It’s Just Not Fair!
“No fair!” an aspiring thespian protests the just-posted cast list, his coveted starring role inexplicably assigned to an underclassmen well beneath him in seniority.
“That’s not fair!” a teary-eyed youngster blurts out, between sobs, when told by her parents that she could not stay up as late as her big sister.
“Life isn’t fair” echoes across the pages of history in tragic endings, undeserved fortunes and natural disasters. It festers in the unspoken sentiments of those gathered around the open wound of cemetery plots, offering their goodbyes to children cut down in their youth or parents taken from them in their hour of greatest need. It reverberates within our homes and schools, the places we work, and in the arenas and casinos where we pay our tithes to the gods and heroes of our many entertainments. It is the rationalizing cry of both the downtrodden and the powerful, each of whose fate hangs by its slender threads.
What populates your “not fair” list of concerns and aggravations?
· The apparent confusion about what qualifies one to be a citizen and what entitlements or prohibitions come with citizenship?
· The mixed messages we send to urban dwellers and those who prey upon them when crimes are excused, offenders are exonerated and police are execrated?
· The acceptance of a collegiate trans swimmer annihilating female athletes when only one year removed from competing as a man?
· The rejection of highly qualified student applicants in favor of admissions awarded to those who satisfy racial, ethnic, or demographic quotas?
These are a few “ripped from the headlines” realities that confound my sense of what is fair. I’m at a loss to understand why these are now such contentious issues, or how what was once unthinkable became some new normal.
Unfairness seems to meet us at every turn. Nature pulls no punches in driving home this fact of life. Outside of Disney’s anthropomorphic tales of benevolent lion kings and diverse and cooperative Jurassic and Ice Age communities, there is nothing that our eyes can take in or our minds conceive to assure us that life really is fair. The natural world is not designed nor scripted in terms of fairness, but of survival--survival of those most fit or fortunate to live out one day in order to face another. It is kill or be killed, eat or be eaten, endure or succumb. So cruel and heartless is the drumbeat of nature that I find it difficult to watch images from the African savannah or the ocean’s depths without wincing at the sight of so much carnage. Migration, natural selection, adaptation, extinction—all of the evolutionary drivers that have brought forth the diversity of life on this planet seem agnostic to the moral overlay out of which fairness and equality are born. It’s just not fair!
The mighty winds that overwhelm seacoast lodgings or cut through the heartland in cyclonic funnels show no deference to fairness in meting out destruction upon those souls left to wonder why. Gale-driven fires that torch our forests and reduce both mansions and trailer parks to ash and cinder have no apparent conscience. Neither do the waters that spill over and gush through our levees, inundating our neighborhoods. Nor does the life-quenching liquid that evades condensation where most needed, turning stretches of our landscape into bowls of dust and boxes of sand. It’s just not fair!
None of us has ever lived in the romanticized state of nature upon which philosophers and moralists may try to construct our true identity. Instead we have come to life as we must come to terms with the many distinctive qualifiers that sort us into families, tribes and nationalities, sects and religions, haves and have-nots. In each social matrix in which we live, move and have our being we learn and rehearse the myths, stereotypes and jests that tell us who we are, and who we aren’t. And when we pivot our glance from side to side in marking those whom we hold in closest identification, we are quick to note those with better breaks and more favored chances and opportunities than we. It’s just not fair!
Like the proverbial mote and beam, fairness and unfairness lay more in the eye of the beholder than in the fabric of life itself. It is a value, an ideal that we impose on life rather than reasonably extract from it. In our quest to experience life as we think it should be, we often couple our notions of fairness with equality and equity. While each shares a common connection to those ideals in which we define what is right and good, they are far from synonymous or equivalent.
Equality lies at the heart of those inalienable rights upon which our founders believed liberty and happiness depended. So conceived, equality of opportunity provides the context in which individuals find the motivation to strive, compete and achieve. Fairness then safeguards the right of each person to chart his or her own course, pursue his or her own dream and develop his or her own abilities. Societies committed to equality hold sacred the value of participation in which the merits of intelligence, creativity, and effort may flourish in open markets and on level playing fields. Such communities thrive on the synergy that comes when human diversity is both welcomed and protected.
Equity, in contrast, is sought by those who value many of the same rights. Their aim is to redress inequalities and injustices by ensuring that everyone attains and enjoys the same benefits from life, irrespective of their talents and ambitions. The proponents of an equitable world insist on creating conditions where outcomes are uniform, where there are no winners or losers, only participants. Fairness is understood as the evening-out of advantages and disadvantages so that all can enjoy the collective fruits of everyone’s talents and achievements. Societies committed to equity understand that ambition must be tempered in markets that mitigate human greed, and playing fields must be tilted in directions favorable to those most needful of special care.
These two very powerful and idealistic impulses have, for some time, shaped our discourse and fueled our passions as Americans. And now, in the guise of competing –isms and polarized political interests they tear at our collective soul and identity, threatening to break our fragile unum into a disparate and dysfunctional pluribus. It all makes me scratch my head and wonder how we got here and where we may be headed. Will equality of opportunity prove sufficient to undo the cumulative affects of inferior education and racial isolation that are so entrenched in our country? Will the many programs mandating equity of outcomes in our schools and work places make us a more compassionate and caring society, or will they merely shift past discriminations from one beneficiary to another.
Life may not be fair, but we can and must be. In fact the capacity for fairness may be one of our most unique and exceptional qualities as humans. But being fair entails much more than insisting on equal opportunities or imposing equitable outcomes. It compels us to go beyond the impersonal laws of nature that recognize neither virtue nor vice. Being fair draws us into those sanctums of a Creator whom we best know and serve when we love one another without envy, insecurity, pride or deceit. Being fair releases in us that uniquely human grace found in every faith tradition that implores us to treat each other as we would want to be treated. Upon this rule all of human life ultimately depends as both the way and the means by which we can live together, or may ever hope to survive. And that, to me, sounds like a fair thing to believe.
