So it’s game on – Ed Smith versus Matt Syed. It’s a well rehearsed game that has been played out for decades. Nature versus nurture, with Syed batting for the primacy of nurture and Ed Smith, in his latest literary offering, waving the flag for the luck involved in our genetic and environmental inheritance. Of course, I do both gentleman a disservice because I’m certain that both appreciate the dialectics of the two positions or do they. The fault, in a sense, lies with Syed who, in his well acclaimed book, Bounce, probably pushed the pendulum too far in the direction of the importance of a favourable environment and virtually dismissed any biological significance.

It’s all about ten thousand hours of dedicated, purposeful practise and we can all be champions. Our genes, according to Syed, have got bugger all to do with it. Sporting Polemics was quick to applaud this egalitarian and essentially revolutionary position, but on reflection Syed may have just pushed the position a little too far. To dismiss our inherited baggage so completely may be to ignore the dialectical interplay between our genetic inheritance and the good fortune or otherwise of our environment. Smith, sensing Syed’s failure on this point, saw a publishing opportunity and so along comes a very thoughtful and readable story of just how significant the randomness of life is to our little lives. On the significance of a fortunate environment I’m sure there would be little contention between the two scholars, but where the two part company is on the significance of inherited luck or the propensity of our genes to effect our future accomplishments.

Whilst I’m certain both Syed and Smith would claim to understand the dialectic between environment and genetics, both, in my view, approach the question too mechanically. Smith does genuinely seek to show the interplay between the two but in the end it’s a mechanical, wooden interplay devoid of an ongoing and lifelong struggle and unity between these opposites. To our very last breath the interplay between the luck of our genes and the luck of our environment is being fought out with unremitting ferocity. Take for example the smoker. He/she may well have inherited a predisposition towards cancerous cells. But the decision to smoke will likely activate that predisposition. Of course other factors like diet, lifestyle, work and family stress might all come into play. We don’t have the science yet to put percentages on these conflicting components, and we might never have. Some things might be forever beyond the realm of measurement. But we can be pretty sure that the science behind why one heavy smoker falls prey to lung cancer while another plods on for decades more is just about as mathematically incomprehensible as anything might be. The only thing we can be sure of is that the interplay between biological and environmental factors is fully charged until the point of death. Only the grim reaper puts an end to this tragicomedy. Syed and to a lesser degree Smith seem impervious to the mind-boggling complexity of the dialectic.

On the question of environmentally inherited luck i.e. which side of the railway tracks you were born on, both Smith and Syed somewhat miss the significance. That is probably because both Oxbridge gentleman have no real understanding of the debilitating nature of poverty. For Smith, his personal example of luck revolves around the fact that he went to a privileged Independent school while his destitute little sister could only manage the local grammar school. Poor thing. Try life at one of Britain’s crumbling secondary modern schools in the mid twentieth century for a taste of educational impoverishment. Or more to the point, why not raise the fact that some two billion of our fellow citizens have no reliable access to any schooling, not even a rudimentary primary education. For too many of these citizens, sporting opportunities are from another, alien world. Strange that neither Smith nor Syed found time or space to acknowledge this most glaring of indisputable facts. The only sport for these unlucky ones is whether they will receive enough food and clean drinking water to get them through another desperate day. And you won’t see multinational corporations lining up to sponsor that type of sport! Somehow the whole nature-nurture debate seems just a little irrelevant for their situation.

Smith does make some telling points though. Take for example his highlighting the fact that social mobility as reflected through sporting opportunities at the highest level seems to have incontrovertibly been rolled back over the past two decades. Not a good advertisement for the outgoing Blair/Brown Labour government. Smith notes: Thirteen cricketers represented England on the tour to Pakistan in 1987/8. Twelve of them were educated at state schools; only one had been to private school. Now roll the clock on twenty-three years. The England team that beat India at Lord’s in 2011 consisted of eight privately educated players, and three state educated ones.

Smith hammers home the point by referencing the British Olympic medals winners in 2008: At the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics, six of the nine British Gold medallists had their education funded by the state. But in 2008 only half the gold medallists went to state school. And it’s not just gold medals: the proportion of British medallists who are privately educated has grown steadily to about percent. The trend is the same in cricket, in rugby, in Olympic sports..In truth, fourteen of the England rugby squad that played in the 2007 World Cup final were privately educated.

Smith then goes on to make the point that the connection between privilege and sporting success is just a microcosm of British society generally. Smith rhetorically asks: Does sport reflect the rest of Britain? Are we stuck using the rhetoric of meritocracy in an increasingly unmeritocratic society?

Of course the answer is yes and it’s getting more pronounced by the day. What were the first things that the Tory government took its axe to once in power; the Sure Start programme, the network of local libraries and the school-sport partnerships, three community programmes all with the potential of chipping away at entrenched privilege.

Ironically, Tory education minister Michael Gove has been lecturing the nation about this very point, but we know he has a hidden corporatist agenda behind his seemingly egalitarian message show that state schools are perpetually lagging behind the independent private sector, all the better to privatise the state schools as a way of helping them to bridge the gap. What a caring, kindly Tory Mr Gove has turned out to be! Anyway, I digress.

To his credit, Smith relentlessly pursues the point by quoting state educated broadcaster and journalist Andrew Neil: In supposedly modern, meritocratic 21st century Britain, the Prime Minister, the deputy Prime Minister, the Leader of the opposition, the Chancellor and the shadow chancellor all went to Oxbridge, three of the five did the same degree and all were privately educated bar one (Ed Milliband). More men from a single college sit around the cabinet table than women of any background.

The whole trajectory of globalised capitalism looks set to entrench that position and certainly nothing in the Coalition box of tricks suggest that anything is about to improve on the social mobility front not in sport or in any other aspect of life. Its just pure bad luck, as Ed Smith might say, for the majority who are condemned to rapidly diminishing life opportunities. And when it comes to entrenched class privilege genes ain’t got nothing to do with it. On that I’m sure both Smith and Syed would agree. We live in what Smith calls a fortunocracy rather than an imagined meritocracy. Whether the advent of the internet and other related new technologies will whittle away or further entrench class privilege is difficult to say but what is certain is that those with no access to the world of computerisation will fall silently into a disconnected underclass.

Concluding his chapter on class privilege Smith rather humbly concedes: If better sporting education was freely available to all young people in England, as it was to me, I probably wouldn’t have played for England. Someone with more innate talent would have taken my place. They didn’t. Lucky for me. Not so lucky for England.

I can hear Syed gnashing his teeth in defiance at this thing called innate talent but who could deny that Michael Phelps with his huge flipper like feet didn’t have an innate biological advantage over his opponents or that Michael Jordan with his towering physique doesn’t have a huge biological advantage over someone like me with my relatively puny 5 feet 8 inch stature. A successful international basketball player I could never have been, not even with 20,000 hours of high level, focused, purposeful training!

I suggested earlier that Smith’s understanding of luck, randomness or chance occurrences was somewhat mechanical and wooden. I should elaborate on that a little. Throughout Smith’s very readable text we are consistently confronted with an either-or scenario. Either something has been worked for through effort and application or it was a case of good fortune with the latter making the former that much more likely. That seems most reasonable on the surface common sense if you like, but it still presents chance or luck as something opposite and discreet from its opposite. But what is the opposite of chance and just how discreet and separate is a chance occurrence from a more predictable or should we say necessary outcome?

Let’s take the example of a likely Greek default on its sovereign debt. Could it be scientifically predicted that Greece would be the first country in Europe to default on its debt? No, it could easily have been one of the other PIGS Portugal, Ireland or Spain. There is an element of chance that it will be Greece but there was also a growing material necessity that one of the peripheral European countries would eventually come to the point of insolvency. Clearly the categories of chance and necessity are dialectically linked. Chance events, even those such as a motor accident can never fully be separated from the concrete reality surrounding them. Africa, for example, has more motor accidents than Europe not because of bad luck but because their road infrastructure is not as developed as that of Europe. Chance and material reality are inextricably linked. Similarly Greece may be considered unlucky to be the first in the firing line of European economic meltdown but the likelihood of one of the deficit-ridden southern Mediterranean nations coming in conflict with Germany’s towering manufacturing surplus was highly predictable. Chance and necessity are dialectically interwoven.

Frederick Engels put the matter quite succinctly:

‘where on the surface accident holds sway, there actually it is always governed by inner, hidden laws and it is only a matter of discovering these laws.’

This is not some academic trifle. Unless we get to the essence of capitalism’s repeated tendency towards boom and bust we are destined to repeat the pattern, with each cycle being potentially more destructive than the last. Was it chance that Lehman Brother went broke? Was it chance that America had a giant housing bubble just waiting to burst? Is it chance or bad luck that some 14 million children die every year of malnutrition and easily preventable diseases? No, of course not, though our old Etonian political masters would have us believe otherwise. Yes, there is an element of chance that one child dies and another doesn’t in the same family in the same village but that chance event is wholly bound up with the nature of world economic governance or should I say the lack of. These acts of chance are completely predictable and knowable. There is a law-governed necessity behind capitalism’s propensity for creating winners and losers. The following few lines put the matter clearly enough:

The task of science is to reveal the necessary basis of phenomena behind chance connections. However intricate a given phenomenon, however numerous the chances on which it depends, it is ultimately governed by objective laws, by necessity. Dialectical materialism helps to see not only the connection but also the interpenetration of necessity and chance. (Dictionary of Philosophy, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1967)

On the sporting front we can routinely see the dialectical relationship between chance and necessity. Manchester City were extremely lucky to score not one but two goals in injury time against QPR in order to claim the Premiership title and see off their Manchester rivals. Similarly, Chelsea pushed their luck to the extreme to see off Napoli, Barcelona and then Bayern Munich to finally get their hands on the Champions League Trophy. But in both cases good fortune was infused with the massive monetary fortunes of Sheiks and Oligarchs. Which was most influential at any one moment luck or money, is a matter of conjecture, but the chances of either getting their hands on such cherished silverware this season without their billionaire owners is so remote as to be inconceivable. Yes, good fortune played its part but monetary fortune set the parameters of what was possible.

It is precisely this interpenetration of chance and necessity that both Smith and Syed fail to explore or even acknowledge.