Ladders of Luck, Snakes of Misfortune
turn, turn, turn
The classic game Snakes and Ladders is a great illustration of how different our conception of human life and chance and fate is from previous generations.
When you read classic works on dealing with life’s vicissitudes, for example Boethius’ On the consolation of Philosophy, or Seneca’s treatment of fortunes, or Petrarch’s De remediis utriusque Fortunae (concerning ‘remedies’ for either type of fortune), they tend to address the question of ‘how do you weather the different fortunes that come your way in life?’
Snakes and Ladders is a game without any skill. You roll the dice and whatever fate, chance, luck, or god decides is the number determines where you'll move. You move along the board and sometimes a ladder lifts you up, other times a snake takes you down and this embodies a view of life that you mostly do whatever you do and fortune means sometimes you'll be raised to greatness, to success - the harvest is good, the king gives you a benefit or something else good happens to you circumstantially. Or other times you'll be going along and something bad will happen to you, it's not your fault, it's just what happened; there was a bad harvest, the king took a dislike to you, something bad happened. All these things are outside your control and what's inside your control is not your success in the game but only how you respond, only how you react to the events around you.
I think this is, ironically, somewhat at odds with the historic origins of snakes and ladders as an Indian game reflecting karma and kama, and the ladders as virtues that lift you up to a better (next) life, and snakes as vices that take you down. That view of life sees vice and virtue bound to destiny and rewarded consequentially beyond this life.
But the more Stoic view found in Seneca/Boethius/Petrarch is that what happens to you is not in your control, and so is not a moral question, but how you respond in yourself is a moral question because your attitude and actions are within your power.
I don’t think most moderns share this view. I think our view of life is that we have much more control and agency. We don't just control how we react or how we weather events, we shape events. I think partly that it’s a function of living in 2024, it's the modern world where technology has given so much more control over our lives and so much more stability so that you can make a fortune, you can choose certain things and pursue success in a worldly sense and you can have upward mobility and at the same time you can do a number of things in life to ward yourself off misfortune.
Not entirely though: sometimes there's luck that raises you up high and sometimes there's misfortune that takes you down low but we have much more stability about the relationship between our actions and our work and the outcomes in terms of material success and life choices. And so we just don't think about ourselves as mostly responding to the circumstances of fortune, we think of fortune as something we shape.
More than that, we tend to moralize success and misfortune. That is, we are more inclined to think that if people succeed it's because they did the right things and they deserve it and if things go badly in someone's life we're tend to say that well actually this is the result of their choices. So actually, by having a world view that gives more agency to individuals, we also give more moral responsibility for those choices; and then when they are genuinely outside our control we don't recognize that, we don't sympathize as easily with those who have had bad things happen to them because there's a sense in which we think bad things happen to them because they made bad life choices.
I think (I’m not sure, and I’m not going to interrupt my vacation to go hunting) that there are studies that look at the correlation between people’s sense of agency and responsibility, i.e. how much they think their own actions shape their own outcomes, and those outcomes themselves. E.g. if you think that your success in a particular endeavour depends on yourself, you are more likely to be successful in it, precisely because your belief motivates you to go out and do something about it.
But, that in itself undermines the fact that you can go out and try incredibly hard and fail, or that other people seem to success without doing much, if anything.
Stoicism has many faults; I think overall it’s a bad creed and Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius are among some of my least favourite ancient philosophers. However, I am more sympathetic to the view of Boethius and Petrarch. There just are things that happen in life that are so far out of our control, that thinking they are in our control can only lead to the sheer misery of blaming ourselves for them.
Part of the trick, surely, is figuring out the riddle of the old serenity prayer1 about things which can be changed, not changed, and the wisdom to know the difference. To learn with discernment what are the things that lie within our powers, and then exert all our faculties towards the good in those things; but for those things outside our (actually limited powers), to respond with the equanimity that befits them.
Thanks Richard Niebuhr.