“My name,” I shouted, “is Mr. Williams.” I’m sure that cops and troopers use the familiar address with many people who are white, but this one I smelled out. “John” was synonymous with “boy.” He snatched his arm from the window. I flung my authorization for the trip at him. I watched him as he read it, and thought, not only am I not the “right kind” of Negro, not only will I not pay you off, but I am about five seconds away from total commitment—which means five seconds from beating your head.
He glanced over the top of the sheet. “Mr. Wil-liams, you were doing eighty coming down the road. When I caught up with you, you were doing eighty-two.”
“You’re a liar. I was doing seventy. Eighty? Take me in and prove it.” “Mr. Williams—”
“Tired of taking all this crap from you guys.” “Mr. Williams—”
“You’re going to run this nonsense and yourselves right into the ground.”
Cars were slowing as they passed us. The trooper’s face took on an anxious look. Yes, I was rambling in my anger, but I was ready to go. What is more, for the insults I delivered, he would have taken me in had he been right. Instead, he returned to his car and I drove on—at seventy miles an hour.152
Mr. Williams really has this experience and then makes himself and it available in a popular magazine. A dramatic reporting nicely covers the relevant events, as would a cinematic or stage version. We readers become vicariously involved, safely removed from what we live by. What is for him a character contest, a moment of truth, is for us a means to massage our morality.
Whatever the reasons why we consume vicarious fate-fulness, the social function of doing so is clear. Honorable men in their scenes of fatefulness are made safely available to all of us to identify with whenever we turn from our real worlds. Through this identification the code of conduct affirmed in fateful activities—a code too costly or too difficult to maintain in full in daily life—can be clarified and reasserted. A frame of reference is secured for judging daily acts, without having to pay its penalties.
The same figure-for-identification very often engages in all three kinds of fateful activity: dangerous tasks, character contests, and serious action. Therefore we can easily come to believe in an intrinsic connection among them, such that he whom character leads to one type of fateful activity will be the sort of person in the sort of life who finds it necessary and desirable to engage in the other two as well. It is easy to fail to see that the natural affinity of the hero for all types of fatefulness probably does not belong to him but to those of us who vicariously participate in his destiny. We shape and stuff these romantic figures to satisfy our need, and our need is for economy—a need to come into vicarious contact with as many bases of character as possible for the same admission price. A living individual misguided enough to seek out all types of fatefulness is merely adding flesh and blood to what originated as consumer packaging.
This suggests that rules of social organization can be given support by and give support to our vicarious world of exemplary fatefulness. The hero of character is not likely therefore to be the man on the street:
Consider the strain on our moral vocabulary if it were asked to produce heroic myths of accountants, computer programmers, and personnel executives. We prefer cowboys, detectives, bull fighters, and sports-car racers, because these types embody the virtues which our moral vocabulary is equipped to celebrate: individual achievement, exploits, and prowess.153
Because the portrait is needed, a place must be found for the portrayer. And so, on the edges of society, are puddles of people who apparently find it reasonable to engage directly in the chancy deeds of an honorable life. In removing themselves further and further from the substance of our society, they seem to grasp more and more of certain aspects of its spirit. Their alienation from our reality frees them to be subtly induced into realizing our moral fantasies. As Suggested of delinquents, they somehow cooperate by staging a scene in which we project our dynamics of character:
The delinquent is the rogue male. His conduct may be viewed not only negatively, as a device for attacking and derogating the respectable culture; positively it may be viewed as the exploitation of modes of behavior which are traditionally symbolic of un-trammeled masculinity, which are renounced by middle-class culture because incompatible with its ends, but which are not without a certain aura of glamour and romance. For that matter, they find their way into the respectable culture as well but only in disciplined and attenuated forms as in organized sports, in fantasy and in make-believe games, or vicariously as in movies, television, and comic books. They are not allowed to interfere with the serious business of life. The delinquent, on the other hand, having renounced his serious business, as defined by the middle class, is freer to divert these subterranean currents of our cultural tradition to his own use. The important point for our purpose is that the delinquent response, “wrong” though it may be and “disreputable,” is well within the range of responses that do not threaten his identification of himself as a male.154
Although fateful enterprises are often respectable, there are many character contests and scenes of serious action that are not. Yet these are the occasions and places that show respect for moral character. Not only in mountain ranges that invite the climber, but also in casinos, pool halls, and racetracks do we find places of worship; it may be in churches, where the guarantee is high that nothing fateful will occur, that moral sensibility is weak.
Looking for where the action is, one arrives at a romantic division of the world. On one side are the safe and silent places, the home, the well-regulated role in business, industry, and the professions; on the other are all those activities that generate expression, requiring the individual to lay himself on the line and place himself in jeopardy during a passing moment. It is from this contrast that we fashion nearly all our commercial fantasies. It is from this contrast that delinquents, criminals, hustlers, and sportsmen draw their self-respect. Perhaps this is payment in exchange for the use we make of the ritual of their performance.
A final point: Vicarious experience re-establishes our connection to values concerning character. So does action. Action and vicarious experience, then, so different on the surface, seem to be closely allied. Evidence might be cited.
Take clothing. Female dress is designed to be “attractive,” which must mean in some sense or other that the interest of unspecified males is to be aroused. And with this arousal the basis is laid for one type of action. But the actual probability of this action occurring is very often very low. Fantasies are thus invigorated, but reality is not. A clearer version of the same vicarious tease is the wide current sale to horseless cowboys of Stetson hats, high-heeled boots, Levi’s, and tattoos.155 Delinquents who carry knives and own “a piece” similarly exhibit a heightened orientation to action, but here perhaps appearances have a better chance of intruding on reality.
Lotteries, the “numbers,” and casino keno are commercialized expressions of long-shot gambles offered at a very small price. The expected value of the play is, of course, much smaller even than the price, but an opportunity is provided for lively fantasies of big winnings. Here action is at once vicarious and real.
When persons go to where the action is, they often go to a place where there is an increase, not in the chances taken, but in the chances that they will be obliged to take chances. Should action actually occur it is likely to involve someone like themselves but someone else. Where they have got to, then, is a place where another’s involvement can be closely watched and vicariously enjoyed.
Commercialization, of course, brings the final mingling of fantasy and action. And it has an ecology. On the arcade strips of urban settlements and summer resorts, scenes are available for hire where the customer can be the star performer in gambles enlivened by being very slightly consequential. Here a person currently without social connections can insert coins in skill machines to demonstrate to the other machines that he has socially approved qualities of character. These
naked little spasms of the self occur at the end of the world, but there at the end is action and character.
* Attributed to Karl Wallenda, on going back up to the high wire after his troupe’s fatal Detroit accident.
* * *
1A die can be used like a coin if, for example, 1, 2, or 3 is called tails, and 4, 5, or 6 is called heads. Among the types of unsporting dice are misspotted ones variously called tops and bottoms, horses, tees, tats, soft rolls, California fourteens, door pops, Eastern tops, etc. These dice do not have a different number on each of the six sides, and (as with a two-headed coin) allow a player to bet on an outcome that is not among the possibilities and therefore rather unlikely to occur. Note that dice, much more frequently than coins, do land on their edges (by virtue of coming to rest against objects) and do roll out of bounds. The management of these regrettable contingencies is one of the jobs of the members of a craps crew, especially the stickman, in the sense that their very quick verbal and physical corrections are designed to make perfect a very imperfect physical model.
2 The track has a word for it, “extension.”
3 Here and elsewhere in matters of probability I am indebted to Ira Cisin. He is responsible only for the correct statements.
4 To increase the apparent attractiveness of certain bets some crap-table lay-outs state winnings not in terms of given odds but in terms of the pot; thus, a bet whose given odds is 1 to 4 will be described as 1 for 5.
5T. C. Schelling, The Strategy of Conflict (Cambridge, Harvard University Press, i960), esp. p. 24.
6 See the argument by D. MacKay, “The Use of Behavioral Language to Refer to Mechanical Processes,” British Journal of the Philosophy of Science, XIII, 50 (1962), 89-103; “On the Logical Indeterminacy of a Free Choice,” Mind, 69 ( i960), 31-40.
7 In coin-tossing this phase begins when the coin goes into the air and terminates when it lands on the hand—a second or two later. In horse racing determination begins when the barrier is opened and terminates when the finish line is crossed after the last lap, a little more than a minute in all. In seven-day bicycle races, the determination phase is a week long.
8 Horse-racing con games have been based on the possibility of convincing the mark that the period between an outcome at the track and its announcement at distant places is long enough to exploit for post-finish sure betting, that is, “past-posting,”—a condition that can in fact occur and has been systematically exploited. It might be added that friendly 21 dealers in Nevada, after completing a deal, will sometimes look at their hole card and josh a player about a destiny which has been determined and read but teasingly delayed in disclosure.
9 For example, assume that the nickel-finders are engaged in a sudden-death game, one toss determining who gets the nickel. If the two boys are together on this occasion for one hour, their rate of chance-taking is once per hour. Should they change the nickel into pennies and toss these one at a time, each penny only once, then the rate of chance-taking is five times greater than it was before although the resulting swing in fortune no more and probably less.
10 A sound, if popular, treatment may be found in R. Jeffrey, The Logic of Decision (New York, McGraw-Hill, 1965).
11 In gambling, these factors are not independent. No doubt part of the experience obtained from the toss derives from the difference between the satisfaction at contemplating winning and the displeasure at the thought of losing.
12 Recent work, especially by experimental psychologists, has added appreciable knowledge to this area by a design which obliges individuals to show a preference among gambles involving various mixes of elements. See, for example, J. Cohen, Behaviour in Uncertainty (London, George Allen and Unwin, 1964), chap. 3, “Making a Choice,” pp. 27-42; and W. Edwards, “Behavior Decision Theory,” Annual Review of Psychology, 12 (1961), 473-98.
13 For this and other suggestions, I am grateful to Kathleen Archibald.
14 Reputable firms specializing in crooked gambling devices sell variously “shaped” dice that provide the customer with a choice among five or six degrees of what is called “strength.” Probably the ranking is absolutely valid. But no company has tested dice of any alleged strength over a long enough series of trials to provide confidence levels concerning the favorable percentage these unfair dice afford their users.
15 In the literature, following F. Knight (Risk, Uncertainty and Profit [Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1921], esp. chaps. 7 and 8) the term “risk” is used for a decision whose possible outcomes and their probabilities are known, and the term “uncertainty” where the probabilities across the various outcomes is not known or even icnowable. Here see R. Luce and H. Raiffa, Games and Decisions (New York, Wiley & Sons, 1958), p. 13ff. Following John Cohen, B. Fox (Behavioral Approaches to Accident Research [Association for the Aid to Crippled Children, New York, 1961], p. 50), suggests using the term hazard for objective dire chances, and risk for subjective estimates of hazard Fox equates this with a slightly different distinction, that between risk as perceived to inhere in a situation and risk perceived as something intentionally taken on. See also Cohen, op. cit., p. 63.
16 The concept of utility, and the experimental techniques of a forced-choice between singles and pairs probabilistically linked, can attempt to reduce these variabilities to a single scheme. However these efforts can be questioned. Many actual plays are undertaken in necessary conjunction with the player remaining unappreciative of the risk (while focusing on the opportunity), or unaware of the opportunity (while attending to the risk). To place a utility on this unappreciativeness in order to balance the books seems hardly an answer.
17 Although, of course, his choice of means of killing time can be expressive of him.
18 Time off comes in all sizes, a few seconds to a few years. It comes between tasks on the job; in transit between home and work; at home after the evening meal; week-ends; annual vacations; retirement. (There is also—largely in fantasy—the time away from ordinary life that Georg Simmel calls “the Adventure.”) When time off is killed, presumably this is done with freely chosen activity possessing a consummatory end-in-itself character. Whether the individual fills his time off with consequential or inconsequential activity, he usually must remain on tap at the place where serious, scheduled duties are located; or he must be within return-distance to his station. Note that time off to kill is to be distinguished from a close neighbor, the time that unemployed persons are forced to mark and cannot justify as an earned respite from past duties or imminent ones.
19 In our urban society the individual is likely to check up on the time periodically and can almost always estimate the time closely. Light sleepers may even orient themselves constantly in time. Struck on some occasion how “time has flown,” the individual may in fact mean only one or two hours. Finding that his watch has stopped, he may find in fact that it stopped only a few minutes ago, and that he must have been checking himself against it constantly.
20 San Francisco Chronicle, March 10, 1966.
21 Ibid., May 6, 1966.
22 In fictional vicarious worlds, criminal jobs (as well as the structurally similar undercover operations of various government agents), are realized in the teeth of a long sequence of threatened and actual hitches, each of which has a high probability of ruining everything. The hero manages to survive from episode to episode, but only by grossly breaking the laws of chance. Among young aspirants for these roles, surely the probabilistically inclined must be subtly discouraged.
23 Decision theorists currently demonstrate that almost any situation can be usefully formulated as a payoff matrix en-closing all possible outcomes, each outcome designated with a value that is in turn weighted by the probability of occurrence. The result is that conduct that might be construed as unproblematical and automatic or as an obligatory response to inflexible and traditional demands, can be recast as a rational decision voluntarily taken in regard to defined alternatives. Further, since the choice is among outcomes that have only a probability of coming
out, or, if certain, then only a probability of being satisfactory, the decision can be seen as a calculated risk, a practical gamble. (Characteristically, the payoff matrix equally handles a possible outcome whose probability is a product of nature, as when an invasion decision considers the probability of good or bad weather across the several possible landing points, or whose probabilistic features have been intentionally introduced by means of gambling equipment, as when one of the available alternatives involves dicing for a specified prize.) Resistance to this sort of formulation can be attributed to a disinclination to face up to all the choosing implied in one’s act. Acceptance of this formulation involves a certain amount of consorting with the devil; chance taking is embraced but not fondled. Whatever the social and political consequence of this decision-theory perspective, a purely cultural result might be anticipated, namely, a tendency to perceive more and more of human activity as a practical gamble, One might parenthetically add that the Bomb might have a somewhat similar effect-the transformation of thoughts about future society into thoughts about the chances of there being a future society, these chances themselves varying from month to month.
24 See F. Barth, “Models of Social Organization,” Royal Anthropological Institute Occasional Paper, No. 23 (Glasgow, The University Press, 1966), p. 6.
25 A recent description is G. Talese, The Bridge (New York, Harper & Row, 1965).
26 Which features, of course, an interesting dilemma: in battle a tradition of honor and risk-taking must be maintained, yet behind the lines the organization needs steady men in grayflannel uniforms. See M. Janowitz, The Professional Soldier (New York, The Free Press, i960), pp. 35-36.
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