once and for all, my blog is and will remain as www.philosophercrip.com 

check it...

my disaboom blog URL changed slightly. it is now:

http://disaboom.com/Blogs/PhilosopherCrip/Default.aspx

my blog has officially moved to: http://community.disaboom.com/community/philosophercrip/default.aspx

 

I post more than once a week.  So, if you liked my myspace blog rants, check it.

At its essence, disability IS the intersection of biology and power.  That is, much like feminism defines gender as the social construction of roles in society that favor one sex (men) over the other (women), disability is a set of social constructs that favor the abled over the disabled.  To at least some degree, biological difference BECOMES biological disability when it is inserted into a time and place with an existing power structure. 

 

When the majority of people in power positions have a particular biological trait, they exert their power by designing society in a way that gives preference to those with that biological trait.  The trait may be something as simple as a "normal" range of height.  If a person falls far enough outside of this range, they face physical and attitudinal barriers to their access of what is "good" in life (independence, romantic relationships, choice of employment, etc).  Perhaps my examples rely too heavily on my own experience as a little person, but I think this "power-centric" description of the social model of disability can really apply to any disabling difference. 

 

To resist this oppression, we need an understanding of how the application of power works.  How are people with disabilities "crippled" by this combination of biology and power?  Some of the ways in which power is exerted over people with disabilities is fairly obvious.  For instance, many times oppression is direct and unapologetic, as when people with disabilities are forced to live in nursing homes against their will because "there are no other options" (read: the way people in power are put together, they don't need help with x, y, and z and anyone who DOES need help with these things are physically isolated from the rest of the world, removed from society like a criminal).  Other times, it is slightly more subtle, where people with power design physical space that excludes people with differences from access, standardized testing that excludes people with cognitive difference from academic success, or entertainment venues that exclude people with sensory differences from art.

 

The oppressive assertion of power that is the most shrouded – and hence often the most destructive – is power that is wrapped up in the guise of kindness.  Here, I am talking abut pity.  When one person pities another, more than anything else, it is an assertion of power.  It is the expression of the belief that the pitier holds the high ground over the pitiful.  When an attitude of pity is taken toward someone, the object of pity is never seen as an equal.  Pity is not the same as compassion, which is an act of empathy.  There is no empathy in pity.  For pity to exist, there must be an "other" that is being pitied.  There must be a group or an individual that is seen as separate from and LESS THAN the group or individual doing the pitying.  This is an ultimate expression of power. 

 

Sometimes, the hostile nature of pity bubbles up to the surface.  This is the case for The Annual Muscular Dystrophy Association Telethon hosted by Jerry Lewis.  As if his generally patronizing attitude wasn't enough to clue you in about what Jerry REALLY thinks about people with disabilities, he has, in recent history given us more evidence to go on, like the 1990 Parade Magazine article where he states "When I sit back and think a little more rationally, I realize my life is half, so I must learn to do things halfway. I just have to learn to try to be good at being a half a person … and get on with my life." –Jerry Lewis on what disability must be like." When the interviewer suggests that pity may be a harm rather than a good for people with disabilities, Jerry Lewis responds with anger on CBS Sunday Morning (May 20, 2001), "Pity? [If] you don't want to be pitied because you're a cripple in a wheelchair, stay in ya house!"—Jerry Lewis. 

 

These words leave us with no doubt that a war is being waged at the intersection of power and biology.  A war between those who would oppress and marginalize others to preserve a status quo, and those who are proud of who they are and resist this oppression in all its forms, especially pity.

Rage Against The Machine was not on stage last weekend to entertain their fans.  They weren't their for the teenaged moshers and the crowd surfers to get off on the adrenaline rush of loud music and lyrics that they don't even understand.  Likewise, I have no doubt that they settled whatever differences they had and reunited not because their wallets were feeling light since the last decade's success.  Anyone who was LISTENING to RATM could have no doubt abuot why they were their saturday night.  We were all there for a religious revival and Harvard drop-out Zack de la Rocha was our preacher.

Rage blasted out onto the stage with the 1999 single "Testify" as if to say "I told you so."  "Testify" was years after the first Gulf War and years before this current mess, yet its lyrics explicitly describe a scene in which the US is at war because of its dependence on oil and oil products.  It was no coincidence that RATM opened with lyrics like "Yes the car is our wheelchair, My witness your coughing, Oily silence mocks the legless, Those who travel now in coffins" or "The pipeline is gushing While here we lie in tombs" or the repeated refrain, "Mass graves for the pump and the price is set And the price is set."  Zack did not work the crowd.  He did not waste his time with small talk, but let the music and lyrics send his message, playing song after anti-establishment song in rapid fire, with short pauses between when the stage was darkened. 

The only exception to this is right before he sang "Wake Up."  To be clear about Rage's message, de la Rocha reinforced the short speech he gave in CA at their first reunion in which he stated "...if the same laws were applied to U.S. presidents as were applied to the Nazis after World War II [...] every single one of them, every last rich white one of them from Truman on, would have been hung to death and shot - and this current administration is no exception. They should be hung, and tried, and shot. As any war criminal should be. But the challenges that we face, they go way beyond administrations, way beyond elections, way beyond every four years of pulling levers, way beyond that. Because this whole rotten system has become so vicious and cruel that in order to sustain itself, it needs to destroy entire countries and profit from their reconstruction in order to survive - and that's not a system that changes every four years, it's a system that we have to break down, generation after generation after generation after generation after generation.... Wake up."  He echoed these words with precision, in addition stating that he was clarifying for the "fascists at Fox News" who had claimed de la Rocha had called for the president's assisination when in fact he thought the president should be executed after due process.  More than anything else, Zack was calling the crowd to action abuot the war in Iraq and oppression at home.  He was saying that we have to resist the powers that be here with the same passion as the Iraqi youth that resis the occupation of our government.  It was ironic that this was said to a sea of young upper middle class white kids whose parents probably voted for Bush both times.

Rage Against the Machine was not complaining about hanging chads in florida, they were calling for a full scale revolution.  Of course, even if they believe that Bush should be brought to trial as a war criminal, they cannot believe that this is within the realm of possibility in a society where the majority of the people are a contented middle class with their cookie cutter houses and cars.  For real revolution to happen, there needs to be serious, sustained suffering and oppression.  To be sure, this suffering and oppresion exists for many Americans.  I count myself among those who would some radical politics to assuage my oppression and the oppression of those like me.  However, it is a reality that the kind of full scale revolution RATM is calling for is not in the realm of possibility for my movement or anyone else's.

Yet, I was FIRED UP by his words.  I bucked and thrashed and shouted revultionary refrain lyrics with the other thousands of people in the audience.  Perhaps most were just drawn to the energy of the show and would go about their daily lives afterwards, but I'd like to think that many of us HEARD rage.  Many of us Woke Up, bringing the energy with us back to our corners of the world and the work we do to make things better.

One change that this show brought abuot in my thinking is the importance of culture.  I have had friends try to TELL me about crip culture and why it should be the new centerpiece of our movement rather than policy, but it finally clicked at the Rage show.  We can have all kinds of laws designed to protect our rights and protect from discrimination and still feel the weight of oppression on our backs.  As long as it remains acceptable for almost every little person in hollywood to appear as comic relief, for high school kids to throw around the insult "retard" even now that gay and fag are becoming less fashionable, and for the two most "progressive" student leaders on campus to spend nearly 5 minutes straight mocking my best friend's dyslexia, we will have no liberation.  We absolutely need access to public space.  We absolutely need protection against discrimination in housing and employment.  Yet, I can't help but think that most of this will be hollow as long as we are contunually pitied and mocked in our culture. 

So this leads me to my point, where's our revolution?  Will there ever be enoutgh solidarity and culture among people with disabilities to pack a stadium with fans that have come to listen to songs about our struggle?  Can we even get on the agenda of other sub-cultures as allies? Is there hope for adding ablism to the list of things a rapper or rocker tells the audience to fuck (a la fuck racism, fuck war, fuck poverty, etc).

I suppose I should not be discouraged but inspired. Movements don't happen overnight and at least I have strong, like-minded people I have surrounded myself with.  Maybe a culture is built one person at a time.

"Freedom" by RATM

" Solo, I'm a soloist on a solo list
All live, never on a floppy disk
Inka, inka, bottle of ink
Paintings of rebellion
Drawn up by the thoughts I think

Yeah!
Come on!
The militant poet in once again, check it

It's set up like a deck of cards
They're sending us to early graves
For all the diamonds
They'll use a pair of clubs to beat the spades
With poetry I paint the pictures that hit
More like the murals that fit
Don't turn away
Get in front of it

Brotha, did ya forget ya name?
Did ya lose it on the wall
Playin' tic-tac-toe?

Yo, check the diagonal
Three brothers gone
Come on
Doesn't that make it three in a row?

Spoken quietly: "Anger is a gift"

Come on!
Uggh!

(Guitar solo)

Drop that!
Uggh!
Come on
Yeah
Uggh

Brotha, did ya forget ya name?
Did ya lose it on the wall
Playin' tic-tac-toe?

Yo, check the diagonal
Three million gone
Come on
'Cause you know they're counting backwards to zero

Environment
The environment exceeding on the level
Of our unconciousness
For example
What does the billboard say?
Come and play!, come and play!
Forget about the movement

Spoken quietly: "Anger is a gift"

Yeeeaaahhhh!
Uggh!
Awww, bring that shit in!
Uggh!
Hey!

Freedom...yea...
Freedom...yea right...
Freedom...yeeeaaahhh!
Freedom!
Yeeeaaahhh!
Freedom!
Yea right!
Freedom!
Yeeeaaahhh!
Freedom!
Yea!
Right!"

i was asked by a close friend to write a few creative words about disability activism and this is what i came up with... i don't know ANYTHING about poetry so thoughtful criticism is welcomed.



THOUGHT & ACTION

thought, forged in the furnace of feeling
molten ideas churning and bubbling
taking shape amidst the blaze of fury and compassion
hardening to cold steal that cuts through the cords of your oppression
 
action, birthed through the suffering of difference
bodies and minds twisted by your standards
making love that is painfully beautiful
yielding a child whose scream will rouse you in the black of night

Connecticut got its first snow of the year this week.  It was only about an inch and by New England standards, that barely counts.  My computer is broken and so I have been commuting back to my office at night to work after getting dinner.  Fortunately, my commute consists of crossing the street from my apartment.  As I was leaving my office on thursday night, the snow collecting on my hat, jacket, and sidewalk, i followed my tracks from a few hours earlier and noticed that i habitually take the same exact path every day.  I am very precise in my movements, even if that precision is not deliberate.  It got me thinking about habit.

 

What does it mean to have a habit?  Are habits something to be avoided all together or to be fostered consciously?  What habits do I have that I am not aware of? 

 

When someone talks about a habit I think they can mean a few things.  Perhaps it is more accurate to say that it is the same thing, a repeated, predictable action, that can have distinct types of causes.  Some habits seem arbitrary like the path i take to work.  There are slight variations that would nearly equal in distance, and yet I take the same one over and over.  The cause of that habit is random and moraly neutral.  Other habits we slip into because they are functional, like my habit of taking I-84 when I drive from my apartment in Hartford to my parents' house.  Surely, it would be possible to take back roads, but it would not be as efficient.  Other habits are consciously adopted because of a benefit we expect to gain, like exercise or church attendance.  Still other habits are "bad" habits that are immediately gratifying but have negative long term results, like eating taco bell every day for lunch.

 

It seems to me that it is important to be aware of our habits and their causes.  However, causes aren't the only thing we should be concerned with.  Good habits can make our lives easier and better regardless of if they are chosen with intent like an exercise regiment or if they develop "naturally" like my drive home from Hartford.  However, even good habits can be destructive if they become rigid and absolute.  If a father's brisk evening walk means that he can't attend his son's little league games, this healthy habit could have a long term negative impact if it isn't modified in some way.

 

Habits of thought are the most difficult to be aware of and sometimes the most dangerous.  Developing our habits of thought around sound principles is important and can be very good.  But we must not make our commitment to these principles so absolute that we are incapable of modifying them according to a new situation or new information.  Liberals often claim to hold a monopoly over "progress" because of their desire to shatter institutionalized habits of thought.  However, it seems that, more often than not, they can fall into their own rigidity of thought and action. 

 

The disability perspective in bioethics seems to be a good example of something that challenges the "liberal" point of view of what it means to have progress.  Individual liberty is a good principle to build your habits of thought around.  However, it has become so absolute that progressive disability rights activists find themselves more and more closely aligned with the conservative right over these issues.  For example, the liberal habit of thought that argues for individual liberty when it comes to the "right to die" is in direct conflict with the fairly widely accepted disability perspective that a desire to die is often rooted in the fear of disability.  Of course, this leads to radically different policy recommendations.

 

Even the disability perspective has the potential to be caught in habits of thought.   Why can't something like a right to die be seen as giving ppl with disabilities the same right naturally enjoyed by able bodied people to take their own life?  Not that I m endorsing that course of action, but it seems a bit paternalistic.

 

I try to develop the habit of thought of becoming more aware of my habits of thought.  Recently, I have been trying to break out of certain religious biases i recognize in myself and be more open to the possibility of other beliefs.  My religious habits of thought and belief are proving to be a challenge, but one I am obligated to face if i am to be true to my ideas about habit.

 

(disclaimer: a lot of this is my articulation of American pragmatism in the tradition of James and Dewey.  That is, it's not really all that original.)

It's that time of year again when the trees, snowmen, reindeer and rampant, unapologetic materialism of American culture remind us all of the birth of Jesus Christ.  It's funny that somehow we use the least spiritual of things, material possessions, to celebrate the supposed spiritual salvation of the world.  Of course, I understand the Christian symbolism behind it and embrace this irony as much as the next guy, but it just seems strange.  Putting all of this aside, the "Holiday Season" is sure to get me thinking about my prolonged metaphysical crisis.  It gives me time to reflect upon the last year.  It allows me to think about the people, ideas, and experiences that I have come across and how they have impacted the evolution of my beliefs.

 

Perhaps it is self indulgent of me to write it all out and expect that other people actually care, but my "Christmas Without Christ" seems to have been my best seller from over the past year if we use the volume and depth of comments as an indicator, so I will yield to the impulse to write about my faith, or more precisely, my ideas about faith.  During a conversation with a close friend who has caused me to carefully reexamine some of these ideas, I found myself again asserting that the very idea of faith seems to grate on me.  This, of course, was the focus of last year's religion blog.  At the end of the day, a rejection of faith is the claim that believing an idea without empirical or rational evidence is an unacceptable way to live.  However, ironically, the more I unpack that statement, the less I actually believe it.  Let's break that claim up into its two parts and try to make sense of it.  First, we have to fully understand what it means to believe an idea without evidence and then we have to examine the value judgment being made about whether that is a good or a bad thing to do.

 

Even the first half of this claim is problematic at a very fundamental level.  That is, how much evidence do we need to believe something?  Where is that bright line of truth?  Do we take a radically skeptical stance and question even the very existence of the material world because of the fallibility of our senses?  Of course, Descartes tried to assert all we can really believe in is our own minds – "I think, therefore I am."  It seems like in order to get any farther than that at all, we need to have some degree of faith.  We know that experience is possible that is not "real," because we dream.  We also know that our experience of the world can be altered when our senses are altered.  Plato's example that he uses to describe his distrust of the senses is that wine tastes different to a man who is sick than it does when he is healthy. 

 

My point is, even getting up in the morning and putting on your pants is an act of faith because even the last 2,400 years of Western thought has not come up with a way of solving the mind body problem.  Science is a systematic way of observing individual instances of a phenomenon and then drawing a generalization about that phenomenon's characteristics.  However, that begs the question of whether we can trust our observations in the first place.  Any scientist worth his salt would laugh at such a philosopher's conundrum and tell him to go back to his sad little dusty books while he [the scientist] uses his multimillion dollar NIH grant to clone another lab rat. 

 

This is because such skepticism is not at all practical.  That is, it does not affect our lives because no matter what kind of metaphysical or epistemological commitments a Cartesian skeptic has, they do not, in fact they cannot, impact his life.  You can talk about distrust in the senses till you are blue in the face but, practically speaking you have to eventually eat a sandwich and drink a diet pepsi when you feel hungry and thirsty.  If all philosophy is to you is a sort of intellectual self gratification, then you have the luxury of such absurd claims.  However, in essence, our beliefs about how the world works at the most fundamental level are dictated to us by practicality. 

 

I won't delve too deep into what it means for a belief to be practical, but it should be clear that every action we make relies to one degree or another on faith.  It is impossible to live a life sans faith.  There are many many things that we have to believe without rational explanation.

 

This takes us to the second part of my original, flawed claim, the value judgment.  Of course, the necessity of accepting some ideas on the basis of faith does not imply that we should accept any and all ideas on the basis of faith without discrimination.  Many times, this acceptance or rejection of an idea is a value judgment.  When making such a decision we are often asking: does this belief make my life better or worse?

 

This blog is the result of a type of 19^th and 20^th Century American philosophy I have recently been very interested in called Pragmatism.  It definitely has its week points and a comprehensive defense of it would take a lot more effort than I am going to put forth here, although one of my thesis chapters will offer much more on the topic by next May. 

 

For now, let's look at the practical results of a faith in a Christian God.  This is something we really can't believe based on anything other than faith, but an active disbelief would be need to be equally faith driven because the spiritual realm is, by definition outside of what we can really know anything about through logic and experience.  So, we are left with the practical value judgment of whether such a belief improves or harms our lives. 

 

To the extent that a religious faith can close our minds off from new ideas and cause us to be drawn into conflict with others, it is not a good decision.  However, it is equally likely that such a faith can be interpreted to draw us closer to our friends and family, give us hope in a time of suffering, and move us to treat others with love and kindness.  It seems like the practical results of a religious faith is up to us to create as individuals.  This year, I still struggle with the doubt created by a philosophically trained mind, but I am trying to come to terms with the fact that there is a degree of doubt in every belief and thoughtfully choosing my beliefs based on how they improve my life and the lives of others around me.  Perhaps this is a watered down version of religious belief, but it is likely the best belief I am going to be able to practically attain.  Regardless of where I go from here, it is foolish to slip into the dogma of atheism.

The following is a copy of an article i wrote for the latest issue for LPA Today... as always, your thoughts and comments are welcomed...

 

 

 

Disability.  What is your reaction to the word?  Do you see it as a weakness that should be avoided or pitied?  Is it a natural part of life and an identity that one should be proud of?  Does your reaction fall in the gray area between these two poles? Some LPs that have grown up with handicapped parking placards and the ADA identify as persons with a disability.  Others distance themselves from the disability identity because of the stigmas surrounding it within our society.  As the chair of LPA's advocacy committee, my commitment to the ideals of fairness and majority rule trump my personal opinion about how little people should view themselves when it comes to crafting policy that guides LPA as a whole.  I have no mandate from the membership to impose the disability identity on them. 

 

However, I think there are compelling reasons why people with dwarfism should not be afraid to embrace the disability identity.  This article aims to share those reasons with the membership so that interested parties might engage in a conversation about the issue.   Let me begin my case by briefly sketching my understanding of what a disability actually is.  There are two ways of thinking about disability: the medical and the social model.

 

The medical model is the most popular in our science driven culture.  It says that there exists an objective standard of health and if a human being deviates from that standard on a permanent basis, then they are considered disabled.  It is seen as a scientific or medicalized problem to be fixed with technology.

 

The major emotional reactions to disability that grow out of this medical model are fear and pity.  This is the same fear and pity that produces efforts like the Muscular Dystrophy Association's Annual telethon.  We know the MDA's emotional appeals to the fear of disability are rooted in the medical model because they ultimately seek donations to use science to "fix" the person with muscular dystrophy.  For an example of the rhetoric of the medical model driven disability-phobia, we can look to the words of the telethon's host himself.  In a 1990 essay written for Parade Magazine Jerry Lewis avows, "That steel imprisonment that long has been deemed the dystrophic child's plight... For them there's additional indignities of being dressed, being fed, being everything they wouldn't have to be if only they had use of their hands... I realize that my life is half, so I must learn to do things halfway. I just have to try to be good at being half a person."

 

We know that similar fear and pity drives efforts to create technology to fix the "problem" of dwarfism.  When dwarfism is seen as a purely medical problem, people seek a medical solution like limb lengthening or, as genetic screening becomes cheaper, faster, and less invasive, selective abortion.  It is no wonder that little people would want to distance themselves from the disability identity if the only definition of disability they have been exposed to is this medical model.  No one wants to be told that they are the type of person that should be feared, pitied, and, ultimately, "fixed."

 

My case for why people with dwarfism should identify as persons with a disability would be weak indeed if it ended with the medical model.  However, there is an alternative to the medical model that sees disability in an entirely different way and prompts an entirely different set of actions.  The alternative to the medical model is known as the social or cultural model of disability.  This way of thinking argues that the objective standard of health held up by the medical model is a fiction.  Rather, there is a huge variety of physical, emotional, and cognitive differences within the human species.  Some of these differences become disabling because of society's reaction to them.  This is probably a new idea to most readers that requires some further explanation and examples.

 

Societal reaction to difference can be expressed in many ways that make difference into disability.  The most tangible way in which society makes differences disabling is in the built environment.  Staircases do not occur in nature rather than ramps, but even a small step on the front of a restaurant turns my physical make-up – which is, albeit on the very short end of even the little person spectrum – from a difference into a disability.  This is an obvious physical manifestation of the social construction of disability. 

 

For people with cognitive differences, these differences become disabling because of skills our high-tech Western economy emphasizes.  For example, dyslexia is a difference that makes some people's brains have a hard time processing symbolic information, while many times enhancing their ability to process spatial information.  In our high tech society, this difference becomes disabling because the ability to read, write, and perform math are essential to most of what defines a persons success, rather than the ability to process spatial information.  If a person with dyslexia was living during medieval times when what mattered was not an ability to read complex documents but the ability to knock someone off a horse with a big stick, then dyslexia would not be a disability but an advantage.  In this way, all or most disabilities are differences that become disabling because of the way society has constructed its institutions and environments.

 

By now you can see how dwarfism, to a large extent, is a difference that becomes disabling because of society's reaction to it.  Like the staircase makes a wheelchair user disabled and the SATs makes a person with dyslexia disabled, ATM machines, urinals, and grocery shelves transform the physical difference of dwarfism into a physical disability.  Like others with differences that are disabling, we modify our habits and environments to the extent that we can maximize our functionality and minimize how our difference affects our lives.  People with paralysis use wheelchairs to get around the shopping mall, people with dyslexia use hand held audio recorders to take notes in class, and people with dwarfism use stools, sticks, extensions, and reachers for just about everything.

 

There is also the aspect of disability that we LPs may be even more aware of than the physical challenges: stigma.  Dwarfism has many of the stigmas associated with disability in general like the reactions of fear and pity, but it also has some that are unique to dwarfism as a difference.  Sometimes, these uniquely disabling stigmas rear their heads blatantly like dwarf tossing or the characters on the Howard Stern Show.  Other times, stigma is slightly more subtle like a staring child in a department store.  Often, it is so hard to detect that we think we are becoming paranoid like when a prospective employer makes assumptions about our ability to work effectively.  Betty Adelson's book The Lives of Dwarfs is a terrific guide to understanding these stigmas and their history.

 

If we understand disability in this new way and see how dwarfism fits in to this social model, we are left with a choice.  We can ourselves feed into the social isolation and stigma that turns a difference into a disability and distance ourselves from that identity, denying how appropriate it is to our condition, or we can join in the fight against the negativity it produces. 

 

The distinction between the medical and social model is not just theoretical.  The medical model's solution to the "problem" of disability is to fix the individual person.  The fear and pity inspired by this dominant medical model leads to actions aimed at curing, preventing, or isolating the disability through surgeries, prenatal diagnosis and abortion, and institutionalization.  The new, more accurate and more hopeful social model locates the problem of disability not the individual but in the society's culture and institutions.  Therefore, rather than inspire fear and pity, the social model inspires a righteous anger that is aimed at radically reshaping the parts of the culture and its institutions that make differences disabling.  In other words, a person coming from the social disability perspective engages in activism leading to inclusive environments and attitudes.

 

The social model tells us that disability is not a dirty word and the advocacy we do is part of the same culture shift being worked toward by the disability rights movement as a whole.  It is my hope that we can someday build a consensus within LPA to collaborate more with disability activist groups on a large scale to reshape a more inclusive world of people with differences rather than disabilities.

 

The man who said I'd rather be lucky than good saw deeply into life. People are often afraid to realize how much of an impact luck plays. There are moments in a tennis match where the ball hits the top of the net, and for a split second, remains in mid-air. With a little luck, the ball goes over, and you win. Or maybe it doesn't, and you lose. 
~ Woody Allen, Match Point

 

When you want something, all the universe conspires to helping you achieve it.
~ Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist

 

I have been thinking a lot about luck lately mostly because of The Alchemist and Match Point.  It is a very strange force within my own life and the lives of those around me.  Most of us refer to it causally casually.  In other words, it is always at hand when we want to explain the why of an event within our lives that doesnt seem to make much sense.  For those who have thought about this topic in any great depth, which I had not until pretty recently, there seems to be 2 schools of thought, each of which is expressed above by writers with more talent and credibility than I have.  The first view of luck is the one held by my brother-in-law, Daryle and the second view is the one held by my father.

 

Daryle, my brother-in-law, is an accountant.  As is appropriate for accounts he likes numbers.  In fact, one of his favorite things to do is go to the casino and play craps.  For those of you who dont what craps is, its pretty much a dice game that you need an accounting degree to understand the rules of.  There are 2 types of people who play craps: really old fuckers with a lot of money and enough time to read instruction books about how to gamble and accountants.  Anyway, my point is that a love for dice as opposed to say slots seems to almost imply a certain worldview.  Events in the world are reducible to numbers and those of us who understand the trends of probability can walk away from a craps table with more than you came with.  In other words, for these types of gamblers, its not about blowing on and shaking the dice but about understanding and manipulating the randomness inherent to our world.

 

I dont know if Woody Allen plays craps, he isnt an accountant and he seems to be at the old fucker stage of life, not the really old fucker.  Regardless, maybe he will develop a taste for the game because this seems to be his view of luck as well.  In the randomness of life, some people come out on top and often they are the least deserving.  Those who lose are sometimes filled with virtue.  It all comes down to which way the tennis ball falls across the net.  This view of luck expresses a very real risk of losing.  It is as cold as an accounting text book.

 

My dad says there isnt any such thing as coincidence.  He likes numbers too, after all he is an engineer, but he also likes order.  I dont want to pretend like I know the first thing about psychological personality archetypes, but it seems that something within him that likes to see machines that are in working order and functioning properly also predisposes him to thinking that our lives are cogs of a greater machine.  What we perceive as coincidence or luck is really the expression of a larger blueprint that we are part of. 

 

Paulo Coehlo agrees that the universe is not random and neither is luck.  You might call it Karma or destiny or divine intervention, but the bottom line is that everything is one.  If we choose to see the path that is laid before us and walk it, we can find our place within the overarching scheme of things and ultimate happiness along the way.  For this type of luck, its all about taking your place in the master plan.

 

But what does this actually mean for how we should live our lives?  Is the different view of luck and different worldview that accompanies it meaningful to our everyday existence?  Does one school of thought imply a different course of action than the other?  Do my brother-in-law and father lead radically different lifestyles?  Well, unfortunately, the answer is no, otherwise one of them wouldnt have voted for GWB like they both did twice.  Again, I digress.  It seems to me that neither view of the world and our experiences in it really lead to different implications about everyday behavior.  Both worldviews encourage you to release yourself from your fear and roll the dice.

 

 If you want something bad enough, and agree with Daryle and Woody, then statistically you will eventually get it.  If the starving actress is in love with her craft and devotes herself to it entirely, it is a statistical certainty that eventually luck will be on her side.  She may have to wait on tables to pay the rent for quite a while in the mean time, but if you keep rolling the dice and do things to manipulate your probability like acting classes and cocktail parties you will eventually come up with a seven.

 

The same is true for Dad and Paulos worldview.  Its about finding your purpose in the giant machine of the world and having luck nudge you toward it.  You have to have the courage to be on that journey and find your purpose.  In other words, before luck can help you, you need to have something in mind that you need helping with.  You need to have a goal and a purpose and work relentlessly toward it for those uncanny coincidences to do any good.

 

The bottom line for both philosophies of luck is: let go of your fear.  Have the courage to lose if you roll the dice and pick them up again.  Have the courage to put your faith in your destiny that fits in the greater scheme of the world.  This is an idea that I can write a blog about, while being so far from actually doing it.  I hope luck is on my side.