May You Have My Luck

Amazing, is it not, how much magical thinking self-described secularists will engage in? I grew up in Green Bay, Wis., and much of my sense of well-being still depends on the fortunes of the Packers. What did I do to deserve—no, actually to cause—the recent debacle in Seattle? That loss will live with me until my memory fully collapses, which given the rate at which it is declining might occur anywhere from a year to a full decade from now, depending, well, depending on my luck. I felt a powerful force demanding that I propitiate the gods who govern such things to prepare better for the future. So I started thinking about luck.

There is an implicit optimism in the word luck. Unmodified, we supply the adjective “good": Naked luck means good luck, as with the “luck of the Irish,” the obvious irony having been forgotten, except by the Irish. But then wouldn’t it be my luck to put the lie to all that. As do insurance companies, which exist as proof that luck is just as likely to be bad as good, rather more likely if you are, like me, a historian and dispositionally a pessimist. Only an insipid Californian wedded to the cult of positivity, or experts in high finance of recent memory, could think that what goes up will never come down or suppress the thought that its very going up is what will bring it back down. To real-estate prices, one might as well add sexual orgasm and illicit drugs. Highs lead to letdowns.

Luck has its own economics. Good and bad luck are connected in some strange way, so that one suggests the imminence (and immanence) of the other. Why, you may ask, do we go through that silly gesture of knocking on wood or, if that seems a bit vulgar, finding ourselves inexplicably saying “knock on wood,” either upon hearing good news or on telling about some good thing that just fell our way?

Even a dyed-in-the-wool secular rationalist, every once in a while, banks on luck. Yet the rather superstitious person no differently knows that his luck, the good kind, must be husbanded, not banked on in the sense of “count on,” but banked in the sense of “saved up,” with its deployment deferred and economized. The lucky person knows not to press his luck, not to draw on it too often, nor ask too much of it.

Hitler made that mistake, when a preternaturally extraordinary run of luck lasting some 20 years, every improbability falling his way, lulled him into thinking the stern law of limited good luck did not apply to him. Nemesis, in his case, was only taking a very long nap. Nothing angers the gods like presumption. Ask Prometheus, or Satan. And that is why, until very recently, as a sign of the utter complacency that benevolent America has induced, Jews never had baby showers.

Best to save up your luck, and though modesty, both false and true, might counsel you to attribute your successes to luck the better to quell the envy of your mates—"Gee, imagine, I got a first class honors, dumb luck I guess"—you are wise to be crossing your fingers behind your back when you say that, to avoid debiting too many good things to your luck account. Those moments of obligatory false modesty do not draw on your stores of luck one bit, because you fervently believe luck had nothing to do with your triumph. But you might well be wrong.

No one understands luck management better than soldiers under fire, who escape death by a gust of wind, a timely occasion of enemy friendly fire, or by the whim of someone with a desk job who sends you to a quiet zone, or by the Bible you by chance kept in your chest pocket, stopping the bullet right in the middle of the book of Job. This is a constant theme in soldier memoirs.

The Vietnam vet Tobias Wolff astutely remembered the fear that tormented him as economizing on his luck: “Fear won’t always save you, but it will take some of the pressure off your luck,” he wrote in his memoir In Pharaoh’s Army. Those minutes of respite from fear purchased by simple unwariness, a precious instant of miraculous fearlessness, draw down on your finite amount of luck and must be compensated for. So grim are the accounts that Luck keeps that one North Vietnamese soldier, Bao Ninh, reported that many of his comrades felt as if good things, “small acts of love,” were “a bad omen, as though happiness must necessarily call down its own form of retribution in war.”

Luck and Fate are still deities we all give some level of credence and deference to, though we may know them more Christianized as Providence. They are also worshiped by many a middle-brow secularist as the Gene, by others as the Market.

Mark VII, the pseudonym of Max Plowman, author of one of the more moving World War I memoirs—A Subaltern on the Somme—notes that the omnipresent lethal danger of battle suffused the simplest use of the future tense with unintended irony, and with a whole lot of presumption. Any utterance that took the next half-hour for granted depleted your luck account, by tempting the gods, or in his view Fate, to do you in: “The cloud of uncertainty that hung above us every moment while we were under fire, putting its minatory query before the least anticipation, is lifted, and we are free to say ‘In an hour’s time,’ without challenging Fate with the phrase.”

Feeling lucky in that world is just asking for it; the gods will nail you. But so it is in our safe world too, a world in which most of you, no differently from me, hire substitutes for war; we nonetheless feel we must husband our luck. We cannot help ourselves. For feeling lucky comes unbidden; as do the heebie-jeebies, which are to feeling lucky what bad luck is to good luck. Strange it is, but feeling lucky itself often elicits the heebie-jeebies, as when we realize that feeling, rather than leading to good luck, is a diabolical setup to bring us down.

Feeling lucky, obviously, is not to be confused with good luck. It is merely a disturbance of the mind that makes us think something good awaits us. It is a temptress. Not that temptresses do not on occasion deliver, but that lucky feeling most assuredly generates more false positives than true. The casino industry, Monte Carlo and Las Vegas, depends on that. Nor, conversely, does every case of the heebie-jeebies—that uncanny sense that the shoe is about to drop, and you are not quite sure whether it is the first or second one—mean the plane you are boarding is going to crash. The heebie-jeebies generate a lot of false negatives.

The perverse thing is that they wreak havoc with our virtue. If we heed them and defer flying, we feel, rightly, like a coward. And if we do not, and the plane does not crash, we are hardly entitled to feel courageous. And yet we often congratulate ourselves on our brave overcoming of a fate-delivered temptation to drop our sword and shield and head for the rear. What fools the gods make of us.

Nor is feeling lucky to be confused with hope. When you feel lucky, you are in a zone; you are fire and air. The adrenaline is pumping. Hope, on the other hand, is a peculiar type of irrationality that often attends misery, and it is not so much the antithesis of despair as its fraternal twin.

Hope is that last fraying thread keeping you from slipping into the sludge of the Slough of Despond. You are feeling anything but lucky when hoping. In fact, you are feeling truly unlucky. Christianity made hope a theological virtue precisely because it is so hard to keep believing when your luck is bad, and you just start cursing God, take arms against Him and the sea of troubles you are now holding Him responsible for. Up until recently, you were indeed cold and starving, year in and year out, the lords and church skimming most all of your produce, even if you had been lucky enough not to have been plundered for provisions by armies and free companies of mercenaries a couple of times a decade.

Feeling lucky is something that even I, a depressed pessimist, have felt more than I care to own up to. Hope? Not that I can specifically recall. Oh yes, small hopes. Like that my flight will be on time, or my guests will leave, or that the Packers might win. The problem with hope, small hopes no less than grand ones, is that it lets you down so often; you recognize hope mostly when it abandons you. With the fading to black of small hopes, you do not sink into despair—even you recognize that the stakes are low—but into a kind of resignation, as when your guests take yet another round of after-dinner drinks, or your flight is finally, after seven hours of waiting, announced to have been canceled.

One tries desperately—notice how Latinized “hope” seems naked in English if not prefixed with “de,” "(de)-sperate and (de)-spair, the “de” taking hope away—to hope that in the end, God will do justice by sending some poor deserving ghetto grandmother to heaven and damning various fortunates, like Wall Street bankers and well-known public intellectuals spreading error with authority, to hell.

One can wish, but wishing is something short of hope. I can sensibly wish for the impossible, but not sensibly hope for it. You know the odds are long when you hope, or you would not be hoping, you would be expecting. But the danger is that an innocent wish can begin the road to wishful thinking and to self-deception. Jane Austen captures the progression toward self-deception that a mere wish can engender: “What Marianne and her mother conjectured one moment, they believed the next—that with them, to wish was to hope, and to hope was to expect.”

Let us abandon hope (it is what the Greeks understood to be the evil those black-humored gods left as a bad joke in Pandora’s box) and test our luck instead. Luck has the allure of the primitive and the pagan lurking about it. Even God seems to give it space, a kind of liberty in the medieval sense: He has put much of it beyond His control. It belongs instead to the gods and demons who were usually something less than all powerful, but powerful enough to ruin a picnic, and a life.

Luck, I have claimed, is felt to be allotted to us in finite quantities, and its finiteness makes a demand to husband it. But our luck does not exist in a vacuum; its quality and quantity seems to be affected by the quality of other people’s dealings with their luck. Just as a bunch of incompetent bankers can lower the value of the retirement savings that I had prudently invested in so-called safe stocks, so your luck, good or bad, might very well mess with mine.

Obviously that is the case when you and I face off in a zero-sum situation, where your good luck necessarily is the same as my bad luck. More than a few characters in the Icelandic sagas, which I have had the extraordinary good luck (knock on wood) to devote my working life to, are given to making witty remarks about the math of luck: In a situation where your luck multiplied by my luck=K, when yours goes up, mine must go down in the same amount. The very grim consequence is that you can hoard your luck all you want, and still have someone else take it away from you. To those disturbances of the soul I have called feeling lucky and the heebie-jeebies, add the grim fact of schadenfreude and envy.

There is a Bemba proverb that the anthropologist Max Gluckman put into circulation: “To find one beehive in the woods is good luck, to find two is very good luck, to find three is witchcraft.” At best your neighbors will compel you to share your find, at worst, they will kill you.

I can imagine some paint-by-numbers evolutionary psychologist inventing an explanation for the adaptability of schadenfreude and envy. One theory might go like this: Our ancestors lived in conditions of great scarcity; indeed it took the agricultural and industrial revolutions before people could envisage that economies could grow, the pie get bigger. Before then, if someone took too big a share of the communal pie, or was too good a hunter and did not share, well then everyone was worse off for his being better off. To hell with skills qualifying him for survival of the fittest; his loser cavemates had the embryos of schadenfreude and envy growing in them and killed the good hunter. So we get norms of sharing enforced by fear, and the survival of the less fit assured by our ancestors banding together out of sheer annoyance at the big man’s success.

Who knows? Stories like that are a dime a dozen these days, without any explanatory value whatsoever. You could thus retell the story I just told, but with a twist: Instead of killing the lucky hunter or honey finder the have-nots worship him as a god. No envy at all; they prefer rather desperately (there is that luckless word again) to participate in his good luck. They will serve him and make offerings to him if he will only smile upon them now and then.

But then there are still other stories. We also have this sneaky feeling that both good luck and bad luck are contagious. Early medieval war leaders, if they won a few battles at start of their careers, would get a reputation for being lucky (even more useful a reputation than being a skilled commander), and people would flock to them to join up. Their enemies would quail, fearing they were up against more than just a human. Good luck bred more of the same, until it got too good to be true.

For soon it ran up against scarcity and the problem of diminishing returns. A bigger force of followers meant you needed to capture more to keep them happy with distributions of plunder. But all the low-hanging fruit had been picked, you now needed to mount costly expeditions with lengthy supply lines to find people to plunder to keep your pie growing. Inevitably it cost too much to make the pie bigger, and then, lo, it would start to get smaller as your men would cut better deals with new lucky upstarts. Your luck had run out, done in by its very success.

Unless, that is, you turned on your followers and started to plunder them. That was called taxation, and it is part of the story of state formation, put in such a way that would strike a chord with various members of the Tea Party, who have yet to imagine what it meant to be in the way of competing warlords.

We feel bad luck is contagious, too. Once you get a reputation for being accident prone or for just having things not go your way, people start to brand you a loser. Just being kind enough to stay friends with such a poor unfortunate soul is costly, for others will abandon you for not abandoning him. Do you want your daughter out on a date with someone who, when driving, has been run into three times in the last year, each accident not in the least his fault?

Borrowing from Claudius’s description of love, we might say:

Not so with bad luck. Its pie has an uncanny virtue to keep growing. The bad-luck pie is, you guessed it, a cancer, those gifted and energetic cells that keep on reproducing and reproducing, having found, perversely but not incorrectly, the fountain of youth. But the cancer’s good luck, though it be your bad luck, is also its own bad luck. For as soon as it kills the host, you, it too must die.

This tale of gloom and doom must draw to a close, with a curse of an old Jewish lady, a great-aunt of a colleague of mine from early in my career. Yiddish, the language and the culture, its ironically mordant and well-justified pessimism, had a field day with luck. Thus the conventional Yiddish curse: “May you have my luck.” Thus too the custom that when hearing something good said about your children or a compliment paid you, you immediately invoked a talismanic: “Kein eyin hara (No evil eye!)"—lest your children and you be zapped.

My colleague’s old great-aunt’s curse? We, conventional lefty academics at the time, ever-so concerned about the downtrodden located at the antipodes, this being the mid-70s, prompted her to respond to something we said about Western imperialism: “As for the third vorld,” she said, “I vish them luck.”

Luck jokes abound, and humans as well as the gods are good at making them. And the nastier, the more memorable. You’ve got to ask yourself one question, dear reader: ‘Do I feel lucky?’ Well, do ya, punk?”

William Ian Miller is a professor at the University of Michigan Law School. Among his books are ‘Why Is Your Axe Bloody?’: A Reading of Njáls Saga (Oxford University Press, 2014), Losing It: In Which an Aging Professor Laments His Shrinking Brain (Yale University Press, 2011), and The Mystery of Courage (Harvard University Press, 2000).