in his book Too Much Luck, says they have wasted the windfall by, inter alia, not setting up a Norwegian-style permanent savings fund. The Norwegians have a saying: "Luck is loaned, not owned." Perhaps their good sense derives from some deep folk intuition about luck. But what if our governments and other powerful bodies don't have that much influence? What if history moved more like the way Tolstoy described it in War and Peace, great tides of inexplicable human forces to which leaders clung and hoped for the best? "Kings," he wrote, "are the slaves of history." What if Napoleon's fatalism - "Better a general be lucky than good" - was a truer reading of history than the idea that leaders sit behind a control panel and pull levers that produce outcomes? Smith addresses the question of "lucky governments" by citing a study by Andrew Leigh, when he was at the Australian National University, which found that ambient global booms increased a government's chances of re-election by 7 per cent, whereas good government, measured by the country's own outperformance of world growth, only increased its chances by 3 per cent. "Competence," Leigh concludes, "is barely half as effective as luck." (The fact that Leigh is now a federal ALP member shows either he doesn't quite believe his findings or he has a great sense of humour.) In a way, though, determining the precise mix of luck and agency in the complex machinery of government and society is to descend into questions of how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. Our acknowledgement of some luck, Smith contends, is not at all primitive but modern and humane. Deference to the power of luck, he says, has been a key ingredient of civilisations that have prospered. He writes of the English anthropologist E. E. Evans-Pritchard, who in 1926 "went to live with the Azande tribe in the Sudan". He found that they had no concept of luck, no word for luck or chance. There was no such thing. Instead, every misfortune - even a flood or a crop failure - was due to an enemy's wishes. The Azande went to witch doctors to find out who was cursing them, to place counter-curses, and eventually to wage war. In his book Envy, the German anthropologist Helmut Schoeck wrote that "societies lacking the idea of luck find it hard to develop enterprise and aspiration. Why? Without any means of explaining the differing lots that fall to people, society remains dominated by envy". Conversely, Smith says, the Western idea of justice originates with the Greek concept of Tyche - the Roman equivalent was Fortuna - which were forces beyond men's power to influence or blame. To acknowledge luck is a civilising force; sometimes misfortune is no one's fault and the role of government and the law is often to make up for those imbalances. By the beginning of this century, the fundamentalist capitalist assault on luck met up with its pre-modern cousins. On September 11, 2001, fundamentalists of the Islamic belief that there is no such thing as luck, only God's will, determined that nearly 3000 people should die not because they were plain unlucky but because, by being inside America's edifices of commercial and military power, they were complicit in the imperial evil. Like a snake eating its own tail, this fundamentalism met up with its Christian opposite: those who believed the victims were paying for the sins of the Sodom and Gomorrah they lived in, just as they believed the sufferers of AIDS were paying a price for their choices. These combined fundamentalisms, capitalist and anti-capitalist, found their meeting place by abolishing luck. Ayn Rand's capitalist creed was rebirthed: there is no luck, only will. Fundamentalists saw God's will in His actions: if you were struck by lightning, you had to ask what you had done to attract it. Smith concludes: "We are used to thinking that the more free will we have the better, that it is always better for humans to think they have control over events. We tend to consider the growth of 'agency' - the opposite of blind luck - to be synonymous with the progress of human civilisation. 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 the idea of luck. At a time when millions of people indulge in the meretricious book The Secret, that moment may be approaching fast." Perhaps gamblers have a lesson to impart. Any (sane) card player will tell you that gambling is a dance of skill and luck in which the player's powers take him so far and luck has the final say. Smith's final argument is that the stance we take on luck affects the one we take on charity, personal responsibility and community. The victim is not automatically at fault; the consequence of acknowledging luck is that those who come out on its right side will humbly stop, look back, and give a hand to those who have not.

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