Ancestry 32 - Existential Queries: Chance

Yet, many a time our intelligence, in its attempt to seek logic and order, seems overwhelmed by a perceivable chaos in the world and frustrated by its incapacity to rationally explain phenomena or projecting with an acceptable degree of clarity their evolution in the future. The question of the effect chances (or ‘fortune’ in its positive acceptation) have in our lives remains a valid one and lingers throughout life, despite the law of causality and the historical determinism many of us adhere to; and that regardless of the strength and efficaciousness of our will, that is our potential to punch above our weight in our struggles, and influence, if not the course of history, at least somehow that of our lives and those of the people close to us. Acknowledging and assigning a cardinal importance to chance, that is resigning ourselves to the perceived randomness of circumstances and events and phenomena on our paths in an apparently chaotic world, suppresses the innate thirst for knowledge and explanation and is not conducive to bring balance and harmony to minds and souls. Onto a personal level, using the intellect to reduce this randomness of much of what happens around us and affects as a result our thinking and feelings, our behaviour, contact and actions, that is to rationalise the apparent chaos, brings along not just an element of order in our thinking process and perception of the world, but it moderates and effectually manages various emotions inherent in human nature: regret, remorse, the joy in success, the feeling of fulfilment, etc.

Nevertheless, many of us who wonder: “why things happen this way and not another” are often tempted to take a short cut and effortlessly answer without much thought: “Oh, it happened by chance!” or with the proverbial: “Because of bad (or good) luck!” But what does chance and luck mean, in a world that to the human intellect is rudimentarily connected and elementarily coherent, but inherently always causal and deterministic, in which behind each effect often lurks complex and virtually infinite sequence of causes, and each phenomenon is the result of several conflicting forces, often unidentifiable by the most intensive and thorough human analysis? However, despite the randomness that seemingly characterizes small or large events or clusters of events into phenomena that make up short or long human stories of personal or social nature, such stories can potentially be analysed, delineated and described by observable and sometimes the measurable result of forces, whether obvious or inconspicuous, whether invisible at first sight or latent.

Reduction of the occurrence of an event to chance, then, stems from nothing more than the inability for explanation or the unwillingness to seek one; from a rather unconditional surrender to the power of these forces, a disclaimer of knowledge and responsibility, an aversion to reality, a fear of the consequences and of what will come next. Chance seems, after all, a word devoid of content, either concrete or abstract, whose invocation is of no practical benefit. At worst, it becomes synonymous with the evasion of an exegesis and betrays weakness or ignorance or simply indolence. At best, it suggests an inadequate degree of understanding of phenomena in social and human relations. It is a white flag raised by the perplexed and resigned individual, when confronted by the question of the meaning and reason of his presence on this world, of his ancestors and descendants, no matter how insignificant and brief. In effect, it nulls past and present life, on the pretext of this limited capacity to provide an adequate rational explanation of what is happening around us and, indeed, within us, normally as an effect of the former. Admittedly, we are constrained by the amount of the knowledge humanity has thus far accumulated, the even less of the most knowledgeable individuals and machines possess, that is, on the conquests of the intellect of previous generations in the short history of the human kind. And, thus, for what appears sublime and incomprehensible in history and by ourselves, our mind and soul, we summon up chance for an effortless escape, as a relief from the mental torture that search for answers entails.

Although life unfolds before and around ourselves as a sequence of unconnected and random events, it is in fact no more than pseudo-random, in the sense that every event and each turn individuals or societies take in one direction or another, are potentially explicable by multiple causes of different weights, over an enormous breadth and depth of time and space, so that their classification and evaluation as factors in the outcome appears practically impossible. Despite this, aiming at least at a rational explanation, even at a credible approximate interpretation, no matter how rudimentary, no matter if fruitless at the end, is worthy every bit of the intellectual strain that it demands. Hegel’s statement: “What is real is rational and what is rational is real” still holds strong. Let us try to explain our lives and get to know ourselves, before we perish, even if the odds appear overwhelmingly against the success of such an endeavour. We will get a bit closer to the meaning we are looking for, and that might be just worth the effort.