6.31: The Tyranny of Chance: Assis, Borges, and the Randomized Bargain

 

Games of Chance

 

Is anyone surprised if I confess that for most of my life I have been what they now call a tabletop role-play gamer? More exactly, I most often found myself in the role of gamemaster, in Dungeons and Dragons circles what is called a dungeon master. Basically, I invented stories and scenarios for the players to figure out how to solve. Role-play games have always been a tremendous practice of the narrative imagination, of creative reasoning, of collaborative storytelling. I even had many of my classrooms participate in stories which revealed their curricular goals. 

But I would be lying if I did not clear a space to honor one of the most terrifying aspects of all gaming: the dice. In our games, we had traditional dice, the six-sided cubes we all know, but we also had 4-sided dice, 8-sided dice, 12-sided dice, and 20-sided dice. Between them in multiple combinations, we could calculate the statistical odds of any event of the story going in the players’ favor and the degree of consequence in treasure or pain. No matter how clever the players were, in the end, we bowed down to chance. The dice determined all.

If Freddie fell into a bottomless pit, it was because the dice he rolled determined that he slipped. And if the beastie they met in the woods chewed off Abby’s arms, it was because the dice I rolled said it was so. Sorry, Abby, but I can also roll the dice to determine if the nearby doctor can still save your life. . . .

And yes, failures meant disappointments and even grief, but the dice would not be challenged. No one was to be blamed. It was, you know, the ultimate arbitration, fated. Still, if we blamed no one for the failures, I always found it a little odd that successful roles would be celebrated, as if some great personal skill had persevered. Freddie’s slip was the dice, but the dice that determined he made the leap successfully were a feat of personal power. Needless to say, particular dice were sometimes revered or deemed “cursed;” and various dice rolling rituals were invented. Chance would smile if the dice gods were appeased.

Such is the way of the world. Some are born to find success; others are full of “bad luck.” It’s sad, but the odds of everyone finding happiness just aren’t that good. Some will end up suffering. How easy it is to shrug our shoulders this way! It’s nothing to feel . . . guilty about. 

Intro Theme

This is Literary Nomads, where we wander through literature and language, near and far.

I’m Steve Chisnell, and I just rolled a 17 to find out how well I would digest lunch. Is that good?

 

Borges, de Assis, Le Guin

 

If you haven’t caught the recent episode where I read one of the stories we will talk about today, I recommend you go back and give it a listen. Machado de Assis’s “The Fortune-Teller,” more widely known outside of English as “A Cartomante,” is a wonderful unassuming story that is worth the listen. There is also a link to the story in the Show Notes.

But I wasn’t able to offer you a reading of the equally delightful and dizzying fable of Jorge Luis Borges, “The Lottery in Babylon,” because all of the translations are still copyrighted. Even so, there are lots of copies online and I have one also linked in the Show Notes. Go ahead and take a pause right here in this chapter if you want to take an extra 15 minutes and read it right now. Totally worth it. I’ll wait.  

Everybody happy? Good. 

Now, Machado de Assis is the earlier of our two writers, and “The Fortune-Teller” first appeared in 1884. Jorge Luis Borges’s “The Lottery in Babylon” appeared in 1941. And we might appreciate that the two stories cover similar topics and themes, which is why I chose both to talk about here. 

But until fairly recently, we did not know that Borges had actually translated a version of the de Assis story in 1934 for an Argentinian newspaper. In other words, I want to begin by making the point that Borges knew de Assis’s work, had himself worked on de Assis stories, and so his story has de Assis’s influence somewhere in the background of Borges’s thinking. They’re linked. 

Today, we’re connecting them to Le Guin’s Hideous Bargain. And let’s not play coy with the reason. All this time we’ve been talking about the poor Suffering Child, one selected somehow for unending punishment so that the rest of society can prosper. Read the child how you please. Maybe he represents a class or race of people; maybe a country or two that suffers under capitalism; perhaps just any Other that the people in the dominant land name. 

No matter how you think about him, though, let me ask a question. What if we decided on our suffering scapegoat child . . . randomly? That is, we put everyone, including ourselves, into a kind of raffle and the prize was injustice and suffering? Well, suffering, anyway, because wouldn’t a random determination kind of make everything, I don’t know, more fair? And if the determination is made more fair, therefore less immoral? Less evil? In any event, something I would not have to suffer extra guilt over? Why would I feel guilty? It could have been me. 

What’s that phrase, “There but for the Grace of God go I?” Now, I know the purpose of this line is to trigger sympathy, humility, and gratitude, that we’re supposed to think, “Wow, that homeless family could just as possibly be mine, so I should be thankful.” It’s in the hands of the divine, whatever unknowable power is at the helm, whatever caused the dice to roll a natural 20 for the win.

Fate. Destiny. Chance. The Divine. The Order of the Universe. And so you can see that, for us right now, it matters little which of those forces we do or don’t believe in. Each is, more or less, outside of human agency to change. Therefore, each is outside of my need to feel responsible or accountable. 

The Failure of Reason: “The Fortune Teller”

 

Now I hope by now you’ve listened to or remember our story by Assis. Our protagonist Camillo is having an affair with Rita, the wife of his life-long friend Vilela. Rita is fairly superstitious, consulting a fortune teller, for instance, to see the future of her relationship with him. Camillo is at first scornful. But soon enough, mysterious anonymous letters arrive saying that the sender knows everything about his illicit affair. Then he gets a message from Vilela to come to his home immediately. Camillo panics, and much of the story is him, on his way, anxious about Vilela’s intentions, worried that he has been found out. During one delay in his travel there, he passes by the same fortune teller Rita had seen earlier. He goes to her to ask about his affair; she tells him that all is well, that his secret is safe, and that he need not worry. Happily, he completes his journey to Vilela, only to find upon entering that Vilela knows all, Rita has been killed in revenge, and that he is next.

Now Assis begins his story with a reference to Hamlet, noting that there are “more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy.” Right away, we have a strong clue to what Assis is up to, don’t we? 

Poor Camillo is a man who prides himself on his logic, his intellect. The story’s first scene is his mocking of Rita for having consulted a fortune teller. But there is a line, it seems, where logic and moral consequence don’t quite line up. Rita says that there are many a true and mysterious thing in the world, almost exactly Hamlet’s words to Horatio, so we have the parallel: reason and logic are not all. This turns out to be fairly true, at least psychologically. When Camillo receives the summons from Vilela, he is instantly paralyzed in fear. There well may be a moral consequence to his actions, not merely that careful and rational planning will keep any act a secret. He could at this moment attempt to reason through it, but his emotional desperation takes over. He goes through different possibilities for the summons, each in increasing panic. And, by the time he passes by the fortune teller’s home, he is hearing the memories of his mother’s superstitious voice, he recalls the words of Hamlet, and he doesn’t reason here but rationalizes: “What could he lose by it, if…?”  

Desperate for some emotional comfort, he abandons his intellect, turns his own principle of logic against himself as a weapon–he claims he is reasoning a simple test when he is not—and, significantly, he surrenders himself to another force entirely.

Now Hamlet was paralyzed in uncertainty, by overthinking his acts—indeed, we wait a full five long acts for his unwilling commitment to his ghost-told destiny. But Camillo is a different story. Instead of thinking, he gives up intellectual analysis to a faith in superstition. That’s what carries him forward, a fatal self-deception. 

Camillo says literally, “I can’t stand this uncertainty,” and as he waits for the carriage to move forward, he looks at the fortune teller’s house which “looked for all the world like the dwelling of indifferent Fate.” And even while listening to her, Camillo suspects that she may be guessing, that she may have no power. Still, he convinces himself, falsely reasoning that if she could guess about the affair, her guess about his safety must be equally right. “For, the unknown present is the same as the future.” She says to him, “Go, ragazzo innamorato,” basically ‘young boy in love,’ –lover boy— and he takes that as sufficient, forming a “new and abiding faith.” 

It’s a wonderful turnabout of Shakespeare here. Whatever we may think of Hamlet, Camillo is a fool, an anti-hero. Shakespeare’s poetic pentameters are reduced to Rita’s more common, even vulgar, paraphrasing. And rather than a literal ghost who launches the play, Camillo ends his story by paying too much to a charlatan in a dingy attic. The drama of medieval Denmark is not 19th century Rio de Janeiro. There’s no divine destiny here, no cosmic alignments, just foolishness, deceit, moral weakness.

But this is how it works. Whether or not Fate or Chance or the Divine exist, we are plenty ready to fictionalize its presence, to give up our agency, our will to choose, to that emotional conjuration. We might convince ourselves we are being rational, when really? We’re mostly cowards, unwilling to act accountably. Totalitarian regimes like in Orwell’s 1984 pretend to use science and economics to justify their abuses of power. The citizens in Lowry’s The Giver take pills to evade the moral and emotional consequences of their actions. Camillo just uses a false fortune teller. 

Maybe we could describe this use of reason and supposed logic as a “stick with two ends,” a kind of “weaponization of Reason.” We presume invoking it can protect us from consequence rather than recognize it as a method which blinds us to any philosophy which acknowledges our subjective selves, our moral or ethical consciences. We believe that if only we reason, we might defeat oppression and injustice. But this kind of reason, as we saw with the mathematics of Abbott and Zamyatin, is itself an Iron Cage, a dangerous habitus of human exceptionalism. It might hide the consequences for us for a little while, but it never banishes them. 

Borges, Rawls, and the Democratic Scapegoat

 

Where Assis offers us one fool who uses the idea of Fate to try to evade responsibility, what if an entire civilization does it? Borges’s “The Lottery in Babylon” is a vicious little tale, rife for multiple interpretations, as any allegorical fable would be. So right away, I’ll say that we won’t exhaust it today, not by a long shot. But it will be easy enough to see its applications to our discussion.

To refresh your memory if you haven’t read it recently, the setting is ancient Babylon. Probably. The lottery there, some time in the past, began as a simple game where participants gambled with copper coins to win silver. Unfortunately, they recognized soon that the game was not very popular because it appealed only to “hope,” the possibilities for a win. So they added unlucky draws: some people would lose more than they gambled. Then jail time was added. Politics beings politics, the loose gaming practices evolved into a group called “The Company,” and to keep everything equal, The Company began to take over more and more government power in order to enforce the wins and losses. Then, to keep it totally equal, the lottery was made “secret, free of charge, and open to all.” Now rewards, service, mutilations, death, are all up to The Company. Everyone’s fate was re-evaluated by the random game. 

Our narrator says at the beginning of the story:

 “Like all the men of Babylon, I have been proconsul; like all, I have been a slave. I have known omnipotence, ignominy, imprisonment… I have known that thing the Greeks knew not—uncertainty.”

And, as is clear, the game has become almost infinitely complex when it is extended to multiple fates across myriad actions atop an entire civilization. Borges’s narrator says:

Let us imagine a first drawing, which condemns a man to death. In pursuance of that decree, another drawing is held; out of that second drawing come, say, nine possible executors. Of those nine, four might initiate a third drawing to determine the name of the executioner, two might replace the unlucky draw with a lucky one (the discovery of a treasure, say), another might decide that the death should be exacerbated (death with dishonor, that is, or with the refinement of torture), others might simply refuse to carry out the sentence. That is the scheme of the Lottery, put symbolically. In reality, the number of drawings is infinite. No decision is final; all branch into others.

Long before this, of course, we have recognized that Borges is not writing a literal fantasy, but also an allegorical one. What exactly is he representing? There is enough sacred and mysterious language to suggest that this is an enormous metaphor for religion, for God. But too there have been claims that this is all how capitalism works, or totalitarianism, or Keynesian economics, a parody of democracies, game theory or chaos theory. I won’t argue against any of these; allegory in literature can be quite directive or widely open to interpretation, depending on the author’s crafting of it. 

But regardless of Babylon’s representation, I want us to focus on that same conception we found in Assis. What does it mean for us to psychologically, intellectually, submit to it?

Really, if everything–literally everything—is a roll of the dice, pure chance, then to what are we accountable? What moral responsibility do we have to anything at all? If I am caught in my act of theft, it was a random occurrence, determined in some shadowy or obscure realm far outside of my actual ability to alter it. If I am a lottery winner, the same. If I am born a slave, . . . the same. 

All this time we’ve been arguing about strenuous moods of moral outrage, of societies which must be revised, to stay and fight for. But if the suffering is always random? “There but for the roll of the dice go I.” Suddenly, if life is just a series of chances and probabilities, my moral outrage—my potential to blame and put aright—is quashed. If someone suffers in a remote closet in Babylon, it isn’t a systemic injustice; it’s just a bad draw. Borges says early on in the story that the Babylonians actually demanded this system because it felt more equal. 

Why, it’s a fair social contract! That little Omelas kid in the basement? Our outrage is sanitized: we’ve turned him into a casino. And is this better or worse than a society which hides the fact that he’s there at all?

The same is true of our extraction economies, our clinical labor black markets, our 13th Amendment practice of minority enslavements. All the inequalities which result from capitalism. Have we convinced ourselves, in any way, that everyone is just playing the same giant lottery? 

Now, my initial response is “No,” I certainly do not think the world is all random chance. But then. I remember saying sometimes to my students to consider how “lucky” they were to have been born into relative comfort and wealth here in Michigan, that one way of wondering about our roles and responsibilities might be to consider if, among the 6 or 7 billion people out there, we have been born elsewhere. That around 10% of the world or more experiences extreme poverty, hunger, and disease. But that maybe 5% lives as we do. The odds are humbling.

And why did I phrase it that way, except that I was trying to make a rhetorical point, and a world of chance accomplished it. But by doing so, did I underscore their responsibility to work for equity and justice or did I erase it?

And then I think of one of the great themes of American literary education, the conception of the American dream. Everyone, we say, has an equal chance to succeed. And if everyone has the chance, and some people don’t make it, well, that’s just the consequence of chance, isn’t it? This concept of hard work and all is fine and well, but in the end, we know that some hard workers succeed and others don’t. What are the chances? And if I keep using this idea of a “chance to succeed,” then aren’t I creating some kind of illusion of probability which helps me excuse the fact that the basement is still full of suffering kids? 

Does this habitus explain why so many Americans today completely misinterpret the phrase, “The poor you will always have with you”? Jesus speaks these words in at least two or three of the Gospels, and poor readers of those texts are quick to shrug their shoulders and say, “See? Inequality is eternal: nothing we can do about it. It’s the way the world is designed.” Yeah, well, no. Jesus’s words come from Deuteronomy which follows them with this: “Therefore I command you to be openhanded toward your fellow Israelites who are poor and needy in your land.” In other words, being supportive and helpful to those in need, taking action in our compassion, is a good thing. Which, bt dubbs, lines up with most of everything else the New Testament says. 

But while we’ve diverted a bit from Borges, and we recognize that this “everything is chance” idea is really a kind of psychological rationalization for inaction, an excuse to thank the roll of the dice and believe that we can affect nothing, now might be a good time to introduce John Rawls into our discussion.

So I taught Rawls in a few of my classes, and his ideas really played with the heads of my students. Rawls was all about justice-seeking, and he too considered building a society based on chance, but not exactly as we’ve been talking about.

If we are going to build a society that moves us toward utopia, or at least towards one that believes justice and equality are virtues, he proposes a concept called the “Veil of Ignorance.” Design a society where, after it’s created, you do not know whether you will be a ruler or a worker; you have no idea what role you will have in the society until it is done being created. The result, of course, is that we would all design a place that minimizes the chances for inequalities. 

Borges’s Babylonians maximize chance as a way to excuse the suffering child. After all, anyone could have been there, so it’s not like we are being needlessly cruel or prejudiced. For Rawls, we minimize the chances through intentional design towards equality. If it turns out, in our design, that some will suffer, at least we have designed the best system we can. 

What I like about Rawls is that the exercise of chance is dependent upon a system we intentionally and willfully design, one which will lean heavily on equality and justice. Where I am a bit more skeptical is that—when we use the word “chance” at all, even in the final allocation of who lives where—we are rationalizing away our moral imperative to do better. The chance for inequality may be perfectly symmetrical, but it is still one we are responsible for in its design. 

AccountabilityAccountability is a claim on our actions, but it is external... More 201

 

And that, I think, is the most important point I have about all of this. We are responsible for its design, this system we live. Not chance.

Several episodes ago we talked about Hannah Arendt and her ideas of the “banality of evil,” a concept explicitly quoted in Le Guin. I think it’s worth repeating here. She worries about our “thoughtlessness,” our refusal to acknowledge that evil and injustice aren’t villainous deliberate acts, but far worse, our refusals to engage and address what we are doing day to day. 

If we think about Borges’s “Company” that runs everything, like some totalitarian authority, in a lottery-run world, nobody is a murderer. There are only administrators of the drawings. If someone suffers, well, it might just be a clerical error. Sorry, nothing personal, just business.

Totalitarianism, Arendt reminds us, relies on bureaucrats who are just following orders, who detach themselves from the moral realities of their actions. It doesn’t really matter how we rationalize away our accountabilityAccountability is a claim on our actions, but it is external... More: I was just following orders, I don’t understand the big picture, it’s someone else’s department, above my pay grade, I’m just doing my job, or it’s just the luck of the draw. The fact is, that for Assis, for Borges, for a thousand others and for ourselves, we seem more than ready to give away our agency. 

Let’s not forget Borges’s point that it was the general populace who demanded complete and equal fairness in the Lottery. In other words, they literally demanded that The Company take complete control from them, that all of their lives would be in the hands of the totalitarian bureaucracy. 

And look how easy it is from there to see the arguments of injustice. They might say, “We didn’t want to take absolute power and lock you up, but you forced us to by choosing jail!” It is the manufacture of consent. Whether the people forced The Company to power or not, this is the story now told by our narrator all these years later. And, as Arendt reminds us, this is a key rhetorical tactic of oppressive regimes: blame the oppressed, make them feel like this has always been a populist idea. We don’t just expand the Hideous Bargain when we rationalize away our agency; we annihilate our sense of self.

 

Institutionalized Chaos

 

We can’t close today without bringing up an argument we heard several episodes ago, Georges Bataille’s “Will to Chance.” You remember: Bataille said that those who walked away from Omelas, who rejected the society built on the suffering of a single child, were exercising a radical “will to chance.” They no longer accepted the transactional bargaining of morality, the Hideous Bargain of trading a near utopia for a child. They chose instead an absolute and productive unknown. 

They gambled. They used their personal agency or will to take a chance on something better. And heck yeah, this kind of gamble, this chance, certainly seems like a better use of the dice than my role-playing games deciding if a bugbear scores a critical hit on the elf. Or on pretending chance is what put the child in the cellar. The people exerting a Will to Chance abandon predictable comfort for the absolute unknown—an “unproductive loss” that refuses the utilitarian bargain.

To make this clear, the Babylonians aren’t on the same playing field as Bataille at all. The Babylonians are faking it. They haven’t embraced the wild unknown; they have built a massive, totalitarian bureaucracy (The Company) to administer the unknown. They’ve surrendered their reason in order to rationalize away their obligations and they’ve called this chance. Just like Camillo rationalizes away his intellect and called it a faith in a higher fated power. The labyrinths of Babylon are now so thick in bureaucracy and secrecy that it no longer matters if the Company exists; the point is that they no longer have to take responsibility for anything ever again. A bureaucracy of erasure disguised as a game.

I’m not fond of Bataille’s solution, though I admit I have a difficult time responding to it. I admit, too, that my dissatisfaction with him has grown since we talked about Cavarero’s horrorism some time ago. So I will say this of Bataille’s position: by walking away, it, also, abdicates responsibility to the suffering child, pretending that these people walking away have no history that merits a response. I think Bataille makes too absolute his condemnation and refusals of utilitarian systems. But I can also recognize that what he is talking about, his Will to Chance, is truly “chance” in that the walkers have no conception of what lies ahead. Even if they have partly authored the utilitarian system they are leaving.

But let me see if I can explain the failure of the Babylonians (and perhaps our rationalized selves) this way. Have you heard of the Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy? So this guy with a gun shoots randomly at the side of a barn. Then, afterwards, he walks over and paints a bullseye around each of the bullet holes. Now he is a sharpshooter.

If a Babylonian gets mutilated or sent to prison, it is terrifying to think it happened for absolutely no reason. So, they invent ‘The Company.’ They institutionalize the chaos, a kind of Capitalist Realism for you Mark Fisher fans out there. They would rather believe their suffering is part of a grand, secret, bureaucratic design than face the void of a meaningless universe. Everything, we might say, happens for a reason. The Lord, we might say, works in mysterious ways. If there is chance in the world, I dare not, in the end, see it as “True Chance.” I must paint a reason on top of the world in order to explain it. 

And what can I tell you? All this time, this entire podcast is about the search for meaning, how we read it and make it. But the spear has two points, the stick has two ends. We fear a lack of meaning even more than we fear suffering. We will invent an oppressive system to give our pain a purpose rather than accept that the universe is even partly random.

Narrative Hypnosis

 

Both Camillo and the Babylonians fail our Omelas morality test. Between Camillo’s flawed logic to accept superstition and the Babylonians’ desire for fairness and their surrender to a kind of totalitarian death-lottery, all have surrendered their agency to choose.

We have no business outsourcing our moral choices to fortune-tellers and Tarot cards, astrology or reading animal entrails. I recently heard about shufflemancy, where you set your music library to shuffle your songs and interpret the lyrics that come up. Ouch. Let’s add algorithms of all kinds to our list. We are so desperate for meaning and direction. But freedom, I suspect, requires a terrifying burden, agency. 

I’m accountable for what I read, for the readings I produce, and for the misreadings, too. 

And this reminds me a bit of a question posed to me some years back. Why bother reading the literature at all? Why not just go to Wikipedia or a scientific journal, collect the summaries and the data, and then debate the ethics and society-building from there? After all, all this wandering around and crossing back and forth through the themes of the literature this season can’t do much but confuse, right? 

And you might be thinking, though I suspect you’re not–you’re listening this far in to a literature podcast, after all. But you might be thinking: ‘Steve, just give me the TLDR of the moral dilemma so we can debate it.’ But I can’t. If we just debate the math of a utopia, like we saw last episode, or the probabilities for change–objectively–we stay comfortable. We have to walk through story, because we need the narrative to hypnotize us, to discomfort us, to offer us the contradictions and nuances and complications that are part of the dialogue inside us, those that will compel a change in our perspective that logic alone cannot achieve. 

Literature, art, they don’t speak to us objectively. And they aren’t governed by reason, mathematics, fate, or chance. They’re built on intention and they are read the same way. We return to them because they deepen our questions, create friction and uncertainty, provoke imagination, and evoke our responsibility to meaning. 

No astrology or lottery will ever do that. 

Refuse the false knowing. Embrace the ambiguities and uncertainties of story. And go read something. 

Outro

 

Follow me and find me along with supplements, bonus episodes, resources, newsletters, and still more at Waywords Studio dot com.  That’s Waywords Studio (two s’s in the middle) dot com. Thanks for listening! 

Music for Literary Nomads is by Randon Myles

Chapter headings by Natalie Harrison and Sarah Skaleski

Literary Nomads is a production of Waywords Studio. Find me at Waywords Studio on most social media and at Waywords Studio .com.

Bibliography

 

Arendt, Hannah. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. Viking Press, 1963.

Assis, Machado de. “The Fortune-Teller” (“A Cartomante”). Gazeta de Notícias, 1884.

Borges, Jorge Luis. “The Lottery in Babylon” (“La lotería en Babilonia”). Sur, 1941.

Daston, Lorraine. “Life, chance & life chances.” Daedalus, 2008. https://direct.mit.edu/daed/article/137/1/5/26722/Life-chance-amp-life-chances

Douglass, Ellen H. “Machado de Assis’s ‘A cartomante’: Modern Parody and the Making of a ‘Brazilian’ Text.” Hispania, 2001. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/22505

Hirsch, Alexander Keller. “Walking off the Edge of the World: Sacrifice, Chance, and Dazzling Dissolution in the Book of Job and Ursula K. Le Guin’s ‘The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas’.” Humanities, 2014. https://www.mdpi.com/2076-0787/5/3/67

Mendes de Souza, Marcelo. “Borges Reads Machado: A Translation of ‘A Cartomante’ in Revista Multicolor de los Sábados.” Machado de Assis em Linha, 2018. https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/0198/f3152d1bb0d277a6c6c4f782498ed4d9f027.pdf

Rawls, John. A Theory of Justice. Harvard University Press, 1971.

Shabbir, Ayesha. “Examining the Depiction of Capitalist Realism in Borges’s The Lottery in Babylon.” NUST Journal of Social Sciences and Humanities, 2021. https://www.academia.edu/161256695/EXAMINING_THE_DEPICTION_OF_CAPITALIST_REALISM_IN_BORGESS_The_Lottery_in_Babylon