Intro to The Lottery in Babylon

By Jonathan Westphal

The enigmatic plot of Borges's "The Lottery in Babylon" invloves a society in which a secret lottery determines justice, including punishments and the arragements of life in general. When a crime is committed, someone gets punished, but what the punishment is and to whom it is given are decided by a lottery. So the connection between what the Babylonians do and what they receive as a matter of justice is entirely broken. It may seem obvious that a system of random punishment is the exact opposite of justice. Ordinarily, there is a connection between what is done and what is received as a result, but part of the interest of Borges's metaphysical fable is that this is not such an obvious idea, for it is not obvious that an ordinary state lottery, with a multimillion dollar prize, is unjust or unfair. It may be unjust or unfair becuase it is unfairly conduceted, not becuase of the huge resulting inequality of wealth. It is fair, suggests Borges, preceisely when it is random. Indeed, it could be that for this reason a distribution of jobs, income, and prestige by lottery is in the end the only just one! Or perhaps a socioeconomic lottery will as a matter of fact produce the most desirable and beneficial outcome for all. But the question still arises whether this beneficial or preferred distribution is a just one. Part, though of course only part, of what is wrong or unjust about the practice of reprisal shootings of randomly chosen prisoners in wartime is that the victims are chosen randomly, as by a lottery.

There is a hidden recognition of this point in Borges's nightmare parable. The group which organizes the lottery, known as "the Company," "with devine modesty, avoids all publicity. Its agents, as is natural, are secret....The silent functioning, comparable to God's, gives rise to all sorts of conjectures." Some say that the Company has not exited for centuries, others that it is eternal, and another, "in the words of masked hierarchs, that it has never existed and will not exist." If this is so, and here is the culmination of Borges's dark conception, then the world, with all its obvious unfairnesses, is just, no matter what its organization, for it is the outcome of a "natural" lottery of history and biology.