I’ve been noticing the way some very accomplished people attribute their accomplishments to luck and I’ve gotten to wondering whether that is a good idea.

At the personal level, I suppose it doesn’t do very much harm.  It isn’t really permissible to say—however obviously true it might be—that the skill you have learned or the job you have mastered are the result of persistent and disciplined effort.  So long as everyone knows how hard you have worked at it, they will hear your demurrals as simple modesty.

At the societal level, I think it is catastrophically bad.  You can, naturally, go wrong on either direction, but if I were to evaluate a society that accounts for successes by attributing them to hard work and compare it to a society that believes, really believes, that the successes are the result of luck, I would choose the former.

If people believe that they are accountable for the quality of their work and are rewarded for it, it is reasonable to think that there will be more hard work on the part of more people.  On the other hand, it is also true that some people are born with disadvantages, and hard work is not going to do the whole job for them.  Every society with an interest in “fairness” has to recognize that the starting line is not at the same place for all the competitors.

Liberals have done quite a bit of work to fix that.  The idea is that if it is a race, every competitor ought to have an equal chance of winning it.  It’s a nice thought, but genetic endowment and family background and educational quality are all against it.  Those things cannot be standardized across a society and they are not fair.

We have moved, as a result, in the direction of calling “privileged” those who have the fewest or the least prominent disabilities.  It is true that some are born with better chances of success in life than others, but it is also true that “privileged” takes away any recognition of the work that is needed to turn that initial advantage into something valuable that belongs to the person.

And on the other side, we have moved in the direction of calling people who have not achieved success for one reason or another—I have argued already that there are the two kinds of reasons—“marginalized” or, more bluntly, “victims.”  There are several things wrong with these terms as I see it.  One is that both identify the least successful people as being the victims of someone or some group.  That is clear in “victim,” a term which first referred to a sacrificial animal and which has not moved very far in the interim.  It is not quite as clear in “marginalized” except that the “-ized” part identifies it as the work of someone else.  Without it, it would just be “marginal.”

From the standpoint of social justice, the case can be made that everyone ought to have the resources they need to thrive.  Karl Marx states that quite clearly.  From the standpoint of the language we choose to describe who deserves what in our society, there is no point in hiding from the fact that any position of initial advantage can be squandered by failures of understanding and effort.  Likewise, nearly any position of initial disadvantage can improved by consistent and careful effort.

That isn’t going to change very much, but it will keep people who have labored long and hard to achieve success from being required to attribute it to luck.  It might also keep people who have squandered every opportunity to improve their position from claiming that they have been “marginalized” by someone.

That’s a small change.  It will not achieve social justice.  It might, however, help us gain back a little control of what we can say about what we have done or have failed to do with our lives and that seems worth doing.