Fate and Chance

Pick a Side, Ye Agnostics!

The twentieth-century fantasist Lord Dunsany opens The Gods of Pegāna (1905) with the following myth:

In the mists before the Beginning, Fate and Chance cast lots to decide whose the Game should be; and he that won strode through the mists to Māna-Yood-Sushāī and said: “Now make gods for Me, for I have won the cast and the Game is to be Mine.” Who it was that won the cast, and whether it was Fate or whether it was Chance that went through the mists before the Beginning to Māna-Yood-Sushāī—none knoweth.

Māna-Yood-Sushāī is Dunsany’s version of Brahma, the sleeping divinity whose dreams we (and the gods) are, and whose eventual awakening will abruptly put an end to the universe. For all that, Māna-Yood-Sushāī isn’t alone before the dream begins. Fate and Chance are also there, and whatever form Creation will take in Māna-Yood-Sushāī’s long dream, it will be on terms established beforehand by either Chance or Fate. It comes down to who won the casting of the lots.

Detail from The Soldiers Casting Lots for Christ’s Garments. William Blake, 1800.

Dunsany was a confirmed agnostic. His ingenious experiments in myth-making could, one supposes, be read as send-ups of myths he thought were taken all too seriously in the real world. Surely, The Gods of Pegāna gives us a litany of deities whose offices amount to rather human concerns. Yoharneth-Lahai is the god of “little dreams and fancies”; Jabim, the Lord of Broken Things; Wohoon, the Lord of Noises in the Night.

In that light, we could content ourselves with a superficial reading of this story about Fate and Chance. Is there a plan to existence, or is it all just random? No one knows, and no one ever will. Dunsany is giving us agnosticism in a nutshell.

The problem with agnosticism, however, is that it’s not really agnostic, and never has been. On the surface, it looks like good-natured intellectual humility. Asked about the ultimate nature of existence, the agnostic simply says that nothing can be ascertained. There may be a plan, a God, or there may not be: humans evidently can know nothing about it. The sheer variety of religious beliefs is all the proof we need. Far from demonstrating that we were made in their image, the many incompatible gods that the human imagination has disgorged to date were clearly made in ours. Better to rely on our rational resources than on myths concocted before we knew any better. After all, if there is an ordering agency in or beyond this universe—a divine intelligence—it was this agency that gave us the ability to reason soberly. Hell, it was this agency that chose to veil its own existence from us. Let us assume best intentions, then, and proceed as directed by our nature. If God is good, God will understand.

A perfectly sensible position—much more sensible, on its face, than either of the two extremes which, for the purposes of this post (and at the risk of oversimplification), I will call theism and atheism. Each of these alternatives puts its money on one of the two forces Dunsany sees at work “before the Beginning.” The theist claims that Fate governs everything and can be known to do so. The atheist claims that all is Chance: there is no ordering principle, no divine being—nothing but a blind play of forces.

Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, 18th Baron of Dunsany (1878-1957).

In that light, agnosticism looks like a no-brainer. But the truth is that it is not a real position, because the idea that Fate and Chance are valid alternatives, such that one can pit them against each other in a zero-sum game, is an illusion. Besides, in the very idea of such a face-off, agnosticism has already decided on a winner; it only pretends otherwise.

To repeat, the agnostic says: the world may be governed by Chance, or it may be governed by Fate. A problem whose solution is anybody’s guess is really nobody’s guess. Since we don’t know the probability of either option, we must assume that the odds are, ultimately, fifty-fifty. It is, therefore, a matter of chance whether the world is ruled by Chance or Fate.

Agnosticism, in other words, subjects Fate to the whims of Chance. Like atheism, it sees Chance as the ultimate arbiter, but allows for one chance event that the atheist rejects—namely, the chance that the universe happens to be governed by Fate. You can see this sewn right into Dunsany’s story: “In the mists before the Beginning, Fate and Chance cast lots to decide whose the Game should be…” The casting of lots is a chance operation. If Fate won, then it won by the luck of the draw. Chance remains in charge. It rules in the ultimate sense.

But let’s say that Chance, not Fate, won the draw. On what grounds can Chance then say to Māna-Yood-Sushāī, “Now make gods for Me, for I have won the cast and the Game is to be Mine”? After all, the casting of lots is no ordinary game; it is an act of divination, which is to say, a means by which people allow an external agency to decide a matter they can’t resolve on their own. If the casting of lots is to have any meaning at all once the draw is over, it can only be because, chance operation though it may be, it affirms the ultimate supremacy of Fate. The game only matters if whoever happens to win the cast was fated to do so. Regardless of who won, then, Fate ultimately rules.

Curiously, casting lots only makes sense if Fate and Chance both rule at one and the same time. Neither player can win without losing to the opposing player. The lots are cast, but the casting itself already presupposes the primacy of Chance in the throw and the primacy of Fate in the binding force of the result. Each requires the other and neither can rule alone.

This is what philosophers call an aporia, a dead end—at least if we insist on seeing Chance and Fate as mutually exclusive principles, which on the surface they certainly seem to be.

The Wheel of Fortune from the Arnoux & Amphoux tarot, 1801.

We could content ourselves with this paradox. But we could also do as Henri Bergson suggests, and recognize in any apparent paradox a badly posed problem—one which, properly reformulated, would solve itself. Perhaps Dunsany’s myth does not stage a contest between Chance and Fate so much as expose their weird complicity. Perhaps the question isn’t whether Fate or Chance governs the world, but what kind of world the paradox itself presupposes. Here, the agnostic gesture, eager to suspend judgment, reveals itself as a refusal to think the conditions of its own articulation.

In human life, the riddle of Fate versus Chance is not a theoretical problem but a living mystery. It bears on the question of meaning, the “why?” which, acknowledged or not, drives all wondering about the nature of things. A universe that elicits such wonder can’t be one whose parts are either strictly contingent or strictly necessary. It can only be a universe in which anything that happens can be read as either random or planned, in such a way that events ultimately transcend this opposition.

A cog in a machine does not ask why, nor does a tossed coin in mid-air. What asks why is a free being who senses, first, that the die of the possible has an infinite number of sides, any of which might turn up on the next throw; and second, that, given this infinite openness, any actual result necessarily bears the weight of a decision. It is true that anything could happen, and the world can therefore be construed as radically subject to chance. For that very reason, however, there is something miraculous in whatever does end up happening at any point. Only in a world shot through by Chance can an event manifest as Fate.

Fate and Chance, then, aren’t competing explanations but complementary ways of registering the same truth, namely that what happens matters. Everything that is could have been otherwise, and it shines forth with divine significance precisely because of this radical contingency. The agnostic is right to hesitate before choosing; but the hesitation itself already testifies to something that neither Chance nor Fate, taken alone, can account for. Before these two cast their lots, after all, there were the mists, and there was Māna-Yood-Sushāī.