The Hidden Third Force That Shapes Lives, and History

[david_myers]

“Under the sun the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, nor bread to the wise, nor riches to the intelligent, nor favor to those with knowledge, but time and chance happen to them all.”

~Ecclesiastes 9:11

As every educated person understands, our traits and fates are predisposed by nature and guided by nurture. But as famed psychologist Albert Bandura emphasized four decades ago, a third force also powerfully steers our lives and world—random, unpredictable chance happenings.

“If I had not moved my head at that very last instant, the assassin’s bullet would have perfectly hit its mark and I would not be here tonight,” explained Donald Trump to his convention, after a bullet nicked his right ear as he turned right to view a campaign rally Jumbotron image—meaning he was facing shooter Thomas Crooks instead of perpendicular to him.

Two seconds and two inches defined the difference between brain and blood, between catastrophe and an iconic fist-raised photo image that, for his supporters, affirmed his victimhood, his virile courage, and, as with so many folk heroes, his seeming divine protection. “They tried to slander him. They tried to imprison him. Now they have tried to kill him,” proclaimed Ben Carson to the Republican National Convention. “But if God is protecting him, they will never succeed.”

Trump reportedly was buoyed by what columnist Ross Douthat called his “incredible, preternatural good luck.” As Trump basked in public sympathy, the betting markets immediately raised his election chances from 60 to 70 percent. And his Trump Media stock opened up 30 percent the following Monday, giving him a paper gain of $1.5 billion. (Both subsided after the ascendance of Kamala Harris.)

If Trump’s fortuitous escape were to assist his winning the 2024 presidential election—and to enable his proposed abortion, taxation, deregulation, energy, and immigration policies—then the future will have turned with a mere head turn. As Nicholas Rescher reflected in Luck: The Brilliant Randomness of Everyday Life, “The hand of luck rests heavy on the shoulders of human history.”

The sitting president understands the alternative devastating potential of random juxtapositions of time and place. As 30-year-old Joe Biden was two weeks from being sworn in as a senator, his wife Neilia picked the wrong second to pull onto Delaware Route 7—the second when a tractor-trailer truck was passing, killing her and daughter Naomi, and seriously injuring sons Beau and Hunter. If only she had left the house a moment earlier, or later. “It’s our role as humans to accept the randomness of the universe,” wrote Rabbi Harold Kushner in When Bad Things Happen to Good People.

In his new book, The Random Factor, social welfare professor Mark Robert Rank offers examples of “how chance and luck” have shaped history:

• an arbitrary administrative decision that turned a teenage Adolf Hitler onto a road that led to the Holocaust;
• a temporary August 9, 1945, cloudiness over Kokura, Japan, that led to the second atomic bomb being diverted to Nagasaki;
• a Russian submarine officer getting stuck on a conning tower ladder that averted a likely World War III during the Cuban Missile Crisis;
• an unexpected phone call that led to conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly’s blocking adoption of the Equal Rights Amendment.

Chance is built into the fabric of nature, from chance mutations that enable evolution to sporting outcomes to scientific discovery. As Louis Pasteur famously said of accidental scientific happenings, “Chance favors the prepared mind.”

And as Bandura stressed, chance forms relationships. He illustrated:

Seeking relief from an uninspiring reading assignment, a graduate student departs for the golf links with his friend. They happen to find themselves playing behind a twosome of attractive women golfers. Before long the two twosomes become one foursome and, in the course of events, one of the partners eventually becomes the wife of the graduate golfer. Were it not for this fortuitous constellation of events, it is exceedingly unlikely that their paths would ever have crossed.

Different partnerships create different life courses.

The graduate student in this particular case happens to be myself.

In his autobiography, Bandura delightedly recalled the book editor who came to his lecture on the “Psychology of Chance Encounters and Life Paths,” and who ended up marrying the woman he chanced to sit beside.

Careers, too, are deflected by chance events. In the summer of 1978, I was the guest of German social psychologist colleagues for a five-day research retreat near Munich. There I came to know an esteemed American colleague after he chanced to be assigned an adjacent seat. The next January, when he was invited to become a social psychology textbook author, he declined and spontaneously referred the McGraw-Hill psychology editor to me . . . which led to a new authoring career, ultimately including these TalkPsych.com essays.

But for each of us, surely the most fortunate sequence of chance events is what produced our existence. Among some 250 million sperm, the one needed to make you won the race and joined that one particular egg. And so it happened for the all the generations in your past. Consider: If even one of your ancestors was formed from a different sperm or egg, or died early, or chanced to meet a different partner or . . .

For better or for worse, chance is the great random power that shapes lives and diverts history. Whether we view life’s serendipities as “mere chance” or as guided by the hidden hand of providence, the biblical Ecclesiastes was right: Time and chance happen to us all, spicing our life with unpredictable happenings. With flukes of good luck come unexpected opportunities, and with bad luck the ever-present risk of tragedy. As the French writer Stendhal (quoted by Rank) surmised, “Waiting for God to reveal himself, I believe that his prime minister, Chance, governs this sad world.”

David Myers, a Hope College social psychologist, authors psychology textbooks and trade books, including his recent essay collection, How Do We Know Ourselves? Curiosities and Marvels of the Human Mind.

Image credit: SDI Productions/Getty Images