Randomness, Luck, Circumstance - Life As Ricocheting Balls On A Pool Table, A Troubling Prospect

The Chris Wilton character in Woody Allen's movie Match Point says:

The man who said "I'd rather be lucky than good" saw deeply into life. People are afraid to face how great a part of life is dependent on luck. It's scary to think so much is out of one's control. There are moments in a match when the ball hits the top of the net, and for a split second, it can either go forward or fall back. With a little luck, it goes forward, and you win. Or maybe it doesn't, and you lose.

 

The movie's seminal scene is when Wilton, who has killed his lover and her landlady and taken the landlady's jewelry to make the murders look like robbery, throws the incriminating evidence into the Thames. Walking away from the river he realizes that he still has the landlady's wedding ring, so throws it towards the river, turns away, and walks off.  Unbeknownst to him the ring bounces on the railing, could go either way, into the river or back onto the pavement, and bounces back. 

A drug addict finds the ring, and when he is murdered by an unknown assailant, the police find the ring, engraved with the landlady's name and wedding date.  Police attention is drawn away from Wilton as the murderer and placed squarely on the addict.  

Tolstoy in his Second Appendix to War and Peace expounds on his theory of determinism.  Napoleon lost the Battle of Borodino not because of a loss of his usually canny battlefield strategy, but because his valet forgot to bring his gum boots on a cold, rainy day. As a result the Emperor caught cold and on the day of the decisive conflict was congested, feverish, and not his sharp, perceptive self.  As a result he made a series of errors which led to Russian victory.

Tolstoy does not stop here.  The valet forgot to bring the Emperor's foul weather gear because he was distracted by his wife's infidelity.  The wife's infidelity with a sheepherder was precipitated by her long frustration with her husband.  The sheepherder, himself in an unhappy and unrewarding marriage sought comfort and pleasure with the valet's wife.

In other words, each action was determined by a previous one in a chain that dates back ad infinitum. Events are not random, but conditioned by the past. 

The two arguments for randomness and determinism when taken together dispel and dismiss the notion of divine or secular purpose.  John was not 'meant' to find Mary, Bob did not die a miserable painful death because he deserved it, Amy did not discover a life-saving drug because she had been chosen to do so.  All were propelled by the ineluctable influences of the past altered only by random bits which do not change the equation but only alter its mathematical direction. 

Discussion about such things is not new.  Philosophers and theologians have argued for centuries over them.  The disquisitions have never been just academic.  It matters to everyone.  A world without meaning is unconscionable, unthinkable, and frightening. 

Aquinas in his Summa Theologica spent a thousand pages trying to prove the existence of God; but of course, despite the efforts of this, the world's greatest theologian, he had to rest on faith and faith alone.  At the same time he built the foundation for the Catholic Church which contends that true belief is a function of both faith and logic. 

 

The philosophers of the Enlightenment were logicians, but the application of intellectual rigor was not a willy-nilly exercise.  Logic, objectivity, and exegesis were the handmaidens of faith.  Logic was to be used to better understand divinity and the mysteries of the universe. 

Frederik Nietzsche was a nihilist for whom there was no meaning in the world; and the only validation of the individual was the expression of pure will.  Sartre, far less harsh and peremptory hedged his bets, and suggested that doing good could alter the existential emptiness of the world. 

Marfa Potter woke up in a cold sweat every morning, bolted awake by the same nightmare she had every night.  She found herself alone in a cold, dark, empty place with only a thread of light on the horizon. There was no sound, the air was frozen and still, the earth was featureless and flat. Everywhere she turned she saw the same emptiness and stillness and felt the penetrating cold.  It was the end of the world, the end of existence, and there was nothing left.  No life and no God.  She screamed and woke up. 

The George Pal 1960 movie made of H.G. Wells' The Time Machine evokes the same desolate view of the end of a world approaching entropy, the complete absence of energy.  The sea has no movement, no ripples, no tide.  The air is still. The landscape is shapeless, bare, grey, monochrome. 

Wells is neither determinist nor nihilist, but there is only one way to interpret his chilling ending of the book.  All human enterprise, good, evil, morality, love, and feature will ultimately end in nothingness.  Given that, what is the purpose and meaning of life? Nothing at all. 

The Cormac McCarthy book No Country for Old Men explores this theme.  The psychopath Shugur is a nihilist for whom the only arbiter of value is the flip of a coin. Heads, you live; tails you die.  No value at all. 

'If the rule you lived by has brought you to this', Shugur says to Carson Wells before killing him, 'of what use was the rule?'  Rules like any standards and guideposts of behavior are meaningless, temporal, artifacts created to confer order but without any inherent, absolute value. 

Marfa Potter conflated two of man's greatest concerns - that he has done nothing significant in his life and will die without legacy; and that nothing he has done or could have done has any meaning at all. He will die soulless, neither condemned to hell or ascended to heaven but simply extinguished. 

In Conrad's The Heart of Darkness, Kurtz's last words are, 'the horror...the horror', for at that moment he realizes that the tribal savagery he has witnessed in the darkness of the jungle was universal.  Human beings by nature are savage, brutal, and soulless. 

Conrad believed in traditional good and evil, morality, ethics.  Lord Jim spent his whole life atoning for his sin aboard the pilgrimage ship Patna which he abandoned when he thought it was about to sink, abandoning 800 souls to drowning and certain death. 

In his novel Victory, the main character flees the world and seeks solitude and refuge from evil; but of course, says Conrad, this is not possible; and he is visited by men without a scintilla of moral justice.

As horrible as this human evil is, it is preferable to a world without meaning.  Evil gives meaning to life just as good. 

It was the total absence of meaning, the complete aloneness that made Marfa's nightmare so frightening.  Danger, pursuit, threat, violence would have been better than this complete abandonment to a meaningless, horrifyingly empty existence. 

Marfa was an old woman, so her dreams were no longer intimations, but reality.  She like Tolstoy's Ivan Ilyich would soon be facing death, a black, empty, cold, and unremittingly dark place of eternity; and so her nightmares not only persisted but worsened in fright and intensity. 

Nihilism, stoicism, existentialism were of no use.  Perhaps had they taken hold much earlier in her life, she would have incorporated them as a foundation on which she would take her last breath; but she had been schooled in religion, propriety, good taste, and enterprise all of which were the ingredients of the final, desperate horror of death. 

Perhaps she will have Ivan Ilyich's epiphany. 

He sought his former accustomed fear of death and did not find it.
‘Where is it? What death?’
There was no fear because there was no death.
In place of death there was light.

 And then, 

“So that’s what it is! What joy!”