Excerpt from Benedict Anderson’s A Life Beyond Boundaries

If the reader cares to consult the indexes of any two dozen important scholarly books, the odds are very high that she or he won’t find an entry for ‘luck’. Academics are deeply committed to such concepts as ‘social forces’, ‘institutional structures’, ‘ideologies’, ‘traditions’, ‘demographic trends’ and the like. They are no less deeply committed to ‘causes’ and the complex ‘effects’ that follow from them. Within such intellectual frameworks there is little room for chance.

Once in a while I would tease my students by asking them if any of their friends or relatives had ever been involved in a motor accident. In response to a positive reply, I would then ask: ‘Do you really mean it was an accident?’ And they would usually answer with something along the lines of: ‘Yes! If Grandma had stayed chatting in the shop five minutes longer, she wouldn’t have been knocked down by the motorcyclist’; or, ‘If the motorcyclist had left his girlfriend’s house five minutes earlier, Grandma would still have been chatting in the shop.’ Then I would ask them: ‘So how do you explain the fact that over the Christmas holidays the authorities can predict fairly well how many Americans will be killed in accidents? Let’s say that the actual number turns out to be 5,000. The authorities will have looked at statistical trends over past Christmases and predicted, say, 4,500 or 5,500, not 32 or 15,000. What “causes” these predictions about “accidents” to be so good?’ Once in a while a clever student would reply that the answer is probability theory, or ‘statistical probability’. But in what sense can ‘probability’ be understood as a ‘cause’? More than a century ago, Emile Durkheim faced the same problem when he studied the most lonely of all human acts: suicide.

The point is that we have not yet managed to eliminate chance and accident, let alone luck, in our everyday thinking. We do try to explain bad luck. For this reason or that, because of this person or that, I had this or that bad luck. Yet we cannot explain how good luck intervenes either in our scholarship or in our daily life. This is why, in the preceding account of my life as a scholar and intellectual, I have put such emphasis on my general run of good fortune: the time and place of my birth, my parents and ancestors, my language, my schooling, my move to the US and my experiences in Southeast Asia. It makes me feel like the grandpa who stayed to chat with the shopkeeper five minutes longer.

At the same time, chance does not knock on our door if we do nothing but wait patiently in the shop. Chance often comes to us in the form of unexpected opportunities, which one has to be brave or foolhardy enough to seize as they flash by. This spirit of adventure is, I believe, crucial to a really productive scholarly life. In Indonesia, when someone asks you where you are going and you either don’t want to tell them or you haven’t yet decided, you answer: lagi tjari angin, which means ‘I am looking for a wind’, as if you were a sailing-ship heading out of a harbour onto the vast open sea. Adventure here is not of the kind that filled the books I used to enjoy reading as a boy. Scholars who feel comfortable with their position in a discipline, department or university will try neither to sail out of harbour nor to look for a wind. But what is to be cherished is the readiness to look for that wind and the courage to follow it when it blows in your direction. To borrow the metaphor of pilgrimage from Victor Turner, both physical and mental journeys are important. Jim Siegel once told me: ‘Ben, you are the only one...