Question of the Day - 15 May 2023

Gambling, or in a more general sense, risk taking, is one of the great conditioning factors of life itself. Risk taking was an integral force — indeed, often the guiding principle — in a majority of the most primitive cultures. Which means that the gambling impulse has been with and in us since we've been human.

The human race evolved in an environment of risk and danger and chance — in a word, uncertainty. The physiological attitude of readiness, the ability to assume risk, to challenge chance, to plunge into uncertainty are survival traits favored by natural selection. Senses, strength, coordination, reflex, judgment, metabolism are all heightened during an encounter with a serious challenge; they all increase the likelihood of not only the success, but also the efficiency, of the human response to risk.

The impulse to plunge into uncertainty is usually acquisitive in nature. A risk taker wants to gain something — food, property, knowledge, experience, power — from the risk taking. In this sense, greed is an evolutionary force for change.

This drive, in the most successful players of the games of life, has to be stronger than its countervailing evolutionary force: fear.

The only manner in which early man and woman could overcome fear in order to confront risk was a conviction of safety, a deep-seated confidence — in a word, certainty. Having a sense of certainty about the uncertain might seem paradoxical. But the conviction of certainty had to emerge from a real physical and psychic basis for self-confidence, a visceral experience of faith, the belief in a guiding power or some such determining will, whether inside or outside one's self, which decides whether the risk taker is favored by triumph or condemned by failure.

All actions are a gamble, a questioning of chance, and all results are an indication of how an individual, or even a society, fares in chance's eyes. That's why the deities of the earliest religions were nothing more than manifestations of chance. It can be argued that all religion, and in fact all philosophy and science, were built on a foundation of gambling.

How? The cornerstone of religion, philosophy, and science is certainty: the explaining, if not the conquering, of the terrible unknown. Certainty is the profound striving to remove chance from the game of life. After all, chance is too unpredictable, unfathomable, unreliable. Chance will never make the trains run on time or cook the E. coli out of chopped meat. Chance is just too hard to bear, too tough to do business with. That's why we have religion and science. 

So certainty (religion and science) gives chance (gambling) some competition. However, because gambling predates religion, the most ambitious religions incorporated gambling into their mythos. Many understood that religious practices, both outward in form and inward in attitude, are a kind of deistic emulation of gambling practices.

Churches and casinos, for example, have so much in common, it's almost spooky. Both are far removed from ordinary activity. Both involve highly arcane rituals, vernacular styles, parochial properties, belief systems. Both invite prayer and supplication to symbols and embodiments of a higher power. Both are lavishly appointed and offer (though mostly don't deliver) rewards in the form of miracles and jackpots to those of strong and unquestioning faith. 

Other religions, however, never adopted gambling in an attempt to co-opt it. They believe that gambling promotes idleness, encourages avarice, degeneracy, and profligacy, and furthers the faith in blind chance over the certainty of an omnipresent omniscient omnipotent God. Where the power of such religions prevails, gambling is weak. And vice versa.

The power of gambling is continually expanding and contracting; it's one of the great heartbeats of civilization. Right now, gambling around the world is engorged with blood, at the possible peak of an expansion cycle in which the most expensive and exclusive resort destinations on Earth are being built and sustained by the greatest transfer of wealth over gaming tables ever witnessed or even imagined. 

But in the final analysis, it's all vanity and vexation of the spirit.

Death, of course, has the last word. Death is the ultimate house advantage. It's always near in the short term, where the luck factor holds more sway. Get terminally unlucky and you're busted out before your time. Over the long haul, the inexorable edge collects its inevitable percentage, wearing you down day by day, cell by cell, breath by breath, heartbeat by heartbeat. And in the end, by the immutable law of the ultimate edge, death finally takes it all.

Life, as one gambler put it, is 6-to-5 against. If life were offered to you as a proposition, you'd be a sucker to take it.

But you still have to. Because life boils down to an impulse to gamble against death. And while you're here, it's good to be in the action.

And that, at least in our study of this irrepressible phenomenon, is why gambling is so popular.