Lotteries in Public Life: A Reader
By Vilhelm Aubert, Dael Wolfle, Dennis C. Mueller and
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Lotteries in Public Life - Vilhelm Aubert
1957).
Vilhelm Aubert[1],[2], Chance in Social Affairs
The Norwegian Law of Courts § 51 states: "Well in advance of each session of the circuit court, hearing criminal cases, the chief judge, or another judge authorized by him, or the court’s clerk shall, in the presence of a legal witness, by drawing lots, select fourteen jury-members and two alternates." This is one among a great many cases where society has institutionalized a recognized chance device as the proper mode of reaching a decision with social implications.
More than 150 years ago the English minister-philosopher Paley advanced the embryo of a general theory about the social functions of such chance decisions:
In a great variety of cases, and of cases comprehending numerous subdivisions, it appears, for many reasons, to be better that events rise up by chance, or, more properly speaking, with the appearance of chance, than according to any observable rule whatever. This is not seldom the case even in human arrangements. E ach person’s place and precedency in a public meeting may be determined by lot. Work and labour may be allotted. Tasks and burdens may be allotted. Military service and station may be allotted. The distribution of provision may be made by lot, as it is in a sailor’s mess; in some cases also the distribution of favours may be made by lot. In all these cases it seems to be acknowledged that there are advantages in permitting events to chance superior to those which would or could arise from regulation. In all these cases also, though events rise up in the way of chance, it is by appointment that they do so.[3]
And he goes on to say that even the acquirability of civil advantages, ought perhaps in a considerable degree to lie at the mercy of chance. Some would have all the virtuous rich, or, at least, removed from the evils of poverty, without perceiving, I suppose, the consequence, that all the poor must be wicked. And how such a society could be kept in subjection to governments, has not been shown...
[4]
Paley refers to chance devices that by appointment
are used to make decisions. The chance element is, as in the selection of juries, a manifest characteristic of certain institutionalized types of decisions. If we leave our own rationalistic culture, or those areas where we are the most deliberate and utilitarian, we come across another vast class of decisions that are random, but without being recognised as such. The chanciness of these decisions is latent.
One interesting step towards extending the concept of the chance device in social decisions has been taken by O. K. Moore in his analysis of hunting-magic among the Naskapi Indians in Labrador. The magical practice consists of heating bones of animals over hot coals, usually the shoulder-blade of the caribou or a bone of the kind of animal which the Naskapi are about to hunt. When heated, the bone cracks. It is then fitted into a wooden handle, and while held in specified ways, the cracks of the bone are read so as to give directions for the hunt. An impersonal device of the kind used by the Naskapi might be characterized as a crude ‘chance-like’ instrument. It seems that the use of such a device would make it more difficult to anticipate their behaviour than would otherwise be the case.
[5]
The practice serves to increase the likelihood of successful hunting under conditions where game is scarce and where the animals tend to learn from previous experience with hunters. The Naskapi are, however, quite unaware of the randomness resulting from these decisions. They believe that they are seeking, and getting, guidance from the super-natural, i.e. that the decision is systematic.
This seems to be generally true for all similar practices among primitive people. The conscious notion of chance appears to be a late comer among the basic conceptual tools by which man gains mastery over his world of action and perception. Sigerist states categorically that primitive men always deny chance or randomness in the occurrence of disease.[6] Illness is always precipitated either by natural causes or by the sick or somebody else’s actions. Similarly, death is usually not explained as due to chance.[7] On the whole, it seems to be the consensus of anthropological opinion that misfortunes and other events, are never explained by reference to a chance concept. On the contrary, primitive man’s systems of belief usually give evidence of a very vigorous denial of chance and uncertainty, and a similarly desperate affirmation of their capacity to master the world by secular skills or by magic.[8]
It has already been suggested that there is a need to distinguish between what we, as scientific observers, would characterize as chance elements in social life, and what any particular individual or social group happens to classify as a chance event. It may actually be useful to distinguish between three sociological types of chance phenomena: random responses precipitated by ignorance, chance devices, and chance theories.
Ignorance
Several years ago Moore and Tumin published a paper on the functions of Ignorance in social affairs. Some of their conclusions merit serious consideration in a context of chance decisions, although the writers themselves were unconcerned with this aspect of their problem: The central theory of this paper holds that, quite apart from the role of ultimate values and the attitudes relative to them, perfect knowledge is itself impossible, and an inherently impossible basis of social action and social relations. Put conversely, ignorance is both inescapable and an intrinsic element in social organization generally, although there are marked differences in the specific forms, degrees, and functions of ignorance in known social organizations.
[9] And they go on to describe some possible functions of ignorance in modern western societies: The function of ignorance that is most obvious, particularly to the cynical, is its role in preserving social differentials.
[10] Ignorance operates to maintain smooth social relations by preventing jealousy and internal dissension where differential rewards to approximate status equals are not based upon uniformly known and accepted criteria.
[11] "The success of military or law-enforcement undertaking, and the security of its participants, may depend upon the element of surprise.[12]
Another way in which ignorance serves to protect the traditional normative structure is through reinforcing the assumption that deviation from the rules is statistically insignificant."[13]
Whenever there is ignorance, secrecy, or deception about an event, the actor’s response and decision relative to that event, must in one sense be random. He does not fully know what he is doing. The influence of ignorance and secrecy upon his perception of order or randomness depends upon the reason why he is kept ignorant. If his ignorance is related to the unacceptably random nature of the events (like unequal rewards in an office organization) it may give him more sense of orderliness than is warranted. If his ignorance is due to a need to hide a system in certain events, he will perceive more randomness in the events than there is.
One might venture the hypothesis that ignorance of randomness is most likely to be kept up within co-operative social bonds; while ignorance of systematic responses is most likely to be kept up in antagonistic social relations and in conflict behavior.
Chance Theories
By "Chance theories is meant everything from the calculus of probability to everyday attempts to explain events by reference to luck, accidents, fortune, or the like, with the emphasis upon the latter
folk theories." The functional significance of such theories has been discussed by Merton:
In sociological terms, the doctrine of luck as expounded by the successful serves the dual function of explaining the frequent discrepancy between merit and reward while keeping immune from criticism a social structure which allows this discrepancy to become frequent. For if success is primarily a matter of luck, if it is just in the blind nature of things, if it bloweth where it listeth and thou canst not tell whence it cometh, or whither it goeth, then surely it is beyond control and will occur in the same measure whatever the social structure.
For the unsuccessful and particularly for those among the unsuccessful who find little reward for their merit and their effort, the doctrine of luck serves the psychological function of enabling them to preserve their self-esteem in the face of failure. It may also entail the dysfunction of curbing motivation for sustained endeavour...
This orientation toward chance and risk-taking accentuated by the strains of frustrated aspirations may help explain the marked interest in gambling - an institutionally proscribed, or at best, permissive rather than preferred or proscribed mode of activity - within certain social strata.[14]
The idea of Fortune as a category of events appeared in Aristotle’s works. But, beginning with him, the concept of Fortune has always been very close to its opposite pole, Fate.[15] This ambivalence reappears in people’s everyday philosophies relative to a large number of social situations; what seems to be determined by chance is at the same time decided in advance by fate. The ideology of romantic love gives an explanation of the decision on whom to love and/or marry, which has a strong element of chance, with overtones of fate. The English term to fall in love
carries with it associations of randomness and chance. The more extreme cult of romantic love, is full of expressions like love at first sight,
love in spite of reasons.
A Norwegian proverb says that love may fall upon a dirt as soon as upon a lily.
One implication seems to be that love is unpredictable, irrational and divorced from other systems of social interaction.
The notion of the happy accident
in science is another case in point, irrespective of whether this is a correct explanation or not, of how inventions and discoveries actually are made. A more special case is the institution of free association
in psychoanalysis. The norm directed to the patient is that he should permit random
thoughts to become conscious and verbalize them, while the explanation applied by the therapist is a systematic one. We may look upon the recent method of brainstorm
as an extension of free association on the psychoanalyst’s