WHAT DO WE MEAN BY LUCK?
Both society and the Church are uneasy talking about the role of luck in life. More honesty about its effects might help us address the injustices about which God cares.

If you are smart, you will convince people that your successes in life are deserved and your failures just bad luck. Listening to any Premier League manager after a game of football is testimony to that. A study of high achieving CEOs has shown that a striking amount of their success is actually the product of what we would term pot luck. The report cites a number who did well at the helm of one company and then badly in charge of the next. The author concluded:

 

The point is not that these executives were fools…These people didn’t go from being brilliant to being stupid overnight…It’s just that they were never skilled enough to get the right answers most of the time, probably because no-one is. It’s natural for us to look at successful people and assume that their success is due to some innate quality they have, rather than to think it might be the result of circumstance or chance.

The former England and Middlesex cricketer Ed Smith has written a book (Luck: What it Means and Why it Matters, Bloomsbury Publishing, 2012) which deals with the role that luck plays in human affairs. It is unquestioningly accepted by most that we live in a meritocracy where people are properly rewarded for a combination of ability and hard work. This overlooks the critical factor that circumstance plays in life. Considerations like: which family and social class we are born into; what connections we have; how much money lies behind us, are huge factors in social outcomes. This is an inconvenient truth for many who succeed in life, hence the tendency today for people to play down a privileged background in their life story. If these factors were acknowledged properly then the way people are remunerated might have to be re-considered. As a result, talk of luck hardly gets a mention when we think about success.

 

The ruthless purging of luck from the social lexicon reached its apogee in the 2008 economic crash. Fiendishly clever financial models were thought to inoculate us from risk, evidence of the triumph of humanity over the arbitrary dangers our predecessors were exposed to. Yet these impossibly complicated and impenetrable models were a modern version of the tower of Babel; monuments to our vanity which resulted in chaos and confusion. As the quantitative risk expert at Lehman Brothers said when the firm collapsed: ‘Events that models only predicted would happen once in 10,000 years happened every day for three days’. Some model.

Christians have an awkward relationship with luck. We use words like ‘fortunate’ and ‘best wishes’ yet we do not really believe the world is subject merely to random forces. A creator and redeemer God is believed to be at work, decisively shown in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Whatever we mean by ‘luck’, God is part of the dynamic. This leads us into potentially dangerous terrain if we assume we can interpret just what God is doing in every situation. I suspect we have all come across Christians who act like this; people who effortlessly attribute the right motive and intention to God in every outcome in life. Thankfully such people are rare (though they do exist). Many of us will have experienced the secret joy of discerning when God has been behind a co-incidence; what might be termed the Joseph doctrine (‘God meant it for good’). However, there are many other outcomes in life which feel so manifestly unfair that it is a struggle to identify God’s activity.

 

In the hot debate over the balance between personal virtue and pot luck, our faith should contribute a sense that all people are gifted by God to one degree or another. This calls for humility and should act as a touchstone for us in public policy, countering an inflated sense of entitlement which has marred the world of work. We might also raise questions about the role of luck in life. The mere fact that Christians struggle with its meaning and the role that God plays or does not play in apparently chance outcomes should not cause us to ignore its effects. The more visibility we afford luck, the more serious we might be about injustice. We may struggle to discern luck’s effects, but we know plenty about God’s character and what he cherishes in society.