By Maeve Plunkett, '21, Previous Multifaith Ambassador
This post is part of our "Luck, Destiny, and Free Will" series. Check out more by following the "Luck, Destiny, and Free Will" tag.
Luck is the whimsical word we use to talk about things that we don’t control. You won the lottery? Wow, you’re so lucky! You hit every single red light on the way to work the other day? Ah, you had bad luck with lights. We also often use it interchangeably with privilege- I was lucky to have such good public schools in my area growing up.
As a quite anxious person who feels the need to control most of what surrounds me, over the past year I’ve been thinking a lot about control. As someone involved in social justice work, I think about privilege. So a deeper look into luck seems fitting in its relation to both of those things.
I also want to share that I am Irish Catholic. My grandparents immigrated from Ireland at the beginning of the 20th century and in case that’s not proof enough- my name is Maeve and I’m one of 6 kids. One of many stereotypes about Irish culture is that there’s a lot of stock put in luck. I’m not going to prove or disprove that, but rather talk about what luck does when brought into conversation about control and privilege and how helpful and hurtful it can be.
For me, there’s something calming and releasing about acknowledging a lack of control as something that’s up to luck. The red light incident for example, it’s a lot better for my life if I chock the unfortunate delay up to dumb luck, rather that theorize that there’s a great conspiracy bent on keeping me from my destination.
But what about when I say that I’m lucky to have grown up with access to the schools in my town? I didn’t control that. But when I say “luck,” I’m putting the control out into the universe, into something inexplicable, something about which there is nothing to be done. But there’s a reason the schools in my town are so well funded. It’s a legacy of segregation, elitism, and wealth accumulation with ties to race, class, capitalism, and America. There are choices made every year in state budget meetings and tax bills that decide to fund the arts like broadway, the athletics like the olympics, and academics like a top tier university. And in those same meetings and bills it is decided again and again that other schools won’t receive anything close to that funding.
Catholic teaching says that humans have free will and we use it as we choose to do good or bad. To me, that’s what’s so interesting about luck then. It’s the things we don’t control- the ones we don’t use our will to determine. But it matters how we use our will in reaction to them. We choose to let the red lights be out of our control or we explode into road rage against the person who’s lane merge stopped us from making the last one. Do I thank luck or God for giving me a good education while others miss out, or do I do my part in dismantling the unequal system of which I ended up on the benefitting side?
Free will is not only choosing to act or not act, but understanding which is right in each situation. As I navigate through the ways in which I respond to things out of my control, as I label some luck and others systemic problems, as I categorize what I can change and what I cannot, I’m digging into Jesuit moral reasoning which asks me to descend into the particular details of each given situation to understand its unique facts and considerations. But that’s a whole other blog so check out this podcast series for more on Jesuit moral reasoning from Malcom Gladwell: