In this mini-lecture, I will focus upon gambling. Pre-modern approaches to gambling center around a set of norms which hold that gambling is a pathway to the gods and should not be profaned by non-persons; in the sociology of law, this translates into legal proscriptions forbidding games of luck and/or forbidding women/children from gambling. Games of skill are often tolerated [bridge, poker, billiards, horseshoes and such] but games of luck are held to be the province of the gods and not lightly to be played.

In the musical section of your local video store, there will be a movie called 'Guys and Dolls' in which a young and surprisingly competent Marlon Brando sings 'Luck be a Lady tonight.' [Lyrics below]. In the movie, Sky Masterson [Brando] promised Sister Brown, a Salvation Army lady that he would bring her 12 souls to be saved if she would go with him to Havana for dinner...he wanted to work his wicked will with her. In the definitive scene, Sky wages $1000 with some 20 small time gamblers; if he wins, they go to the church meeting with Sister Brown...so, in preparation for throw of the dice, Sky/Brando sings his song:

Luck be a Lady tonight;
Luck be a Lady tonight.
Luck if you've ever been a lady,
Luck be a lady for me.

Luck let a gentleman see how nice a dame you can be
I've seen the way you've treated other guys before me,
Luck be a lady tonight.
Stay with the fellow you came in with,
Luck be a lady for me.

Modern approaches to gambling center on probability and functionality. Generally, it is desanctified; the laws of probability set forth by Pascal and others since simply state the odds of winning/losing. In still another movie, Tom Cruise took his idiot/savant brother [played by Dustin Hoffman] to Las Vegas to play the odds.

Las Vegas is the epitome of the modernist approach to gambling; it is simply a game of skill in which the house takes a percentage off the top [usually 18% but often more] and allows the law of probability to define winners and losers...gods are not invoked nor does winning signify a state of special grace as in pre-modern times.

If gambling is forbidden by legal codes, the arguments appeal to the harm done to the psyche, to the family, to the job or to society. Gambling is said, in modernist medicalized linguistic encodings, to be addictive and thus to be an illness. Or gambling is said to be dysfunctional to the family in that scarce resources are lost to the budget of the marginally poor. Or gambling is said to compromise the commitment of the worker to his/her job...being addicted, the gambler cannot be entrusted with monies, secrets or other convertible property of the company.

Gambling is said to be anti-social in that it forces the welfare state to pick up the costs of dysfunctional' families as well as the costs to 'cure' the addicted. Much of the animus directed at both drugs and by the capitalist state centers around the fiscal crisis it now experiences. If people would only be thrifty, stay sober, be punctual, work hard, spend time with their children, support their local schools, save money for their old age; discard bad habits such as smoking, drinking, over-eating, and gambling, social problems would disappear and the state could oblige us by shrinking to the smallest corners of social space.

The postmodern point of view is that definitions of good, bad, evil, functional, holy, illness and crime are rent with both religion and politics. This does not, of course, preclude the fact that some practices are hostile to the human condition; that some practices should be repressed...it simply means that one cannot appeal to the gods nor to natural law in the prohibition of behaviors. Drug use, gambling, sexual practices, the use of violence, patterns of food/feeding, dancing and praying have all been used/are being used as pathways to the Holy. If we forbid the use, at the same time, we foreclose the social process by which dramas of the Holy are constituted by intending human beings. Again, this is neither right nor wrong in postmodern sensibility; it just is the socio- logical case.

In Korea, families gathered together on the last day of the year to play 'Yut.' Yut was played at the end of the twelve/thirteen month to determine the fortune of the family for the coming year. Yut is played by dropping four sticks; savants 'read' the lay of the sticks and tell the fortune...Yut is now played year 'round.

China has many games by which the fate of a man/woman or child is known...card games are still played under the assumption that the winner is favored of the gods. Crickets/grasshoppers are harbinger of good luck and kept near the hearth of the home in many parts of China.

A great many contests are played; the winner of which is thought to be favored of a god or goddess. Duels are fought; darts are thrown, arrows shot, horses ran, races run and cabers tossed for prize and pride. Playing cards is often forbidden in some societies since other societies use card to know fortunes. Tarot cards are still read in every major American city by those adept in the meanings of the cards and in the combinations of the cards.

Sjoo and Mor, in their work on matriarchy, (1987) argue that mysticism, games of god-driven chance and other supernatural sources of knowledge came to be forbidden as male gods began to replace female gods...the birth of Moses was the chief turning point in the rationalization of the knowledge process. According to Sjoo and Mor, the male world is dominated by logic and is oriented to human control of events. First canon law, then common law, then statutory law was used to suppress feminine ways of knowing.

I don't know the truth value of this view...there are claims that women use right brain and men use left brain in their problem solving...whatever the case, the student of criminology and/or the sociology of law should know these things.

In the first of the series, I made the sociological point that societies forbid to their own members, the dramas of the Holy used in other societies...as worship of false gods. This means that both pre-modern and modern sensibilities define palmistry, astrology, phrenology, alchemy, card-playing, dice-rolling, stick-dropping, and tea leaf reading as either sinful or silly superstitution.

This results in a shrinking tax base [as a portion of GNP] and increased demand on the part of a growing Underclass for housing, shelter, health care and food. Capitalist too, have their needs and have been successful in obtaining tax holidays, tax-free zones, lower capital gains tax, more help in cleaning up pollution, help with job training and apprenticeships as well as countless other federal and state subsidies.

Still, the economy fails to grow at previous rates; at rates adequate to the needs and desires of workers and owners. So the state sector expands to meet the fiscal crisis in a globalized economy. As tax revolts increase by both capitalists and middle class workers, states turn to gambling as an revenue source.

In the last ten years, state-run games of pure chance have exploded; with prizes of tens of millions of dollars, hundreds of million tickets are bought...and the fiscal crisis of the State attenuated a bit.

Indian tribes too, stripped of land and degraded of status, have hit upon a clause in their treaties to open gambling casinos. In Michigan the Saginaw Chippewa tribe has reversed its immiseration at the expense of the tourists from Canada and non-Indian regions...and soon, a new, greatly enlarged casino will open on a scale not seen outside of Nevada...