Luck

by Jay Paul

I have posted here for the last several weeks about my recent struggles with medication. I am happy to say that, for now, things are resolved. I am on a low dose of olanzapine that does not play havoc with my blood and does not make me feel woozy. Unfortunately, I am having some minor problems with weight gain and sleepiness. I hope they get better as time goes on. But for now, my serious problems are behind me. Now on to this week's essay.

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In his essay “Moral Luck” Thomas Nagel notes that we blame a drunk driver for recklessly driving up onto a curb and hurting a pedestrian much more so than we blame her if she just went up on the curb and nobody was there. This is a case of moral luck. If nobody was there, the drunk driver’s moral, and legal, standing results from her being lucky that the sidewalk was empty.

 

Nagel’s point seems irrefutable. Much of our moral standing in our own and in other people’s eyes results from pure luck. Reading about this caused me to think about luck more generally. To what extent are our lives the result of lucky coincidences?

 

We can start at the beginning of life, at the chance meeting of a particular sperm with a particular egg. Nature is in many ways extraordinarily excessive and exuberant. So many sperm get wasted. So many eggs get wasted. This is true of other species, too. Think of how few acorns even begin to turn into oak trees. 

 

This chance meeting of egg and sperm has a tremendous effect on mental illness. Identical twins, according to most studies, have a 50% chance of coming down with schizophrenia if their twin has it. In the general population, only about one percent have schizophrenia.

 

So having schizophrenia is about 50% bad luck in the genetics lottery. But what about the other 50%? Apparently, that’s environmental. It could be physical—viral or bacteriological infection of the brain, gut, or both—or psychological—stress and trauma. Nobody really knows at the present time.

 

As far as luck goes, it doesn’t matter if it’s physical or psychological. It’s bad luck to have a virus attack a susceptible brain and partially cause schizophrenia. It’s also bad luck to be born into an abusive family or be subjected to abuse by peers or an authority figure in childhood or later. All of these can be contributing factors to creating schizophrenia. At this point, the only thing that is clear is that getting schizophrenia is very bad luck.

 

But what in life is not the result of luck, either good or bad? Not only are our genetic make-ups the result of luck, but our socioeconomic status at birth and while growing up is all luck. In fact, very little in our lives is under our control. We tend to focus and attend to the small array of possibilities that are in our control and ignore or take for granted what isn’t.

 

For example, we are as dependent on the sun and the air for survival as we are on our heart and brain. Even astronauts in space need space craft and suits that mimic earth air and food that ultimately comes from the sun, as does all food. Without the air or sun we would not be alive. Yet I know I rarely think about this. I just take them for granted.

 

The sun and air are examples of good luck that allowed us to come into existence. Bad luck can not only give you disease, it can destroy your home during a storm or cause you to be in the path of a drunk driver. 

 

What is in our control? Not much. We are presented with a limited range of possible actions and thoughts in each moment. We may eat a piece of cake and possibly gain weight, or we may not. We may choose to involve ourselves in a political movement or not. We may cross the street to see what is happening on the other side or not. All these choices assume a tremendous amount of good luck stemming from our body continuing to move to an asteroid not hitting the earth.

 

What we don’t know and usually don’t pay attention to forms the very possibility of our lives. Perhaps this realization is one of the reasons that religion appeared. It can be overwhelming to think that blind luck rules so much of our lives. We often want to believe in some sort of spiritual will behind the scenes that makes sense of all this seeming luck.

 

Another way to come to terms with luck is to connect with nature and its forces as much as possible. We can think of ourselves as in a canoe borne by the current of a river yet affected by what we do with the oar. Most of our lives are formed by forces way beyond our control, and in the metaphor these forces are the river’s current. And this is okay. Better to connect with these forces than to fight the inevitable.

 

Connecting with these forces entails accepting bad luck when it comes, as it will. This is not easy. Sometimes I still curse my fate for having schizoaffective. But it’s also my destiny, formed by the confluence of genetics and environment in my particular case. So I let it run its course with the help of medication. 

 

The strange thing about medication is that it could have resulted from the same societal mindsets that brought on the schizoaffective in the first place. According to T.M Luhrmann in The Most Troubling Madness, while all cultures have a word for delusions and hallucinations, schizophrenia in the developed world tends to be more severe than it is in the developing. The more virulent forms of the condition seem to have appeared with modernity. Indeed, schizophrenia wasn’t even identified as a “disease” until the 20^th century with Eugen Blueler’s Dementia Praecox, or the Group of Schizophrenias.  

 

To an extent, the very mindset of the modern world, with its exploitation of nature and its urban sprawl and processed products, may have played an important role in my having schizoaffective. This exploitation of nature also produced the medicine that I take for my schizoaffective.

 

But this is speculation. Ultimately, we don’t and can’t know why we are the way we are. Things just fall out in certain ways. I, like everyone, am an accident of nature. The chances of me coming into existence the way I am were miniscule. This is true of everyone. We are all little miracles of luck.