The Ethics of Banking: Conclusions from the Financial Crisis (Issues ...

126 9 Financial Wagers, Hyper-Speculation and Shareholder Primacy
The fact that the gambler is enticed not by the rational but by the unfathomable
element of chance and luck is also confirmed by the observations of Jackson Lears.
Lears puts forward the view, in the American context, that the “culture of risk” and
the “culture of control” must be separated. 11 For aristocrats, workers and marginalized
ethnic groups, gambling served the purpose of setting the culture of risk apart
from the culture of control. Gamblers reject the dominant ethic of self-denial for a
future pay-off, of “deferred gratification”, and of rational calculation, to throw in
their lot with the more enigmatic power of luck and fate. 12 They reject the Puritan
principle of “You must learn before you can earn.” According to Kavanagh, the same
is true of gambling for entertainment, as taken up by the European and American
middle classes. Amateur gambling for entertainment appeals to the experience of
luck as a force beyond rational control, and exhibits features of a subversion of
the rational market economy into the “economy of gifts” and the effortlessness of
“something for nothing”. 13
Unlike the game of chance and the chance-based wager, behind the rational
wager stands the quite different type of belief in one’s own capacity for knowledge,
in one’s own ability to be able to predict the future through superior knowledge. The
wagerer is more narcissistically predisposed. He is overly convinced of his powers
of knowledge, whereas the gambler is more prone to display traits of regression,
of the abandonment of rationality in favor of surrender to fate. The gambler consciously
wants to divest himself of his autonomy and surrender to blind fate. Yet the
gambler lacks neither the narcissistic motive to force fate, nor the belief in his own
ability to be able to do so. On the other hand, the wagerer is also familiar with the
regressive element of surrendering to fate. Victory is important to both.
confirmed this inability on the basis of his anti-materialism: “Joseph Frank suggests that
Dostoevsky’s inability to restrain his emotions for more than thirty minutes confirmed his antimaterialist
belief that humans are not motivated by rationality and interest alone, that spiritual
demands trumped ‘the icy self-domination of reason.’ ” Cf. JOSEPH FRANK: Dostoevsky: The Stir
of Liberation, Princeton (Princeton University Press) 1986, p. 262. – The explanation that a purely
rational game does not produce the satisfaction that the gambler is actively seeking, namely total
dependency on luck, seems more plausible.
11JACKSON LEARS: Something for Nothing: Luck in America, New York (Viking) 2003, esp. Ch. 6.
Cf. on working-class gambling, which is usually also seen as hostile to market rationality, MARK
CLAPSON: A Bit of a Flutter: Popular Gambling and English Society, 1823–1961, Manchester
(Manchester University Press) 1992; ROSS MCKIBBON: “Working-Class Gambling in Britain,
1880–1939,” Past & Present, 82(1979), pp. 147–178; and ROGER MUNTING: An Economic and
Social History of Gambling in Britain and the USA, Manchester (Manchester University Press)
1996.
12Cf. also GERDA REITH: The Age of Chance: Gambling in Western Culture, New York
(Routledge) 1999, p. XVII.
13Cf. THOMAS KAVANAGH: Enlightenment and the Shadows of Chance: The Novel and the
Culture of Gambling in Eighteenth-Century France, Baltimore (Johns Hopkins University Press)
1993, p. 46. – In his more recent book, Kavanagh distinguishes the “nomological”, regulated orientation
of modern everyday life from the “ontological” orientation of the true gambler who is fixated
on the “moment unregulated”. THOMAS M. KAVANAGH: Dice, Cards and Wheels: A Different
History of French Culture, Philadelphia (University of Pennsylvania Press) 2005, p. 21.