Chapter 11: The Belief in Luck
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The gambling propensity is another subsidiary
trait of the barbarian temperament. It is a concomitant variation of
character of almost universal prevalence among sporting men and
among men given to warlike and emulative activities generally. This
trait also has a direct economic value. It is recognized to be a
hindrance to the highest industrial efficiency of the aggregate in
any community where it prevails in an appreciable degree.
The gambling proclivity is doubtfully to be classed as a feature
belonging exclusively to the predatory type of human nature. The
chief factor in the gambling habit is the belief in luck; and this
belief is apparently traceable, at least in its elements, to a stage
in human evolution antedating the predatory culture. It may well
have been under the predatory culture that the belief in luck was
developed into the form in which it is present, as the chief element
of the gambling proclivity, in the sporting temperament. It probably
owes the specific form under which it occurs in the modern culture
to the predatory discipline. But the belief in luck is in substance
a habit of more ancient date than the predatory culture. It is one
form of the artistic apprehension of things. The belief seems to be
a trait carried over in substance from an earlier phase into the
barbarian culture, and transmuted and transmitted through that
culture to a later stage of human development under a specific form
imposed by the predatory discipline. But in any case, it is to be
taken as an archaic trait, inherited from a more or less remote
past, more or less incompatible with the requirements of the modern
industrial process, and more or less of a hindrance to the fullest
efficiency of the collective economic life of the present.
While the belief in luck is the basis of the gambling habit, it is
not the only element that enters into the habit of betting. Betting
on the issue of contests of strength and skill proceeds on a further
motive, without which the belief in luck would scarcely come in as a
prominent feature of sporting life. This further motive is the
desire of the anticipated winner, or the partisan of the anticipated
winning side, to heighten his side's ascendency at the cost of the
loser. Not only does the stronger side score a more signal victory,
and the losing side suffer a more painful and humiliating defeat, in
proportion as the pecuniary gain and loss in the wager is large;
although this alone is a consideration of material weight. But the
wager is commonly laid also with a view, not avowed in words nor
even recognized in set terms in petto, to enhancing the chances of
success for the contestant on which it is laid. It is felt that
substance and solicitude expended to this end can not go for naught
in the issue. There is here a special manifestation of the instinct
of workmanship, backed by an even more manifest sense that the
animistic congruity of things must decide for a victorious outcome
for the side in whose behalf the propensity inherent in events has
been propitiated and fortified by so much of conative and kinetic
urging. This incentive to the wager expresses itself freely under
the form of backing one's favorite in any contest, and it is
unmistakably a predatory feature. It is as ancillary to the
predaceous impulse proper that the belief in luck expresses itself
in a wager. So that it may be set down that in so far as the belief
in luck comes to expression in the form of laying a wager, it is to
be accounted an integral element of the predatory type of character.
The belief is, in its elements, an archaic habit which belongs
substantially to early, undifferentiated human nature; but when this
belief is helped out by the predatory emulative impulse, and so is
differentiated into the specific form of the gambling habit, it is,
in this higher-developed and specific form, to be classed as a trait
of the barbarian character.
The belief in luck is a sense of fortuitous necessity in the
sequence of phenomena. In its various mutations and expressions, it
is of very serious importance for the economic efficiency of any
community in which it prevails to an appreciable extent. So much so
as to warrant a more detailed discussion of its origin and content
and of the bearing of its various ramifications upon economic
structure and function, as well as a discussion of the relation of
the leisure class to its growth, differentiation, and persistence.
In the developed, integrated form in which it is most readily
observed in the barbarian of the predatory culture or in the
sporting man of modern communities, the belief comprises at least
two distinguishable elements -- which are to be taken as two
different phases of the same fundamental habit of thought, or as the
same psychological factor in two successive phases of its evolution.
The fact that these two elements are successive phases of the same
general line of growth of belief does not hinder their coexisting in
the habits of thought of any given individual. The more primitive
form (or the more archaic phase) is an incipient animistic belief,
or an animistic sense of relations and things, that imputes a
quasi-personal character to facts. To the archaic man all the
obtrusive and obviously consequential objects and facts in his
environment have a quasi猵ersonal individuality. They are conceived
to be possessed of volition, or rather of propensities, which enter
into the complex of causes and affect events in an inscrutable
manner. The sporting man's sense of luck and chance, or of
fortuitous necessity, is an inarticulate or inchoate animism. It
applies to objects and situations, often in a very vague way; but it
is usually so far defined as to imply the possibility of
propitiating, or of deceiving and cajoling, or otherwise disturbing
the holding of propensities resident in the objects which constitute
the apparatus and accessories of any game of skill or chance. There
are few sporting men who are not in the habit of wearing charms or
talismans to which more or less of efficacy is felt to belong. And
the proportion is not much less of those who instinctively dread the
"hoodooing" of the contestants or the apparatus engaged in any
contest on which they lay a wager; or who feel that the fact of
their backing a given contestant or side in the game does and ought
to strengthen that side; or to whom the "mascot" which they
cultivate means something more than a jest.
In its simple form the belief in luck is this instinctive sense of
an inscrutable teleological propensity in objects or situations.
Objects or events have a propensity to eventuate in a given end,
whether this end or objective point of the sequence is conceiveD to
be fortuitously given or deliberately sought. From this simple
animism the belief shaDes off by insensible gradations into the
second, derivative form or phase above referred to, which is a more
or less articulate belief in an inscrutable preternatural agency.
The preternatural agency works through the visible objects with
which it is associated, but is not identified with these objects in
point of individuality. The use of the term "preternatural agency"
here carries no further implication as to the nature of the agency
spoken of as preternatural. This is only a farther development of
animistic belief. The preternatural agency is not necessarily
conceived to be a personal agent in the full sense, but it is an
agency which partakes of the attributes of personality to the extent
of somewhat arbitrarily influencing the outcome of any enterprise,
and especially of any contest. The pervading belief in the hamingia
or gipta (gaefa, authna) which lends so much of color to the
Icelandic sagas specifically, and to early Germanic folk-legends, is
an illustration of this sense of an extra-physical propensity in the
course of events.
In this expression or form of the belief the propensity is scarcely
personified although to a varying extent an individuality is imputed
to it; and this individuated propensity is sometimes conceived to
yield to circumstances, commonly to circumstances of a spiritual or
preternatural character. A well-known and striking exemplification
of the belief -- in a fairly advanced stage of differentiation and
involving an anthropomorphic personification of the preternatural
agent appealed to -- is afforded by the wager of battle. Here the
preternatural agent was conceived to act on request as umpire, anD
to shape the outcome of the contest in accordance with some
stipulated ground of decision, such as the equity or legality of the
respective contestants' claims. The like sense of an inscrutable but
spiritually necessary tendency in events is still traceable as an
obscure element in current popular belief, as shown, for instance,
by the well-accredited maxim, "Thrice is he armed who knows his
quarrel just," -- a maxim which retains much of its significance for
the average unreflecting person even in the civilized communities of
today. The modern reminiscence of the belief in the hamingia, or in
the guidance of an unseen hand, which is traceable in the acceptance
of this maxim is faint and perhaps uncertain; and it seems in any
case to be blended with other psychological moments that are not
clearly of an animistic character.
For the purpose in hand it is unnecessary to look more closely into
the psychological process or the ethnological line of descent by
which the later of these two animistic apprehensions of propensity
is derived from the earlier. This question may be of the gravest
importance to folk-psychology or to the theory of the evolution of
creeds and cults. The same is true of the more fundamental question
whether the two are related at all as successive phases in a
sequence of development. Reference is here made to the existence of
these questions only to remark that the interest of the present
discussion does not lie in that direction. So far as concerns
economic theory, these two elements or phases of the belief in luck,
or in an extra-causal trend or propensity in things, are of
substantially the same character. They have an economic significance
as habits of thought which affect the individual's habitual view of
the facts and sequences with which he comes in contact, and which
thereby affect the individual's serviceability for the industrial
purpose. Therefore, apart from all question of the beauty, worth, or
beneficence of any animistic belief, there is place for a discussion
of their economic bearing on the serviceability of the individual as
an economic factor, and especially as an industrial agent.
It has already been noted in an earlier connection, that in order to
have the highest serviceability in the complex industrial processes
of today, the individual must be endowed with the aptitude and the
habit of readily apprehending and relating facts in terms of causal
sequence. Both as a whole and in its details, the industrial process
is a process of quantitative causation. The "intelligence" demanded
of the workman, as well as of the director of an industrial process,
is little else than a degree of facility in the apprehension of and
adaptation to a quantitatively determined causal sequence. This
facility of apprehension and adaptation is what is lacking in stupid
workmen, and the growth of this facility is the end sought in their
education -- so far as their education aims to enhance their
industrial efficiency.
In so far as the individual's inherited aptitudes or his training
incline him to account for facts and sequences in other terms than
those of causation or matter-of-fact, they lower his productive
efficiency or industrial usefulness. This lowering of efficiency
through a penchant for animistic methods of apprehending facts is
especially apparent when taken in the mass-when a given population
with an animistic turn is viewed as a whole. The economic drawbacks
of animism are more patent and its consequences are more
far-reaching under the modern system of large industry than under
any other. In the modern industrial communities, industry is, to a
constantly increasing extent, being organized in a comprehensive
system of organs and functions mutually conditioning one another;
and therefore freedom from all bias in the causal apprehension of
phenomena grows constantly more requisite to efficiency on the part
of the men concerned in industry. Under a system of handicraft an
advantage in dexterity, diligence, muscular force, or endurance may,
in a very large measure, offset such a bias in the habits of thought
of the workmen.
Similarly in agricultural industry of the traditional kind, which
closely resembles handicraft in the nature of the demands made upon
the workman. In both, the workman is himself the prime mover chiefly
depended upon, and the natural forces engaged are in large part
apprehended as inscrutable and fortuitous agencies, whose working
lies beyond the workman's control or discretion. In popular
apprehension there is in these forms of industry relatively little
of the industrial process left to the fateful swing of a
comprehensive mechanical sequence which must be comprehended in
terms of causation and to which the operations of industry and the
movements of the workmen must be adapted. As industrial methods
develop, the virtues of the handicraftsman count for less and less
as an offset to scanty. intelligence or a halting acceptance of the
sequence of cause and effect. The industrial organization assumes
more and more of the character of a mechanism, in which it is man's
office to discriminate and select what natural forces shall work out
their effects in his service. The workman's part in industry changes
from that of a prime mover to that of discrimination and valuation
of quantitative sequences and mechanical facts. The faculty of a
ready apprehension and unbiased appreciation of causes in his
environment grows in relative economic importance and any element in
the complex of his habits of thought which intrudes a bias at
variance with this ready appreciation of matter-of-fact sequence
gains proportionately in importance as a disturbing element acting
to lower his industrial usefulness. Through its cumulative effect
upon the habitual attitude of the population, even a slight or
inconspicuous bias towards accounting for everyday facts by recourse
to other ground than that of quantitative causation may work an
appreciable lowering of the collective industrial efficiency of a
community.
The animistic habit of mind may occur in the early, undifferentiated
form of an inchoate animistic belief, or in the later and more
highly integrated phase in which there is an anthropomorphic
personification of the propensity imputed to facts. The industrial
value of such a lively animistic sense, or of such recourse to a
preternatural agency or the guidance of an unseen hand, is of course
very much the same in either case. As affects the industrial
serviceability of the individual, the effect is of the same kind in
either case; but the extent to which this habit of thought dominates
or shapes the complex of his habits of thought varies with the
degree of immediacy, urgency, or exclusiveness with which the
individual habitually applies the animistic or anthropomorphic
formula in dealing with the facts of his environment. The animistic
habit acts in all cases to blur the appreciation of causal sequence;
but the earlier, less reflected, less defined animistic sense of
propensity may be expected to affect the intellectual processes of
the individual in a more pervasive way than the higher forms of
anthropomorphism. Where the animistic habit is present in the naive
form, its scope and range of application are not defined or limited.
It will therefore palpably affect his thinking at every turn of the
person's life -- wherever he has to do with the material means of
life. In the later, maturer development of animism, after it has
been defined through the process of anthropomorphic elaboration,
when its application has been limited in a somewhat consistent
fashion to the remote and the invisible, it comes about that an
increasing range of everyday facts are provisionally accounted for
without recourse to the preternatural agency in which a cultivated
animism expresses itself. A highly integrated, personified
preternatural agency is not a convenient means of handling the
trivial occurrences of life, and a habit is therefore easily fallen
into of accounting for many trivial or vulgar phenomena in terms of
sequence. The provisional explanation so arrived at is by neglect
allowed to stand as definitive, for trivial purposes, until special
provocation or perplexity recalls the individual to his allegiance.
But when special exigencies arise, that is to say, when there is
peculiar need of a full and free recourse to the law of cause and
effect, then the individual commonly has recourse to the
preternatural agency as a universal solvent, if he is possessed of
an anthropomorphic belief.
The extra-causal propensity or agent has a very high utility as a
recourse in perplexity, but its utility is altogether of a
non-economic kind. It is especially a refuge and a fund of comfort
where it has attained the degree of consistency and specialization
that belongs to an anthropomorphic divinity. It has much to commend
it even on other grounds than that of affording the perplexed
individual a means of escape from the difficulty of accounting for
phenomena in terms of causal sequence. It would scarcely be in place
here to dwell on the obvious and well-accepted merits of an
anthropomorphic divinity, as seen from the point of view of the
aesthetic, moral, or spiritual interest, or even as seen from the
less remote standpoint of political, military, or social policy. The
question here concerns the less picturesque and less urgent economic
value of the belief in such a preternatural agency, taken as a habit
of thought which affects the industrial serviceability of the
believer. And even within this narrow, economic range, the inquiry
is perforce confined to the immediate bearing of this habit of
thought upon the believer's workmanlike serviceability, rather than
extended to include its remoter economic effects. These remoter
effects are very difficult to trace. The inquiry into them is so
encumbered with current preconceptions as to the degree in which
life is enhanced by spiritual contact with such a divinity, that any
attempt to inquire into their economic value must for the present be
fruitless.
The immediate, direct effect of the animistic habit of thought upon
the general frame of mind of the believer goes in the direction of
lowering his effective intelligence in the respect in which
intelligence is of especial consequence for modern industry. The
effect follows, in varying degree, whether the preternatural agent
or propensity believed in is of a higher or a lower cast. This holds
true of the barbarian's and the sporting man's sense of luck and
propensity, and likewise of the somewhat higher developed belief in
an anthropomorphic divinity, such as is commonly possessed by the
same class. It must be taken to hold true also -- though with what
relative degree of cogency is not easy to say -- of the more
adequately developed anthropomorphic cults, such as appeal to the
devout civilized man. The industrial disability entailed by a
popular adherence to one of the higher anthropomorphic cults may be
relatively slight, but it is not to be overlooked. And even these
high-class cults of the Western culture do not represent the last
dissolving phase of this human sense of extra-causal propensity.
Beyond these the same animistic sense shows itself also in such
attenuations of anthropomorphism as the eighteenth-century appeal to
an order of nature and natural rights, and in their modern
representative, the ostensibly post-Darwinian concept of a
meliorative trend in the process of evolution. This animistic
explanation of phenomena is a form of the fallacy which the
logicians knew by the name of ignava ratio. For the purposes of
industry or of science it counts as a blunder in the apprehension
and valuation of facts.
Apart from its direct industrial consequences, the animistic habit
has a certain significance for economic theory on other grounds. (1)
It is a fairly reliable indication of the presence, and to some
extent even of the degree of potency, of certain other archaic
traits that accompany it and that are of substantial economic
consequence; and (2) the material consequences of that code of
devout proprieties to which the animistic habit gives rise in the
development of an anthropomorphic cult are of importance both (a) as
affecting the community's consumption of goods and the prevalent
canons of taste, as already suggested in an earlier chapter, and (b)
by inducing and conserving a certain habitual recognition of the
relation to a superior, and so stiffening the current sense of
status and allegiance.
As regards the point last named (b), that body of habits of thought
which makes up the character of any individual is in some sense an
organic whole. A marked variation in a given direction at any one
point carries with it, as its correlative, a concomitant variation
in the habitual expression of life in other directions or other
groups of activities. These various habits of thought, or habitual
expressions of life, are all phases of the single life sequence of
the individual; therefore a habit formed in response to a given
stimulus will necessarily affect the character of the response made
to other stimuli. A modification of human nature at any one point is
a modification of human nature as a whole. On this ground, and
perhaps to a still greater extent on obscurer grounds that can not
be discussed here, there are these concomitant variations as between
the different traits of human nature. So, for instance, barbarian
peoples with a well-developed predatory scheme of life are commonly
also possessed of a strong prevailing animistic habit, a well-formed
anthropomorphic cult, and a lively sense of status. On the other
hand, anthropomorphism and the realizing sense of an animistic
propensity in material are less obtrusively present in the life of
the peoples at the cultural stages which precede and which follow
the barbarian culture. The sense of status is also feebler; on the
whole, in peaceable communities. It is to be remarked that a lively,
but slightly specialized, animistic belief is to be found in most if
not all peoples living in the ante-predatory, savage stage of
culture. The primitive savage takes his animism less seriously than
the barbarian or the degenerate savage. With him it eventuates in
fantastic myth-making, rather than in coercive superstition. The
barbarian culture shows sportsmanship, status, and anthropomorphism.
There is commonly observable a like concomitance of variations in
the same respects in the individual temperament of men in the
civilized communities of today. Those modern representatives of the
predaceous barbarian temper that make up the sporting element are
commonly believers in luck; at least they have a strong sense of an
animistic propensity in things, by force of which they are given to
gambling. So also as regards anthropomorphism in this class. Such of
them as give in their adhesion to some creed commonly attach
themselves to one of the naively and consistently anthropomorphic
creeds; there are relatively few sporting men who seek spiritual
comfort in the less anthropomorphic cults, such as the Unitarian or
the Universalist.
Closely bound up with this correlation of anthropomorphism and
prowess is the fact that anthropomorphic cults act to conserve, if
not to initiate, habits of mind favorable to a regime of status. As
regards this point, it is quite impossible to say where the
disciplinary effect of the cult ends and where the evidence of a
concomitance of variations in inherited traits begins. In their
finest development, the predatory temperament, the sense of status,
and the anthropomorphic cult all together belong to the barbarian
culture; and something of a mutual causal relation subsists between
the three phenomena as they come into sight in communities on that
cultural level. The way in which they recur in correlation in the
habits and attitudes of individuals and classes today goes far to
imply a like causal or organic relation between the same
psychological phenomena considered as traits or habits of the
individual. It has appeared at an earlier point in the discussion
that the relation of status, as a feature of social structure, is a
consequence of the predatory habit of life. As regards its line of
derivation, it is substantially an elaborated expression of the
predatory attitude. On the other hand, an anthropomorphic cult is a
code of detailed relations of status superimposed upon the concept
of a preternatural, inscrutable propensity in material things. So
that, as regards the external facts of its derivation, the cult may
be taken as an outgrowth of archaic man's pervading animistic sense,
defined and in some degree transformed by the predatory habit of
life, the result being a personified preternatural agency, which is
by imputation endowed with a full complement of the habits of
thought that characterize the man of the predatory culture.
The grosser psychological features in the case, which have an
immediate bearing on economic theory and are consequently to be
taken account of here, are therefore: (a) as has appeared in an
earlier chapter, the predatory, emulative habit of mind here called
prowess is but the barbarian variant of the generically human
instinct of workmanship, which has fallen into this specific form
under the guidance of a habit of invidious comparison of persons;
(b) the relation of status is a formal expression of such an
invidious comparison duly gauged and graded according to a
sanctioned schedule; (c) an anthropomorphic cult, in the days of its
early vigor at least, is an institution the characteristic element
of which is a relation of status between the human subject as
inferior and the personified preternatural agency as superior. With
this in mind, there should be no difficulty in recognizing the
intimate relation which subsists between these three phenomena of
human nature and of human life; the relation amounts to an identity
in some of their substantial elements. On the one hand, the system
of status and the predatory habit of life are an expression of the
instinct of workmanship as it takes form under a custom of invidious
comparison; on the other hand, the anthropomorphic cult and the
habit of devout observances are an expression of men's animistic
sense of a propensity in material things, elaborated under the
guidance of substantially the same general habit of invidious
comparison. The two categories -- the emulative habit of life and
the habit of devout observances -- are therefore to be taken as
complementary elements of the barbarian type of human nature and of
its modern barbarian variants. They are expressions of much the same
range of aptitudes, made in response to different sets of stimuli.
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