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More "advanced" societies have forgotten the demonic language of superstition and luck, which they are inclined to call "dumb" or "blind." They often have no better explanation than primitives do for luck's strange intercessions, but they generally adopt a strategy both passive and fatalistic, a stoical mixture of rationalism and resignation to luck's works. Today it is mainly gamblers who stay on intimate and dangerous terms with luck and try to tame and possess it. Here and there, state lotteries have tried to bureaucratize luck—a dreary business and a contradiction in terms.
Generally, luck is something that happens to individuals. If a society or a century is considered as a whole, the random individual events that are set down to luck or fortune form more coherent overall patterns; large historical forces become discernible. But entire societies should not mock luck either. The classic Mayan civilization disappeared so strangely, so precipitously, that some massive stroke of bad luck must have been at work—a sudden plague, say, a viral riot.
Of all civilizations, America seemed the luckiest. With its vast Edenic spaces and immense natural wealth, with its extraordinary freedom from the stultifications of caste and poverty, the place seemed born in luck. Or so it appeared to the white Europeans who settled the continent, if not to the Indians they violently displaced or the Africans they imported in slave ships to work the plantations. Americans eventually made the mistake of describing their national luck as their "manifest destiny." In any case, America became the place where the world came to get lucky. Americans believed in the splendidly transforming powers of luck in their land. Men born in poverty made fortunes. They struck oil and gold. Hard work went into it, of course, but for a long time Americans were drunk on the luck of their sheer possibility. Foreigners bemused by America have often thought that too much good luck deprived Americans of a sense of the tragic. In the past 15 years or so, Americans have been riding a bad streak. It is possible they responded to Reagan because his smile reminded them of a time when America was lucky.
Whatever the motions of free will and necessity, Herman Melville wrote, "chance has the last featuring blow at events." Luck may be simply another name for the odd, unexpected notes in the huge symphony of things, of circumstance and coincidence, chemistry and character, diet and disease, weather and timing, the vastly subtle totality of being. But whatever the agnostics say, luck is not completely blind, or completely wild either. Within limits, it can be domesticated—although it will always be part wolf and may unexpectedly turn mad and eat the children one afternoon.
As Hector Berlioz said, "The luck of having talent is not enough; one must also have a talent for luck." Genius, in fact, may be defined as the ability to control luck. A turbulent gambler like Dostoyevsky was not overcome by the hectic fortunes of his experience, but turned them into his art. Outside the genius class, however, there is such a thing as a predisposition to good luck; it might be said on the evidence up to now that Reagan has it, while Ted Kennedy does not.