Complex Numbers

O Fortuna

Today's article is fairly long, but worth it if you have the time.

Fortune’s Wheel  
For many in Western history, games of chance represented a portal of possibility, not a heresy to be demonized or a statistical probability to be managed.

In the American mythology of success, labor is the only path to prosperity.

Ha!

The affluent can cleanse their cash by claiming they worked hard for it; mastering fate and controlling outcomes bestow moral legitimacy on their earnings.

HA!

Many moralists throughout American history have affirmed that merit matches reward and that people get what they deserve, in this world and the next.

At the risk of repeating myself, ha.

This all ties in to another thing I featured over two years ago: "On Merit" 

But a heresy against this faith in hard work has stubbornly survived nearly two centuries’ preaching of the virtues of America’s civil religion.

"Civil" religion, my lazy heretical ass. This nonsense about "hard work will get you ahead" can be directly traced to Calvin. The preacher, not the cartoon kid.

The lottery ticket, humble as it is, serves as a passport to a more fluid moral economy, where fate can be cruel or kind but is always arbitrary—where luck, as even Horatio Alger realized, matters more than pluck. And this culture of chance more closely resembles the world in which most people live than the one prescribed by the dominant mythology of success, which can aptly be called a culture of control.

Much has been said—including by me—about the problems with playing the lottery. But for many, it's the only thin straw they can grasp at to maybe escape their life at the bottom of the social hierarchy, at least for a while (more on that in another entry).

But it does suggest that gambling is about more than mere money. Modern games of chance reenact ancient rituals of divination—casting lots, throwing pebbles, bones, shells, or dice—designed to provide glimpses of the sacred and to conjure luck or its spiritual equivalent, grace. Rather than the static and timeless cosmic order of orthodox monotheism, the sense of the sacred sought by diviners was a pluralist plentitude, symbolized in Western tradition by inconstant Fortuna and by similar figures in American Indian and African traditions.

Yeah, that might be a stretch.

The article goes on to describe the history of Fortuna, which is quite fascinating in itself.

But Fortune did not fit well with Christian ideas of Providence. To early Christians, the divine plan unfolded as mysteriously as the fluctuations of luck, but however remote the planner or apparently perverse his decrees, his purpose was ultimately benign.

To me, as an outsider, "divine will" is indistinguishable from random chance working through the laws of physics.

Beginning in the fifteenth century, Protestant reformers assaulted these rituals as part of a broader war on the medieval culture of chance. Taking their cues from John Calvin, theologians disparaged Fortuna, deriding belief in her powers as a pagan excrescence on the Church.

See? I told you we'd get to Calvin.

Only by God’s “secret plan,” Calvin wrote, do “some distinguish themselves, while others remain contemptible.”

In the millennia of lies foisted on an unsuspecting public, this one is in the running for the worst in terms of the effect it had on society.

As early as 1653, when dissenting sects proliferated amid the English Civil War, a female sectarian confessed that she could not stand to see her neighbors prosper, as it meant they had prayed more than she had.

That, for example.

Despite occasional revolts, faith in Fortune endured in a variety of ways, even in the language that people used to describe their circumstances. The word “happiness” has long been linguistically dependent on chance. The thirteenth-century English substantive “hap” derives from the old Norse “happ,” meaning “chance” or “good luck.” The verb “happen” and the adverb “haply” (by chance) emerged from this root in the fourteenth century, as did “happy,” which originally meant “prosperous” and by the sixteenth century had acquired the connotation of contentment.

I'm just leaving this there as further support for my continued ragging on the incessant popular harping about "happiness."

The Protestant war on Fortune, declared by John Calvin centuries earlier, also allied itself with Newtonian science, whose practitioners were less interested in denying chance than in containing it. By the end of the eighteenth century, Jacob Bernoulli, Adolphe Quetelet, and other statisticians had developed modern probability theory, reducing chance to a predictable outlier or a standard deviation. Both statisticians and devotees of “rational religion” hastened the shift from a respectful and even fearful Renaissance vision of Fortune as a goddess to a modern, more confident understanding of chance as a condition to be managed.

Yeah, I don't fully buy that bit. Newton envisioned a purely deterministic universe, and probability theory is kind of not that.

As Wall Street sanitized speculation as “investment,” and the mere manipulation of money through complex financial instruments became a path to self-made manhood, gambling continued to be stigmatized by society.

This I don't buy either. Sure, you can enter the stock market speculatively, risking capital on short-term investments. But there's one very important difference between investing and speculation: Insofar as investing can be considered subject to the whims of chance, historically, long-term investments are the equivalent of owning the casino, giving the investor the house edge.

Mason Locke Weems, whose early biography of George Washington introduced American readers to the story of the cherry tree, condemned gambling’s effect on the “social body.”

As the cherry tree story is pretty firmly in the realm of mythology, I wouldn't trust anything else that guy wrote, however well-intentioned.

The emergence of gambling as mass entertainment can be traced to several sources, including the willingness of cash-strapped state governments to substitute gambling revenues for taxation and the decline of job security among gamblers themselves—in a contingent labor market, where one can be dismissed for reasons having nothing to do with one’s performance, the disjunction between merit and reward is more painfully apparent than ever. If hard work gets you nowhere fast, why not have a fling with Fortune?

They sold us on a lottery here in Virginia, back in the 80s, saying the profits would go to transportation and education. As far as I know, they did—but the legislature ended up cutting off more traditional sources of funding to those areas, leaving us worse off than before.

The willingness to relinquish control over outcomes—to play—promoted the insouciance toward money that lies at the core of the culture of chance. This outlook arose from an insight common among Fortuna’s children: the recognition that you don’t get what you deserve. You get what you get.

The article, and I, mentioned Newton up there. As I said, he saw a deterministic world, where calculations had fixed results and if you but had enough information, you could make any prediction accurately.

And that turns out not to be the case.

so at this hour
without delay
pluck the vibrating strings;
since Fate
strikes down the strong man,
everyone weep with me!
—O Fortuna