Gaming Our Social Obligations Instead of Committing To Them
Or, Why Linking Educational Funding to Gambling Proceeds Is Possibly the Worst Idea We've Had About Education as a Society
In this installment of our continued series on the nature of moral obligation, I turn attention to the nature of our social obligations, with special reference to how forms of gambling become stopgaps for the obligations that we fail to meet toward one another. The full post, as well as our upcoming book discussion on Ivan Illich, is available to paid subscribers.—The Management
Gambling: An Autobiographical Prologue
When I tell people that I’m from Shreveport, Louisiana, should the conversation go longer, I tell them about how I’m from two Shreveports: the one from before 1994, and the one after. The one before was fairly pastoral; though our house was located in the middle of town, there were large cotton fields between our house and my dad’s business. I remember riding to pick him up at work, and seeing the dead cotton bolls on the road, the fields cleared to be able to see a quarter mile down Youree Drive.
This all changed in the mid-1990s with the advent of the riverboat casino: the first ones came in, and within five years, the cotton fields were sold to developers, producing the strip malls that cram the space between my parents’ house and Dad’s work. Along with the casinos came tourism, retail options, restaurants—the kinds of low-paying jobs which attend a casino. During that time, defaults on telephone bills went up 30%. The jobs were plentiful, I hear.
For my 30th birthday, I went to a bingo hall and was shushed by the regulars four cards deep in a game, as my friends and I gawked at the seriousness with which people took a parlor game. There was money at stake each round. When I was 40, I bought a Powerball ticket as the national pot topped several hundred million dollars and lived in a rent house with drafts under the doors. I thought many times about the cotton fields, about the advent of the casinos, about the city center which became emaciated through abandoned homes; the casinos brought in The Doobie Brothers and Willie Nelson.
Social Obligations: A Brief Account
For Christians, the nature of social obligations can be characterized in something like the following way:
Christian moral obligations depend first on the nature of the sending God.
Christians exist as wheat among tares, as the pilgrim city of God amidst the city of the world, as salt amidst a decaying world—pick your metaphor. As such, Christian obligations to their neighbors depend upon what it means that they image the saving work of God amidst creation: not for their own sake, but for the sake of that which they have been sent. If the life of the Christian is to follow the life of Christ, in the power of the Spirit, then the life of the Christian follows the contours of God’s own work: the Son sent into the world, who sends the Spirit, sends the people of God for the same ends and purposes.
Within that economy of being sent, Christian moral obligations turn on this prior economy.
This gets a little tricky, so bear with me. Insofar as Christians are sent of God by the Spirit, to bear witness to the One who was sent for us, we inhabit creation in order to offer it to God as worship. Worship, while it entails the offering of all things to God, does not entail offering all things in the same way, or at the same time: offering sometimes means distinguishing between those things which are to be discarded and those to be preserved. The Christian social obligation entails, then, attending to the neighbor’s good—which is God—and the ways by which that good can be promoted.
The way that the Christian meets social obligations assumes not only that we meet Christ within creation, but that Christ is actively redeeming the world which Christ has made, and that Christians follow that lead.
Christians follow the approach of Christ in their engagements in the world1, with the assumption that is both the One who sends us, by the Spirit, and the One who meets us within the world in the faces of the suffering. As such, we are never trying to hold together the world, but ministering as members of Christ’s body within creation, attending to those those aspects of the world which are destroying that creation and those neighbors which Christ has created, loved, and called.
Now, this frequently means that Christian’s seek the good of things which may or may not directly benefit them. We’ll talk about this in a moment, but public education is one of those things which all support with taxes but only some benefit from2. But no one ever said that seeking the good of neighbors was reciprocal.
This is a thumbnail sketch, but it offers a way of approaching social obligations as informed first by the way of Jesus, sent by the person of Jesus, and assuming that we are contributing in our love of neighbor to the redemptive work that is properly Christ’s and not ours. How we think about social goods, then, follows from this: supporting and helping to facilitate those aspects of social life which support the flourishing of God’s work in the world.
This is, I think, simultaneously an expansive vision, and one which does not assume that institutions qua institutions are necessary features of social obligation, except to the degree that they support the good of creation, which is the love of God. We can get into all sorts of debates over the ways in which social goods support this primary aim in direct, indirect, and supporting ways, but I’ll leave this as the basic frame: social obligations are chastened for the Christian, not by every possible claim, but by claims which are ordered by the work of discipleship.
This means, I think, that Christians will take up some claims which are not taken up by social bodies, and that they will find some claims unnecessary to take up in their current form. The early Christian witness of rescuing children who had been left to die from exposure is an example of the first, and Dorothy Day’s caring for the poor while remaining critical of programs like the New Deal is an example of the second. It requires reflection, and not getting shoved into knee-jerk support. We’re in short supply of the time to do this culturally, but it doesn’t make it any less necessary.
All of this, then, brings us to whether or not to support gambling as a way of meeting social obligations to public education, public financing of goods, and the like.
Gambling and Meeting Social Obligations
The role which gambling has played, at least in Christian history, comprises one of three basic positions: 1) permissible and a matter of conscience, 2) impermissible and deforming of character, and 3) justifiable for the common good. I’ll direct you to some relevant sources here if you want to dig deep on the historical question, but the short version is that #2 is the dominant account: gambling is depicted as teaching us to not be industrious, to trust in luck, etc.
But in recent days, #1 and #3 have become the more common justifications for gambling: that for the pure, all things are pure, and it has a side benefit of supporting various socially beneficial enterprises, such as public schools. The evidence of whether or not gambling can be justified by #3 is pretty dubious, in that legislatures will allow gambling, and then cut public education budgets assuming that gambling revenue will make up the difference. But for the sake of the argument, let’s assume that gambling proceeds do fund social goods.
The assumption that a practice which has been held to be morally dubious and morally deformative— that gambling makes us more avaricious, or trusting in luck, or feeds other addictive behaviors—is instructive for us here. But let’s set that one aside too and focus on the question of what it means that something like gambling can help us meet our social obligations to one another, as Christians.
Taking the framework above on social obligations as our guide, I think you’re hard pressed to make the case that gambling fits this for several reasons:
Gambling may produce income necessary to support social goods, but does so as a byproduct of the will. The will, in gambling, is not intended to support social goods or to love one’s neighbor: the will is ordered toward winning money. That it incidentally benefits our neighbor is like saying that we fulfill our the fullness of our relationship to our loved ones by doing things for them but never being in proximity to them. I may supply their financial needs, but as a spouse and father, more is owed to them then paying the bills.
Gambling encourages the meeting of social obligations as less intention and more by chance. Quite literally. In assuming, as lawmakers do, that gaming funds will support public education, they are treating that social obligation to provide education for the young as one which is met not by reason, not by planning or intention, but purely by accident—and (as the historical objection against gambling teaches us) by making people more vicious. It’s a cruel irony that by making people more morally vicious, they might increase their “social giving” more.
Gambling functionally means that social obligations are offloaded to the ones who are asking for the obligation to be met. It’s bootstrapping by a different name: the ones who need affordable public goods (the poor) are disproportionately the ones who engage in gambling, meaning that the poor are made to be responsible for their own public goods. In other words, it sounds really magnanimous when someone who doesn’t gamble supports gambling for the reason that it supports education, except that it really means the one who doesn’t gamble can have the right opinion while not doing anything to meet a social need.
Leaving an obligation up to the winds of chance, winds which wind up to be ultimately the momentum of the poor flapping their arms from trying to catch up, is not just poor public policy. It’s downright wicked, expecting that a basic social good—the education of the young—should be linked to the fickle feelings of Lady Fortune. It’s asking 911 services to pay for themselves by a raffle. It’s asking the military to be funded by a bake sale3 or for our roads to be built from the leave-a-penny jars. We literally don't do this with any social good we value, but somehow, education seems ripe for this lunacy.
There’s an argument to be made that, by baking risk into the funding structure of education, it’s just being honest about the basic structure of the world: that everything we love is a matter of risk, and that even the most stable forms of funding are not immune from global catastrophes like COVID or from global recessions. There’s a risk in living; tonight, I nearly t-boned a car coming out of my subdivision when a car bolted across an intersection unannounced. Life is, as Lyle Lovett says, so uncertain; building bigger barns will not stave off that uncertainty, but leaning fully into it is a dodge of the way in which that risk is a shared risk. Risk is not managed by offloading to the most vulnerable, but by sharing it as a society, that some things are worth doing, and we will find a way to support them independently of making them necessarily volatile.
So, TLDR: gambling is destructive for us for all kinds of reasons. I’d love to win a million or so dollars, but what it does to me, and to us, isn’t worth it. As we’ve said before, obligations are good for us, in that they teach us what we are to do, and how we are to do it, and how it is that we are bound together.
Reading: William McCaskill’s What We Owe The Future. I’ll write more on it, probably for a review in the future, but it’s a dystopian picture of how we save the world. Finished D.L. Mayfield’s forthcoming Unruly Saint, about Dorothy Day, and hoo-wee, I have thoughts, also coming in a review. Caveat Lector. The Brothers K is proving wonderful on reread, and finished Ember Falls, the second of the Ember Rising quartet, with the boys yesterday. Super fun books if you have young kids: rabbits versus wolves and hawks for the fate of forests, complete with catapults, rabbits in gliders, and intrigues and betrayals.
Not as a matter of repetition, but imitation. This distinction is significant for understanding the difference between being disciples of Jesus, and being Jesus: the material context into which Jesus enacts our salvation is both similar and dissimilar, and thus, our discipleship cannot expect to repeat his human career. This is not an appeal for “contextualization”, making discipleship a matter of implementing principles, but assuming that a life of discipleship will open up into faithful improvisation, as it were. Our imaging of Jesus will take seriously and normative the example of Jesus, drawn into Christ’s own body the church and empowered by the Spirit, but inevitably draw in material and historical factors dissimilar from Jesus.
I have mixed feelings about the way in which public education delivers the good of education, but I’ve discussed that amply in this post. For the sake of argument, and in truth, public education delivers some goods and does some things, but not all of those goods well and certainly not all the time. Nevertheless, goods don’t have to be maximally good to be supported or seen as providing some benefit deserving of support.
As a pacifist, this actually strikes me as a significantly adequate social policy.