The Importance of Being Lucky

By LANCE MORROW

The satirically pious story tells how a soldier's breast-pocket Bible stopped the bullet en route to his heart. Ronald Reagan had no Bible in his jacket outside the Washington Hilton several weeks ago, but some of the world idly suspected that he may have been otherwise armored--that in some obscure way he may have been protected by his own remarkable luck.

Something in Reagan has always been lucky; it has been part of his attraction, his charm, the nimbus around him. Reagan's luck has a distinctly American shine; his grin proclaims it, the confident expectation of the happy ending. That may be why the nation was drawn to him. Reagan's vehicle on the journey from Dixon, Ill., to Hollywood to the White House ran on persistence and self-knowledge, all right, but it was also propelled by a breezy admixture of the luck that the country was born with.

So, when an assassin tried to terminate Reagan's progress, his luck seemed to hold again: if the gunman's arm had been jostled even a hair, if the angle of the slug's deflection off the President's seventh rib had been minutely sharper, if the Devastator bullet had not been a dud . . . Of course, one can argue it the other way: if the assassin's arm had been jostled, he might have missed Reagan entirely.

When one embarks on elaborate multiple fantasies of ifs, he enters abstract forests of luck and chance, of contingency and probability, where each speculative path opens onto a thousand new possibilities. Usually the mind penetrates only a few steps, looks nervously over its shoulder, then bolts back to the hard terrain of actuality. Luck is, by definition, mysterious, a force that may really be the clunkingly erratic, everyday version of the divine mind. Luck is God in a scatterbrained and even amoral mood, with his sense of justice out of commission. Or, agnostically, luck is the collision of the random with human biography; naturally, human intelligence resents and resists the inexplicable random, and so attributes it to imps, dybbuks, wood sprites, gods of the volcano--all the subdeities of jinx.

Invisible, otherwise undetectable, luck can be known only by its works. It is the strange, unknowable force that deposited Lana Turner in a Schwab's pharmacy 46 years ago, that placed a football in Franco Harris' hands ("the immaculate reception") at the end of the Pittsburgh-Oakland championship game in 1972, that put Carl Bernstein in the newsroom of the Washington Post a few hours after the police found a strange collection of characters at the Watergate. (Actually, Watergate was a regular soap opera of the fortuitous: if one of the burglars had not stupidly left tape over the latch of a rear door, the night watchman might never have discovered the caper and Congress might never have investigated and the White House tape system might never have been revealed and Richard Nixon might never have resigned.) Luck was the invisible hand that prompted Skylab to scatter its debris over Western Australia, not rush-hour Manhattan. Even transcendently foresighted NASA might admit that the space shuttle's flawless flight last week involved some luck. The luck of the universe (by one new theory) once banged an immense asteroid into the earth, raising a dust cloud so dense that it blocked off the sunlight, ruined the planet's food chain, and thereby brought on the extinction of the dinosaurs--an event that profoundly redirected evolution. It is arguable (at least agnostically for a moment) that life itself--the lightning in the sugar cube, the huge fortuities of weather and climate and chemistry, of amino acids and proteins and oxygen--emanates from sheer cosmic luck.

To call it Divine Providence would do just as well. The religious mind, with a more orderly or merely fatalistic sense of the universe, tends to ascribe to Providence (however mysterious its intentions) events that the more worldly credit to luck, good or bad. People who believe in luck aren't particularly rationalist either, however, since scientific rationalism has as much trouble dealing with luck as theology does. The best it has to offer is Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, which states that it is absolutely impossible to predict the exact behavior of atomic particles. Luck is a weird, pagan, primitive business. Or else, in modern dress, it is a frigidly heartless existentialism. In any case, whatever its occasionally whimsical moments, luck has a philosophically terrifying core.

The world has adopted two different strategies toward luck. Much of the planet for most of its history has tried to woo and conjure and appease it, longingly courting the force to draw near, to descend from the void of the random for an instant and shower fortune on some lucky head. To ward off luck's malevolent side, the infection of a curse, the evil eye, populations have danced and chanted and worked with charms. To predict its whims, they have studied omens, birds' flights, goats' entrails; they have consulted gypsies and star charts.

More "advanced" societies have forgotten the demonic language of superstition and luck, which they are inclined to call "dumb" or "blind." They often have no better explanation than primitives do for luck's strange intercessions, but they generally adopt a strategy both passive and fatalistic, a stoical mixture of rationalism and resignation to luck's works. Today it is mainly gamblers who stay on intimate and dangerous terms with luck and try to tame and possess it. Here and there, state lotteries have tried to bureaucratize luck--a dreary business and a contradiction in terms.

Generally, luck is something that happens to individuals. If a society or a century is considered as a whole, the random individual events that are set down to luck or fortune form more coherent overall patterns; large historical forces become discernible. But entire societies should not mock luck either. The classic Mayan civilization disappeared so strangely, so precipitously, that some massive stroke of bad luck must have been at work--a sudden plague, say, a viral riot.

Of all civilizations, America seemed the luckiest. With its vast Edenic spaces and immense natural wealth, with its extraordinary freedom from the stultifications of caste and poverty, the place seemed born in luck. Or so it appeared to the white Europeans who settled the continent, if not to the Indians they violently displaced or the Africans they imported in slave ships to work the plantations. Americans eventually made the mistake of describing their national luck as their "manifest destiny." In any case, America became the place where the world came to get lucky. Americans believed in the splendidly transforming powers of luck in their land. Men born in poverty made fortunes. They struck oil and gold. Hard work went into it, of course, but for a long time Americans were drunk on the luck of their sheer possibility. Foreigners bemused by America have often thought that too much good luck deprived Americans of a sense of the tragic. In the past 15 years or so, Americans have been riding a bad streak. It is possible they responded to Reagan because his smile reminded them of a time when America was lucky.

Whatever the motions of free will and necessity, Herman Melville wrote, "chance has the last featuring blow at events." Luck may be simply another name for the odd, unexpected notes in the huge symphony of things, of circumstance and coincidence, chemistry and character, diet and disease, weather and timing, the vastly subtle totality of being. But whatever the agnostics say, luck is not completely blind, or completely wild either. Within limits, it can be domesticated--although it will always be part wolf and may unexpectedly turn mad and eat the children one afternoon.

As Hector Berlioz said, "The luck of having talent is not enough; one must also have a talent for luck." Genius, in fact, may be defined as the ability to control luck. A turbulent gambler like Dostoyevsky was not overcome by the hectic fortunes of his experience, but turned them into his art. Outside the genius class, however, there is such a thing as a predisposition to good luck; it might be said on the evidence up to now that Reagan has it, while Ted Kennedy does not.

Baseball's Branch Rickey once offered a serviceable definition: "Luck is the residue of design." To be sure, luck obeys the laws of a spooky kind of antiphysics, but it responds to risk and reflexes. To some extent, it is true that people make their own luck. Given a lucky chance at the story, Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward ran hard. Good luck must have room to occur. It can be encouraged, even though its exact mechanics remain perverse and mysterious. For its part, bad luck is so eventually inevitable that it is almost a sin to be surprised by it.

"The older I grow," Philosopher Sidney Hook wrote a few years ago, "the more impressed I am with the role of luck or chance in life." The world's distribution of wealth, he pointed out, depends almost as much on luck as on energy, foresight and skill. It is only the luck of the world if one is born in the country club district of Kansas City instead of the Sahel or Bangladesh. It is the sad luck of things for a Colorado oil millionaire if his youngest child, by mishaps of the psyche, turns out to harbor some fetid, lovesick ambition to kill the President.

Surely the ultimate purpose of luck, if there is one at all, is to offer such a spectacle that men and women, besides being vastly entertained, come to recognize their common vulnerability to luck's weird and endlessly inventive impulses. Hook thinks that chastening drama might make people more charitable toward one another. Well--if we are lucky. But perhaps luck, good and bad, also has a deeper physiological purpose, programmed into the human animal in the first dawn of his intelligence: to keep the adrenaline flowing, maybe, and the brain alert to the world's epic of apprehension, terror, greed and hope. Perhaps luck is the way that life puts history into bas-relief, and differentiates moments, and people: the way that the universe punctuates time.

--By Lance Morrow

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