They say I shot a man named Grey
And took his wife to Italy
She inherited a million bucks
And when she died it came to me
I can’t help it if I’m lucky
When I turned thirty I reached a critical point in my identity. (I am now sixty and am somewhat reluctant to call it a mid-life crisis given the implications one could draw with regard to the length of my life). This internal dilemma manifest itself in a sense that I had reached such a milestone in my life but had barely made any decision of note in getting there. I felt I had virtually no control, that I was being manipulated by unseen forces, and this left me with an uneasy sense of dissatisfaction and sadness. I was, of course, wrong to feel this way. The truth of the situation was (and still is) that I had virtually no control and I was being manipulated by unseen forces but, rather than making me feel sad, it should have given me a huge sense of relief and gratitude. I was, in short, the victim of good fortune. The unseen force driving my life was luck.
My fortuity began before I was born. My parents both grew up in a leafy South Manchester suburb. They were healthy and in a stable relationship. Dad had a decent job and mum gave up work to bring up myself and my two elder siblings. We moved to a different, but equally leafy, suburb of South Manchester when I was born and I attended the local primary school. I was nurtured and loved and surrounded by many similar children from families much like my own. It wasn’t always perfect, we had to move somewhere less leafy when Dad lost his job but we largely coped. My brothers and I did somethings we shouldn’t have and got into some trouble with school and the local constabulary but it was all dealt with and we all managed to get work of some description after leaving school. I had great friends and those relationships led me down paths I might not have walked to places I would never have seen. It was in one such place I met and subsequently married Anne. I was fortunate enough to have a mind that worked well with computers at a good time in my life and we moved back among the leaves to bring up our family. I had my ‘crisis’ and we went on holiday(s) and had Christmas(es) and we shouted at the children when they mis-behaved and bought them ice creams and bikes when they didn’t. We encouraged them and they grew.
I’ve obviously missed out a lot of detail there but the point I am trying to make is that the odds were that I would have turned out pretty much the way I have given my genes, background and circumstances. Life would have undoubtedly been different with other (similar) parents or if had I gone to another school or if my friends had been the people that they weren’t. But they were and because they were I met the other people I met and so on. However different life might have been it would still have been recognisable and relatively comfortable.
I am not in any way trying to suggest that my life hasn’t had its difficult moments along the way. I mentioned my father losing his job and our having to move, that was a big moment that affected members of the family deeply. There have been illnesses and bereavements. We have had to deal with the effects of mental and physical struggles. We’ve been the victims of crime, we have known financial hardship. We are still here though, I am still here and doing ok. But that too is because of the genes my parents passed to me and the impact of the cumulative imbalance of good fortune to bad. Because another benefit of favourable chance is that the good luck keeps coming and, what’s more, it gets better – you get luckier.
Does this mean then that I can take no credit for the way my life has turned out? Well, where I stand right now, I would say yes – I am suggesting that I had no conscious influence over how my life has turned out and whilst that saddened and unsettled me when I was 30 it does very much reassure me at 60.
Why reassurance? Well, I have made a lot of mistakes and it is good to know that there was a greater likelihood that I would have made them (come what may) than not. I’m not suggesting that I have some get out of jail free card (though that isn’t such a fanciful idea as it sounds), I can’t act like a complete dick and say ‘well that’s the kind of guy I am so what did you expect?’ However contrived our lives are there is always some room for being more reasonable, more kind and more understanding. We surely do reap a lot of what we sow, or what has been sown in and around us, but things aren’t inevitable. I am not a fatalist. I am not suggesting that every step is and has been mapped out. The future is still unknown to me and full of possibilities that are only revealed to me as they happen or looking back after I missed them.
Looking back, or reflection, is a uniquely human activity. Unlike animals, humans have two lives. We live a day to day ‘life-as-lived’ (experiencing self) in which we experience in realtime what we do and what happens to us. We also have the brain power to reflect on what has previously happened to us – the (hi)story of our lives – a ‘life-as-object’ (remembered self). In this retelling or reimagining our past we ascribe much greater importance to the decisions we think we have made. The bad stuff was all misfortune and malign influence, the good was all me!! That is an over simplification, we would feel no guilt or have no regrets if this was wholly the case, but it does explain a little of how we get seduced into believing our own hype.
I want to be clear here that I’m not trying to prove or disprove free will or convince you it exists or otherwise. My days of trying to convince people to believe in something for which there is no tangible evidence are well behind me, thank god (whoever he was). I really am merely suggesting that my life of unbridled success and limitless joy and happiness(!) is very much the result of being born to the right people in the right place at the right time. I am in the very fortunate position to know what love feels like. I have been cared for all my life and I am valued by family, friends and beyond. Sadly, there are too many people for whom this is very much not the case. These people didn’t choose such a life. They didn’t choose to be born to parents who failed provide adequate nurture or care. They didn’t choose to live in ignorance of how it feels to be loved. They didn’t choose to be so undervalued by a society that they feel they have no worthwhile contribution to make.
The structure of society in the West insists not only that the successful must be rewarded for their hard work and achievement but that those not so successful have to be punished. We pour scorn on the suggestion that merit might have come about by chance or that disadvantage is not the result of an inferiority of effort or aptitude rather than bad fortune. Technically, a system that bestows power on those deemed to merit it, is called a meritocracy. Such a system would work if we all had the same opportunities to prosper but the odds are so heavily stacked in favour of the privileged it might be more appropriate to call it a ‘luckocracy’.
In my account of the recent diagnosis of My Prostate Cancer, I alluded to certain other cancers that might lead one to make judgements regarding the lifestyle choices of those afflicted. We could, if we were feeling particularly vindictive, criticise the treatment of lung cancer in a lifelong smoker or bemoan the transplanting of a liver into a body ravaged by the effects of a lifetimes’ abuse of alcohol. You might be reading this and thinking that these people do not deserve even our sympathies let alone the scant resources of an overstretched National Health service. But you would be wrong. On the face of it, life looks like a level playing field and the decisions we make are built around the assumption that we are all in a rationally sound enough place to make them. We are on no such field. Some are so misplaced – both physically and mentally – that they cannot ever make what society might deem, good decisions. The hand they have been dealt is, in effect, unplayable given the rules of the game as they stand.
I didn’t particularly set out to write this much about determinism but I just couldn’t help myself (do you see what I did there?). People responded to my last post and this is in response to that. Many people commented that I was taking the diagnosis well and that my attitude to the disease was refreshingly frank and honest. The truth is that I recognise that the same genes that increased my chances of developing cancer are also responsible for my attitude to that situation and, as importantly, the fact that I am where I am and ably assisted in the ways in which I can deal with it. None of which I had any conscious input to. I didn’t cause my cells to divide in the way that they did in the same way that I had no part in the fact that I tan well in the sun.
So what did I set out to write? Essentially I wanted to stress how fortunate I am and how relatively easy this makes my life. I wanted to try to illustrate just how little that has been down to me, my ideas and my actions. This is important because, whilst we are very good at accreditation, we really struggle to discredit someone from their plight. We then proceed to condemn and punish them for something they have very little, or no, control over. In the not so distant past people who suffered epileptic fits were vilified and condemned for these attacks. They were considered to be possessed by an evil spirit that they, at worst, had invited in or, at best, failed to resist. Either way they were not treated well. Even when it was recognised as a condition of the brain rather that a weakness of the will, the treatment received was not pleasant and very invasive. Now we understand more about the condition, its sufferers are treated with sympathy, compassion and medication. We do what is necessary to protect them from harm in the midst of a seizure and we do what we can to ensure they cannot harm others whilst they are unable to control their actions. One day we might think like this about many more common complaints and disorders and we will reflect on the lives of the sufferers with compassion and sympathy. We might still remove them from society for the protection of both them and us but we won’t punish them for something they had little or no control over.
The opening lines are from ‘Idiot Wind’ by Bob Dylan. Fortune, good or ill, blows through our lives like the wind. We cannot control it but it is idiotic in the sense that there is no intelligent force behind it, controlling and directing it.
It is my sincere wish that some good luck gets blown your way today.