Chance and its consequences
William James called her "the bitch-goddess, Success." He meant it as a complaint about America's worship of her, but the phrase catches something true. She is a goddess because we deify whatever she touches, crediting it with foresight and merit it never had. She is a bitch because she hands out her favours with no regard for desert at all. What I want to call contingency is just her proper name - the rather distinguished term by which we dress up and disguise mere chance.
A writer can send scripts to numerous publishers without success, and might succeed one day because the editor happens to be in a good mood, having just beaten a parking fine. Once the resources of the publishing house are behind it, the script might succeed, as indeed might have done some of those not as lucky.
Xerox PARC invented the graphical interface, the mouse, and networked computing, and gave the ideas away almost by accident to visitors from Apple and Microsoft who knew what to do with them. Blockbuster was offered the chance to buy Netflix for fifty million dollars and turned it down. None of this was written into the nature of the ideas themselves. It was written into who happened to be in the room.
Roman writers like Suetonius tell us how eagles and other omens appeared when Otho or Vitellius was born, showing they were destined for the imperial purple. In fact they might just have been lucky about who died when. Each made a briefly successful bid and was killed by another within a year.
More tellingly, in the pre-Cambrian explosion of life, some of whose exotic shapes are preserved in the Burgess Shale, there are twenty-three completely new phyla, nearly all of which leave no modern descendants. There are creatures with three legs sticking out of their backs, and all types of weird arrangements. These worked, in the sense that the remains we have were of creatures that lived.
Eerily they call to mind Empedocles, the pre-Socratic philosopher who postulated that creatures had arisen at the water line in all kinds of combinations, heads with no necks, two sets of arms, and so on. He thought the ones which prospered were the ones best equipped to survive. Quite right, as far as it goes.
But it does not go far enough, because equipment can be lucky twice over. Stephen Jay Gould and the biologist Elisabeth Vrba gave a name to the second kind of luck, exaptation. A trait that evolves for one purpose is co-opted for another it was never selected for. Feathers probably evolved for insulation, and only later turned out to be good for flight. So a creature can be lucky not only in surviving cold, but in already possessing, for some unrelated reason, the one feature that turns out to matter afterwards.
In his book Wonderful Life, Stephen Jay Gould points out that some of these early creatures of the Burgess Shale were probably wiped out by a sudden flood, or a volcano, and were unlucky enough to leave no descendants. Evolution plays a role of course, but you have to be lucky with it. He points to one of the more diminutive fossils, which has a stripe along it. This is one of the lucky ones, not hit at the wrong time by a falling log. It is the precursor of the class of vertebrates that includes us. It could just as easily have been one of the others that made it.
We behave as though capitalism, like evolution, rewards merit. Indeed, the two have a strikingly similar modus operandi of weeding out the less well equipped. But chance plays a huge role there too, and not only in single strokes of luck. It plays a role in which small early advantage is locked in and amplified until reversing it becomes almost impossible.
The QWERTY keyboard was arranged to slow typists down and stop Victorian typewriters from jamming. The jamming problem disappeared decades ago, and QWERTY remains, not because it is the best layout but because everyone already learned it. VHS beat the technically superior Betamax chiefly because it reached video rental shops first. Economists call this path dependency. A market can settle into an outcome that has nothing to do with which option was actually superior, only with which one happened to get a small head start at the right moment.
This is not a mark against evolution, either of organisms or of commercial innovations. It is a case for taking contingency seriously as its silent partner. The way both actually work is closer to trial and error than to design: variation thrown up more or less blindly, most of it discarded, a little of it retained because it happened to fit circumstances nobody had foreseen. That is as true of a market experimenting with new products as it is of a genome experimenting with new forms. The mechanism does not know in advance what will succeed. It finds out by trying, and what survives the trying looks afterwards as if it had been aimed at all along.
Something has to happen. Reality is the one that did. Some of the others could have happened instead. I draw a card from a deck, and it is the five of spades. Remarkable. It was only a one-in-fifty-two chance, yet it came up. Ah, but every other outcome was equally unlikely. What happened in evolution, in history, in the marketplace, was all equally unlikely beforehand. Something had to happen, and did. We then try to make it look as though advantage or merit was the determining factor, and it may have been one of the most important ones. It was rarely the only one.
The fact is that reality does not bear the characteristics of a seamless flow of superior ability. It looks more like the ragged jumps and starts of a series of accidents and events, through which that flow can be seen, but through which other successes could just as easily have flowed. We would have been just as convinced of their inevitable success had they happened instead.
We want to live in an ordered and just universe. This may be why we superimpose upon it more rationality and justice than it will bear. Michael Young invented the word ‘meritocracy’ in 1958 as a warning, not a compliment, imagining a Britain so thoroughly sorted by talent that failure could no longer be blamed on anything but oneself. That is the case recently revived against the tyranny of merit. A society that insists success is earned ends up telling its losers they deserve to lose.
Think how unbearable a truly meritocratic human society would be to those who did not succeed. They would have to blame themselves and their lack of ability, instead of drawing comfort from fickle fate. "I coulda been a contender." Better, perhaps, to admit the goddess for what she is, and let her carry some of the blame she has always deserved.
“I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.”
Madsen Pirie