Given these distinctions in the phases of play, it is easy to attend to a feature of simple games of chance that might otherwise be taken for granted. Once a play is undertaken, its determination, disclosure, and settlement usually follow quickly, often before another bet is made. A coin-tossing session consists, then, of a sequence of four-phase cycles with pauses between cycles. Typically the player maintains a continuous stretch of attention and experiencing over the whole four or five seconds course of each play, attention lapsing only during the pauses, that is, after the settlement of one play and before the making of another. Everyday life is usually quite different. Certainly the individual makes bets and takes chances in regard to daily living, as when, for example, he decides to take one job instead of another or to move from one state to another. Further, at certain junctures he may have to make numerous vital decisions at the same time and hence briefly maintain a very high rate of bet-making. But or-dinarily the determination phase—the period during which the consequences of his bet are determined—will be long, sometimes extending over decades, followed by disclosure and settlement phases that are themselves lengthy. The distinctive property of games and contests is that once the bet has been made, outcome is determined and payoff awarded all in the same breath of experience. A single sharp focus of awareness is sustained at high pitch during the full span of the play.
II. consequentiality
We can take some terms, then, from the traditional analysis of coin-tossing,10 but this framework soon leads to difficulties.
The standard for measuring the amount of a bet or prize is set by or imputed to the community, the public at large, or the prevailing market. An embarrassment of game analysis is that different persons can have quite different feelings about the same bet or the same prize. Middle class adults may use a nickel as a decision machine, but will hardly bother tossing just to decide who keeps the machine. Small boys, however, can feel that a co-finder’s claim to a nickel is a big bet indeed. When attention must be given to variations in meaning that different persons give to the same bet (or the same prize), or that the same individual gives over time or over varying conditions, one speaks of subjective value or utility. And just as ex-pected value can be calculated as the average worth remaining to a nickel pot, so expected utility can be assessed as the utility an individual accords a nickel pot weighted by the probability of his winning it.
The expected utility of a nickel pot must be clearly dis-tinguished from the expected utility of tossing for this pot; for individuals regularly place a subjective value—positive or negative—on the excitement and anxiety generated by tossing. Further, after the toss, the displeasure at losing and the pleasure at winning are not likely to balance each other off exactly; the difference, on whichever side, must also be reckoned on the average as part of the expected utility of the play.11 Objective standards can be used in getting at the meaning of bets; but we must use the murky notion of utility to get at the meaning of betting.
When we move from the neat notion of the expected value of a pot to one that will be relevant for our concerns, namely, the expected utility of playing for the pot, we move into almost hopeless complexities. When an individual asserts that a given period of play involves a big gamble, or when he feels that it is chancier than another, a whole set of considerations may be involved: the scale of betting; the length of the odds (and whether he is giving them or getting them); the brevity of the span of play; the smallness of the number of plays; the rate of play; the percentage paid for playing; the variation of size regarding prizes associated with favorable outcomes. Further, the relative weight given each of these considerations will vary markedly with the absolute value of each of the others.12
For us this means that different individuals and groups have somewhat different personal base-lines from which to measure risk and opportunity; a way of life involving much risk may cause the individual to give little weight to a risk that someone else might find forbidding.13 Thus, for example, attempts to account for the presence of legalized gambling in Nevada sometimes cite the mining tradition of the state, a type of venturing that can be defined as very chancy indeed. The argument is that since the economy of the state was itself founded on gambles with the ground, it is understandable that casino gambling was never viewed with much disapproval.
In simple, literal gambling, then, the basic notion of “chanciness” is shot through with a multitude of half-realized, shifting meanings. When we turn from gaming to the rest of living, matters get worse.
In coin tossing, there are a priori and empirical reasons for assessing the chances of either outcome in effect as fifty-fifty. The ultimate validity of this assessment need not concern those who toss coins. That’s the nice thing about coins. In many ordinary situations, however, the individual may have to face an outcome matrix that cannot be fully defined. (This could arise, for example, were our two boys to pause before a deep, multi-tunneled cave, trying to decide what might befall them were they to try to explore it.) Further, even when the full set of outcome possibilities is known, the chances that must be attached to each of them may be subject to only rough assessment based on vague appeals to empirical experience.14 Moreover, the estimator will often have little appreciation of how very rough his assessment is. In most life situations, we deal with subjective probability and hence at best a very loose overall measure, subjectively expected utility.15
Further, while coin tossers typically face a “fair” game, and casino gamblers a slightly disadvantageous one, wider aspects of living present the individual with much less balance in this regard; there will be situations of much opportunity with little risk and of much risk with little opportunity. Moreover, opportunity and risk may not be easily measurable on the same scale.16
There is an important issue in the notion of value itself—the notion that bets and prizes can be measured in amounts. A nickel has both a socially ratified value and a subjective value, in part because of what its winning allows, or losing disallows, the tosser later on to do. This is the gamble’s consequentiaiity, namely, the capacity of a payoff to flow beyond the bounds of the occasion in which it is delivered and to influence objectively the later life of the bettor. The period during which this consequentiality is borne is a kind of post-play or consequentiality phase of the gamble.
A tricky matter must be considered here. “Objective value” and “utility” are both means of establishing instantaneous equivalents for consequences that are to be actually felt over time. This is achieved by allowing either the community or the individual himself to place an appraisal on this future, and to accept or to give a price for it now. I want to avoid this sophistication. When, for example, a man proposes matrimony, it is true that the payoff is determined as soon as the girl makes up her mind, reported as soon as she gives her answer, and settled up when the marriage is consummated or the rejected suitor withdraws to court elsewhere. But in another sense, the consequence of the payoff is felt throughout the life remaining to the participants. Just as a “payoff” is the value equivalent of an outcome, so “consequentiality” is the human equivalent of a payoff. We move then from pots and prizes, neatly definable, to protracted payoffs, which can be described only vaguely. This is a move from pots to consequentiality, and from circumscribed gambles to wider arenas of living.
In addition to all these limitations on the coin-tossing model, there is another and quite central one that we can only begin to consider now. The subjective experience enjoyed by small boys who toss a coin for keeps develops from the feel of light-heartedly exercising will. A decision to gamble or not gamble is made under conditions where no alien pressure forces the decision, and not gambling would be an easy, quite practical choice. Once this decision is made affirmatively, a second one is made as to possible outcome to bet on—here an illusory right, but fun none the less, and certainly not illusory in games involving skill. Once the result is in, this can be treated as a pos-sibility that was foreseen and the gamble taken anyway. In co
nsequence, the whole situation can easily come to be seen prospectively as a chance-taking occasion, an oc-casion generated and governed by the exercise of self-determination, an occasion for taking risk and grasping opportunity. In daily life, however, the individual may never become aware of the risk and opportunity that in fact existed, or may become alive to the gamble he was making only after the play is over. And when the situation is approached with its chanciness in mind, the individual may find that the cost of not gambling is so high that it must be excluded as a realistic possibility, or, where this decision is a practical one, that no choice is available as to which of the possible outcomes he will be betting on. Some freedom of choice, some self-determination is present here, but often not very much. The coin-tossing model can be applied to all of these situations, but only by overlooking some important differences between recreational chance-taking and real life gambles. Apart from the question of the amount at stake, our two boys who toss a coin are not engaged in quite the same type of chance-taking as is unenjoyed by two survivors who have mutually agreed that there is no other way than to toss to see who will lighten the raft; and they, in turn, are subject to chance differently than are two sick passengers who are forced by their well companions to submit to a toss decision to see which of the two will no longer share the life boat’s supply of water.
III. Fatefulness
An individual ready to leave his house to keep an en-gagement finds he is thirty minutes early and has some “free time” to use up or put in. He could put the time to “good” use by doing now an essential task that will have to be done sometime. Instead he decides to “kill” this time. He picks up a magazine from the ones at hand, drops into a comfortable chair, and leafs through some pages until it is time to go.
What are the characteristics of this activity used to kill time with? Approach this question through another: What are the possible effects of this little piece of the individuals life on the whole of the rest of it?
Obviously, what goes on during killed time may have no bearing at all on the rest of the individual’s life.17 Many alternative lines of activity can be pursued and still his life will go on as it is going. Instead of reading one magazine, he can read another; or he can while away the time by watching TV, cat-napping, or working a puzzle. Finding he has less time to put in than he had thought, he can easily cut his dawdling short; finding he has more time, he can dawdle more. He can try to find a magazine that interests him, fail, and yet lose little by this failure, merely having to face the fact that he is temporarily at loose ends. Having nothing to kill time with, or to kill enough time with, he can “mark” it.
Killed moments, then, are inconsequential. They are bounded and insulated. They do not spill over into the rest of life and have an effect there. Differently put, the individual’s life course is not subject to his killed moments; his life is organized in such a way as to be impervious to them. Activities for killing time are selected in advance as ones that cannot tie up or entangle the individual.18
Killing time often involves the killer in problematic activity. The decision as to magazine or TV may be a close one whose determination is not begun until the individual is about to sit down. Here then is problematic behavior that is not consequential. (Interestingly, this is exactly the case in tossing for a nickel. Our youthful gamblers may subjectively place great value on winning the toss, yet the payoff can hardly be consequential.)
In contrast to time off we have time on and its world of collectively organized serious work, which gears the individual’s efforts into the needs of other persons who count on him for supplies, equipment, or services in order to fulfill their own obligations. Records are kept of his production and deliveries, and penalties given if he fails to perform. In brief, the division of labor and the organization of work-flow connect the individual’s current moments to other persons’ next ones in a very consequential manner.
However, the consequentiality of properly attending to one’s duties on any one occasion is very little noted. Re-sults are, to be sure, more or less pictured in advance, but the probability of their occurrence is so high that little attention seems required in the matter. Nothing need be weighed, decided, or assessed; no alternatives have to be considered. This activity is indeed consequential, but it is well managed; it is not problematic. Incidentally, any moment, whether worked or killed, will have this element. It is a matter of total consequentiality that our coin tossers continue to inhale and exhale and do not run their heads against a concrete wall; any failure in the first and any success in the second can have very far-reaching effects on all a boy’s moments to come. However, continuing to breathe and not beating one’s head against the wall are objectives so continuously and unthinkingly sought and so assuredly and routinely realized, that the consequentiality of lapse need never be considered.
Time-off activities, then, can be problematic but are likely to be inconsequential, and time-on activities are likely to be consequential but not problematic. Thus both types of activity can easily be uneventful: either nothing important happens or nothing important happens that is unexpected and unprepared for.
However, an activity can be problematic and consequential. Such activity I call fateful, although the term eventful would do as well, and it is this kind of chanciness that will concern us here.
It must now be admitted that although free time and well-managed work time tend to be unfateful, the human condition is such that some degree of fatefulness will always be found. Primordial bases of fatefulness must be reckoned with.
First, there is the adventitious or literary kind of fate-fulness. An event that is ordinarily well managed and un-noteworthy can sometimes cast fatefulness backwards in time, giving to certain previous moments an uncharacteristic capacity to be the first event in a fateful conjunction of two events. Should one of our youthful gamblers need a nickel to make a crucial telephone call with at the moment the nickel is found, then the chance to win the toss can become fateful. Similarly, our time-killing individual can become so caught up in a magazine story that he loses all track of time19 and does not surface until too late—an irritation, merely, unless the appointment that is missed happens to be important. Or, leafing through the magazine, he can come upon an article on intelligence tests containing sample questions. His appointment is an examination in which one of these questions appears. A moment to fritter away is not totally cut off from the momerits to come; it can have unexpected connections with them.
Although individuals and their activities are always sub-ject to some adventitious fatefulness, there are some enterprises whose vulnerability in this regard is marked enough to serve as a characterization of them. Where coordination and concealment are vital, a whole range of minor unanticipated hitches lose their usual quality of correctability and become fateful. Stories of near-perfect crimes and nearly exposed commando raids enshrine this source of fatefulness, as do tales of strategic goofs:
Maidstone, England: A gang of masked men wielding blackjacks and hammers ambushed a car carrying $28,000 to a bank here yesterday but they grabbed the wrong loot—a bag of sandwiches.
The cash was locked in the trunk of the car and the bag containing the bank official’s lunch was on the car seat.20
Three robbers who completely botched what was supposed to be a simple little bank robbery in Rodeo were sentenced in Federal Court here yesterday. . . .
All three were nabbed by some 40 police officers Jan. 7 as they struggled to make off with $7710 stuffed into a laundry sack they had just taken out of the United California bank, the only bank in Rodeo . . .
Pugh walked in with a sawed off shotgun and lined up the 13 employees and two customers, while Fleming, carrying a pistol, went to the vault and started filling the laundry bag with currency and, alas, coins.
“The coins can’t be traced,” he said cleverly. He kept piling in coins until the bag weighed about 200 pounds. Then he dragged the bag across the floor to the door—and the frayed rope snapped.
Both men then lugged the bag through the door, but it caught and ripped a hole, letting coins trail behind them as they dragged the bag to the getaway car, with Duren at the wheel.
Duren though, had parked too close to the high curb, so the three could not open the door to get the loot inside. Finally they did, by moving the car, and raced away—around the corner. There the car stopped when the three saw the clutter of sheriff, Highway Patrol and police cars.21
These mistakes are everyday ones and would ordinarily be easily absorbed by the reserve for correction that characterizes most undertakings. What is special about criminal enterprise (and other military-like operations) is the narrowness of this reserve and hence the high price that must be paid for thoughtlessness and bad breaks. This is the difference between holding a job down and pulling a job off; here an act becomes a deed.22
Second, no matter how inconsequential and insulated an individual’s moment is and how safe and well managed his place of consequential duties, he must be there in the flesh if the moment is to be his at all, and this is the selfsame flesh he must leave with and take wherever he goes, along with all the damage that has ever occurred to it. No matter how careful he may be, the integrity of his body will always be in jeopardy to some degree. While reading, he may slip in his chair, fall to the floor and injure himself. This is unlikely to be sure, but should he kill time by taking a bath or earn his living by working at a lathe, in a mine, or on construction jobs, the possibility of injuring would be considerably more likely, as actuarial data show. Physical danger is a thin red thread connecting each of the individual’s moments to all his others. A body is subject to falls, hits, poisons, cuts, shots, crushing, drowning, burning, disease, suffocation, and electrocution. A body is a piece of consequential equipment, and its owner is always putting it on the line. Of course, he can bring other capital goods into many of his moments too, but his body is the only one he can never leave behind.
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