Thought Experiment #6: Fairness

Life isn’t fair.

That’s a concept with which some people have great difficulty. The social justice crowd invests endless time and energy trying to forcibly engineer new institutional dynamics that will lead to identical outcomes for all by embracing diversity, inclusion, multiculturalism and omnitolerance.

Well, that’s the goal in theory.

In practice, it turns out there are all kinds of people our woke friends would happily banish forever into the outer darkness, and all kinds of diverse ideas they do not welcome at all. But their whole social change movement starts with the observation that life isn’t fair, and the obsession with trying to fix that for those perceived to be at the bottom of the pile. At least, that’s their story and they are sticking to it.

Imagine No … Everything

I’m trying to imagine a world in which everyone started life with the potential for precisely the same IQ, height, weight, attractiveness and health (which would require some serious genetic engineering), was raised in circumstances that conferred no particular ongoing advantage to anyone, acquired identical social skills and education, was given the same job opportunities …

Wait, how would that even work? How could you run any kind of society where everyone in it had the most desirable jobs imaginable, the word “drudgery” didn’t exist, and nobody had the least hierarchical advantage over anyone else? Worse, how much government intervention would be required to accomplish it? The potential for mucking around with people’s lives against their wills in the attempt to accomplish such a scenario is virtually endless.

So then, this perfect society we are imagining would have no bosses and no flunkies. Presumably everybody would be middle management? Great. My least-favorite job in the universe. And I suppose every decision made would be arrived at by consensus in Teams meetings, conference calls or around boardroom tables over donuts, one of the most staggeringly counterproductive business practices of the last half century and also among my least favorite things.

Already, leveling the playing field for large numbers of people is starting to look (1) impossible and (2) undesirable in certain respects. And that’s before we even begin to consider all the ramifications of bringing equality to the world.

Living in Fantasia

We’re moving into fantasyland here, because even if a world of absolute equality at every possible level could be imagined to function at all, there’s only one person in the entire universe who could create and maintain it, and that would be God himself, the very person the purveyors of woke ideology don’t believe in. That’s why they spend their lives scrambling around trying to equalize everything: because they believe the world they live in is random and chaotic, ruled over by the powerful. In their view, the only way life will ever be “fair” is if we make it so ourselves by forcing our will on the powers that be.

But suppose they could succeed. What would they have achieved? In a world of perfect equality, envy would no longer exist, at least in theory. But with it, we would lose generosity, sacrifice, pity, compassion, comfort, kindness, forgiveness and mercy (all of which require an object with greater needs than our own); leadership, courage, responsibility and perseverance (all of which require some disorder to be rectified); and ambition, hope, character and encouragement (all of which require something better to aspire to).

I’m game to consign many of these things to the past in an eternity of glory, when sin and death have been conquered and Christ is all in all. I’m less enthusiastic about losing them in a fallen world where every advantage that becomes an opportunity for good also becomes an opportunity for evil. In a fallen world, it may be that only the receipt of an act of mercy or generosity, the extension of forgiveness or the existence of hope makes life bearable. Moreover, the ability to offer these things to others gives our existence purpose.

The Christian and Fairness

The Christian also can’t help but notice life isn’t fair. Some of us have difficulty with that too. But in our case, we have the word of God to guide our thinking about how to respond to the perceived unfairness of unequal outcomes. Scripture not only acknowledges differences in circumstances of birth, intelligence, education, beauty, wealth, health, advantage in life and outlook on the world, it also tells us the most important thing in life is not our circumstances but our attitude toward them.

Paul says, “I have learned in whatever situation I am to be content.” Should we be otherwise? More importantly, should we be encouraging others to be thinking about the world differently than Paul did?