Against the Gods. Bernstein Peter L.

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      As Christianity spread across the western world, the will of a single God emerged as the orienting guide to the future, replacing the miscellany of deities people had worshiped since the beginning of time. This brought a major shift in perception: the future of life on earth remained a mystery, but it was now prescribed by a power whose intentions and standards were clear to all who took the time to learn them.

      As contemplation of the future became a matter of moral behavior and faith, the future no longer appeared quite as inscrutable as it had. Nevertheless, it was still not susceptible to any sort of mathematical expectation. The early Christians limited their prophecies to what would happen in the afterlife, no matter how fervidly they beseeched God to influence worldly events in their favor.

      Yet the search for a better life on earth persisted. By the year 1000, Christians were sailing great distances, meeting new peoples, and encountering new ideas. Then came the Crusades – a seismic culture shock. Westerners collided with an Arab empire that had been launched at Mohammed’s urging and that stretched as far eastward as India. Christians, with faith in the future, met Arabs who had achieved an intellectual sophistication far greater than that of the interlopers who had come to dislodge them from the holy sites.

      The Arabs, through their invasion of India, had become familiar with the Hindu numbering system, which enabled them to incorporate eastern intellectual advances into their own scholarship, scientific research, and experimentation. The results were momentous, first for the Arabs and then for the West.21

      In the hands of the Arabs, the Hindu numbers would transform mathematics and measurement in astronomy, navigation, and commerce. New methods of calculation gradually replaced the abacus, which for centuries had been the only tool for doing arithmetic everywhere from the Mayans in the western hemisphere, across Europe, to India and the Orient. The word abacus derives from the Greek word abax, which means sand-tray. Within the trays, columns of pebbles were laid out on the sand.22 The word calculate stems from calculus, the Latin word for pebble.

      Over the next five hundred years, as the new numbering system took the place of the simple abacus, writing replaced movable counters in making calculations. Written computation fostered abstract thinking, which opened the way to areas of mathematics never conceived of in the past. Now sea voyages could be longer, time-keeping more accurate, architecture more ambitious, and production methods more elaborate. The modern world would be quite different if we still measured and counted with I, V, X, L, C, D, and M – or with the Greek or Hebrew letters that stood for numbers.

      But Arabic numbers were not enough to induce Europeans to explore the radical concept of replacing randomness with systematic probability and its implicit suggestion that the future might be predictable and even controllable to some degree. That advance had to await the realization that human beings are not totally helpless in the hands of fate, nor is their worldly destiny always determined by God.

      The Renaissance and the Protestant Reformation would set the scene for the mastery of risk. As mysticism yielded to science and logic after 1300 AD, Greek and Roman architectural forms began to replace Gothic forms, church windows were opened to the light, and sculptures showed men and women standing firmly on the ground instead posing as stylized figures with neither muscle nor weight. The ideas that propelled changes in the arts also contributed to the Protestant Reformation and weakened the dominance of the Catholic Church.

      The Reformation meant more than just a change in humanity’s relationship with God. By eliminating the confessional, it warned people that henceforth they would have to walk on their own two feet and would have to take responsibility for the consequences of their decisions.

      But if men and women were not at the mercy of impersonal deities and random chance, they could no longer remain passive in the face of an unknown future. They had no choice but to begin making decisions over a far wider range of circumstances and over far longer periods of time than ever before. The concepts of thrift and abstinence that characterize the Protestant ethic evidenced the growing importance of the future relative to the present. With this opening up of choices and decisions, people gradually recognized that the future offered opportunity as well as danger, that it was open-ended and full of promise. The 1500s and 1600s were a time of geographical exploration, confrontation with new lands and new societies, and experimentation in art, poetic forms, science, architecture, and mathematics. The new sense of opportunity led to a dramatic acceleration in the growth of trade and commerce, which served as a powerful stimulus to change and exploration. Columbus was not conducting a Caribbean cruise: he was seeking a new trade route to the Indies. The prospect of getting rich is highly motivating, and few people get rich without taking a gamble.

      There is more to that blunt statement than meets the eye. Trade is a mutually beneficial process, a transaction in which both parties perceive themselves as wealthier than they were before. What a radical idea! Up to that point, people who got rich had done so largely by exploitation or by plundering another’s wealth. Although Europeans continued to plunder across the seas, at home the accumulation of wealth was open to the many rather than the few. The newly rich were now the smart, the adventuresome, the innovators – most of them businessmen – instead of just the hereditary princes and their minions.

      Trade is also a risky business. As the growth of trade transformed the principles of gambling into the creation of wealth, the inevitable result was capitalism, the epitome of risk-taking. But capitalism could not have flourished without two new activities that had been unnecessary so long as the future was a matter of chance or of God’s will. The first was bookkeeping, a humble activity but one that encouraged the dissemination of the new techniques of numbering and counting. The other was forecasting, a much less humble and far more challenging activity that links risk-taking with direct payoffs.

      You do not plan to ship goods across the ocean, or to assemble merchandise for sale, or to borrow money without first trying to determine what the future may hold in store. Ensuring that the materials you order are delivered on time, seeing to it that the items you plan to sell are produced on schedule, and getting your sales facilities in place all must be planned before that moment when the customers show up and lay their money on the counter. The successful business executive is a forecaster first; purchasing, producing, marketing, pricing, and organizing all follow.

      The men you will meet in the coming chapters recognized the discoveries of Pascal and Fermat as the beginning of wisdom, not just a solution to an intellectual conundrum involving a game of chance. They were bold enough to tackle the many facets of risk in the face of issues of growing complexity and practical importance and to recognize that these are issues involving the most fundamental philosophical aspects of human existence.

      But philosophy must stand aside for the moment, as the story should begin at the beginning. Modern methods of dealing with the unknown start with measurement, with odds and СКАЧАТЬ