‘Mine is a dizzying country in which the Lottery is a major element of reality’: a place where ‘the number of drawings is infinite’, ‘no decision is final’ and ‘all branch into others’.

These are Jorge Luis Borges’ words, taken from his short story The Lottery in Babylon.¹

The Lottery is an institution that recycles mortal life in an unending string of new beginnings. Each new beginning portends new risks, but in a package deal with new opportunities. None of the beginnings is ultimate and irrevocable. With the Lottery in Babylon, the Greeks invented a way of squeezing the poison out of the sting of that pest, uncertainty. Let us carry on with our reading:

I have known that thing the Greeks knew not – uncertainty. In a chamber of brass, as I faced the strangler’s silent scarf, hope did not abandon me; in the river of delights, panic has not failed me. Heraclides Ponticus reports, admiringly, that Pythagoras recalled having been Pyrrhus, and before that, Euphorbus, and before that, some other mortal; in order to recall similar vicissitudes, I have no need of death, nor even of imposture. I owe that almost monstrous variety to an institution – the Lottery – which is unknown in other nations, or at work in them imperfectly or secretly.

Thanks to the Lottery, many lives can be accommodated in the life of a single mortal. The awesome, harrowing spectre of uncertainty is thereby chased away – or rather re-moulded from a most horrifying liability into a rapturous, elating asset. Instead of more of the same, you opt, by buying a ticket, for the new; and you sign a blank cheque, which is not for you to fill.

It has, as the narrator admits, ‘no moral force whatsoever’. It ‘appealed not to all a man’s faculties, but only to his hopefulness’. The owners of lottery tickets face a two-edged hazard: ‘they might win a sum of money or they might be required to pay a fine’. No wonder there were quite a few gutless, mean-spirited Babylonians who preferred to settle for what they already had and to resist the temptation of more wealth – and so steered clear of Lottery offices.

Men who ran the Lottery resorted, however, to a blackmail of sorts: they managed to cause a man who bought none of the Lottery tickets to be widely censured as ‘a pusillanimous wretch, a man with no spirit of adventure’. Though they didn’t stop at such a halfmeasure. ‘The lottery was made secret, free of charge, and open to all’; most importantly, ‘every free man automatically took part in the sacred drawings’. From then on, The Company (running the Lottery) ‘with godlike modesty shuns all publicity. Its agents, of course, are secret; the orders it constantly (perhaps continually) imparts are no different from those spread wholesale by impostors.’ For all the Babylonians know, or imagine, or surmise, or suspect – ‘the Lottery is an interpolation of chance into the order of the universe’. And so, for them it goes without saying that ‘to accept errors is to strengthen chance, not contravene it’. True, some ‘masked heresiarch’ heretics go on whispering that ‘the Company has never existed, and never will’; other heretics, though – ‘no less despicable’ – argue that ‘it makes no difference whether one admits or denies the reality of the shadowy corporation, because Babylon is nothing but an infinite game of chance’.

Are we all Babylonians now, whether by design or by default? Gamblers by decree of fate or by our – and our modern ancestors’ – past choices ossified into the human condition?

Not exactly. Not only. Let us try to integrate this powerful representation by Borges with a short tale that Aristotle relates in his Metaphysics. A man, out of fear of being robbed, hides his treasure in a field. Another one ‘digs a hole to plant a tree but instead finds a treasure’. Each man deliberately performs an action aiming for an end that he intends to reach, and yet chance intervenes, which, mashing the two actions together, has an outcome that is unexpected, unintended, certainly not looked for.

We may thus complicate Borges’ metaphor: even when we do not sign a blank cheque and we do not entrust ourselves to hope, to our decisions, to our actions alone – small or great, private or collective – chance invariably attaches itself to them, with its unforeseen, unexpected, unsought consequences. As Alan Turing pointed out: ‘The displacement of a single electron by a billionth of a centimetre at one moment might make the difference between a man being killed by an avalanche a year later, or escaping.’²

In the end, between the Babylon imagined by Borges and the world that modernity once promised us – which Jean-Paul Sartre captured in the sublime sentence ‘le choix que je suis’ (‘the choice that I am’) – lies the interregnum in which we are living now: a space and a time that are stretched, mobile, immaterial, over which the principle of the heterogeny of ends rules, perhaps, as never before. A disorder which is new, yet still babelic.