On Miracles

Hoysted Flies With A Christian

A plane with me on board landed and an ebullient lady raised her arms in joy. “Praise the lord!” she sang. Fair enough, I thought, but what about the pilot?

It was funny - the bloke next to me chuckled and we exchanged a glance - but I can’t be too critical. I’m a sitting duck in a large tube roaring through the sky, nerves bouncing with each turbulent undulation. I have no choice but to have a little faith, just like my worshipful counterpart. It’s a little different, of course; the unbelievable safety record of the airline industry isn’t a cosmic accident. There’s a reason that I would have to fly every day for 57,000 thousand years to be in a fatal plane accident.

The truth is aggressive market incentives geared toward safety, regulation and industry-wide protocols have combined with decades of iteration to arrive at the astonishing fact above. I don’t need to attend the final checks before takeoff. I trust the systems we set up work, slip my shoes off (your judgement means nothing) and off I go. Almost all of the time, it’s as good a bet you can make. I don’t praise the Lord because the pilots and engineers and flight attendants did all the work. I have faith, but in the system humans built.

I’m a science guy. I don’t believe in institutional or Abrahamic gods. We really can know some things with certainty, and the scientific method really has revealed laws about the universe that change how we ought to behave in it. Knowing the germ theory of disease means I wash my hands. Knowing aeronautics and stringent safety procedures exist means I get on planes. There are inter-subjective truths about the world that the scientific method verifies and allows us to act accordingly.

But I’m also a faith guy. The world is simply too complex to live in without a modicum of faith, which is why we rely on science in the first place. In fact, what we each know is virtually fuckall. One of my high school mates is a commercial airline pilot now. Maybe I should throw a rosary up for the Big Guy.

On Being Full of Shit

I try and be honest about what I don’t know, which is basically everything. Science and technological progress has ushered in a class of intellectuals and pundits who enjoy prognosticating on the future with swaggering confidence. We also have a lot of tools and information that give us the illusion that we actually control much of it. And we have a system that rewards people for taking outsize credit for the role they play in achievements. In fact, there’s very little downside in claiming credit for happenstance - apart from your own diminishing self-awareness.

Taken together, it’s never been easier to fool yourself as each success confirms your every thought, and every setback the fault of some other jackass. I’m always struck by a story Daniel Kahneman tells in his book Thinking, Fast and Slow. He and fellow legend Richard Thaler had conducted a study to help investment bankers figure out the degree of influence their account managers had over their portfolio returns. In other words, how much were the highly-paid account managers actually making the company? The embarrassing answer was zero. Actually less than zero; if the managers had simply bet on the market rate they would have got better returns. Monkeys throwing darts would have been better.

When they broke the news to the bankers, they expected shock, possibly anger. After all, why pay millions of dollars out to these people when their risk-adjusted returns - even to the top performers - were so unreliable? Instead they got embarrassed smiles. Smiles. Kahneman and Thaler realised then they knew how little they knew. I imagine it’s humbling working in finance, making bets on the deepest, most complex confection humanity has ever built. The market is untameable, especially by individual account managers. Still, I imagine they got their bonuses that year.

Even my own accomplishments seem to arrive through magical circumstance. I got my first proper job because I knew my employer through football. More than that; he liked me, and trusted me enough to take a chance on me. In fact, I think most people’s ‘breaks’ start by getting a little lucky, so it’s easy to grow incapable of acknowledging the outsize role luck plays in life. In fact, the more I think about the best things that ever happened to me, the less certain I am about how much I influenced them at all.

Luck (The Cosmic Kind)

“If you had to choose a time to be born in, you’d choose now.”

- Obama, 2008 inaugration

The single most important determinates of your life are the time and place you were born into. I’m not even talking about the miracle of being born into the 20th century vs the 19th century - graduating into the workforce in 2008 versus 2011 had profound effects on lifetime earnings. Being born in Tasmania versus Sydney has a similar effect, as does being born male or female, or any infinite number of variables you didn’t ask for nor deserved. There is a wafer thin razor’s edge in life’s lottery.

This extends beyond circumstance, right down to the ideas that govern your behavior. Had I been born into a collectivist society, my achievements would be the family’s achievements. I would probably be a much more modest person. I have friends with Chinese parents, and there’s no way they would have tolerated the decade or so I took to get my career off the ground. Instead, the society I was born into has this idea called liberalism, where we are responsible for our actions and status is mostly conferred onto individuals.

So I have a LinkedIn profile where I boast (with artful modesty) about my many achievements. It also leads me to do preposterous things like believe my ideas are worthy of a weekly blog and send this newsletter out every Sunday. Liberalism is a good thing in my view, but my self-esteem and the way I conceive of myself as a citizen didn’t require any heroic reasoning on my behalf. I inherited these ideas and reap the benefits.

Richard Dawkins calls these ideas ‘memes’. Memes have a symbiotic relationship with their human hosts, another way of saying that memes rely on us as much as we rely on them. You don’t control the content of memes, nor which of them enter your brain - that is entirely a byproduct of luck. Whether you discard or invest in certain ideas is about the extent of your autonomy here, which is - in the cosmic scheme of things - modest.

It’s startling to realise we don’t even control the ideas in our head.

Acting As Though

Yet a question might have had floating in the back of your head this whole time; does what I do even matter? Why bother at all if we’re simply being tossed around the cosmic surf? Well, just because the locus of control is tiny, doesn’t mean it doesn’t matter. It’s merely cause for humility.

We give ourselves the illusion of control, but when you examine what we call control, it reveals itself to be the flimsiest possible structure to rest our hopes on. Your plans are ephemeral hopes dancing around as thoughts in your skull. They don’t exist. The best we can do - and this is what’s powerful - is act as though we’re captains of our ship. We can do tiny, beautiful things to the people in our circle, and ride the bigger waves as they arive.

“The best laid schemes o' mice an' men / Gang aft a-gley.”

The miracle, were I religious and prone to worshipful outbursts on a plane, is that these ethereal vibes can somehow make contact in a wicked and capricious world. Like Kahneman’s account managers, you see the world through a tiny porthole. Any claims to know it beyond this are futile and driven by an ego afraid of losing control. The beauty is that somehow you can still make things happen. It’s a glorious thing to defy chaos and heroically chart a path through the stars.

Faith isn’t blind hope; it’s a clear-eyed view that your life matters despite its mystery. It’s knowing that this whole thing is just a giant improvisation. That we’re all improvising. That when the plane lands, it’s kind of a miracle.