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Sunday, April 24, 2022

Is life fair?


Is life fair or unfair? 

I mean really, which is it? It's got to be one or the other, right? Law of the Excluded Middle, and all that?

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I love this question, because I can argue equally sincerely either Yes or No. It's not that my opinions are inconsistent. It's not even that the word fair has two different meanings, though I guess the shadings of meaning are not quite the same in the two cases. No, it's a choice based on pure pragmatics. What am I trying to do with the answer? What is the questioner going to do with what I tell him? What is he really asking?

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On the one hand, we are all told that life isn't fair. Everybody knows this. It's hardly news. Bad things happen to good people; virtue suffers while vice triumphs. People have known this for a long time. Well over two thousand years ago, Kohelet, a son of King David, wrote:

I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all. (Ecclesiastes 9:11)

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On the other hand, we are also told that you get out of life what you put into it — which is another way of saying that life is fair, after all. Yes, accidents happen. Yes, there is horrible injustice. Since we know that in advance, we can prepare for it. And if you know that there's a chance of something bad happening but you take no steps to protect yourself, ... how exactly is it unfair when the disaster finally comes?

Of course there has to be a little leeway in this position. If a whole population is oppressed or held in servitude, it's a little harsh to say that it's their own fault for not taking the steps to free themselves.* For various reasons they might be literally unable to do so. And it's equally callous to suggest a man is at fault for not buying an expensive insurance policy when he has but two cents to his name. You can't reasonably ask someone to do everything for himself in all possible circumstances, because for any individual you care to name — be he never so heroic — it is possible to construct circumstances that are stacked so far against him that he cannot prevail. Even Superman is undone by kryptonite.

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But in normal, workaday circumstances, you can oscillate between the two positions almost frivolously, without any sense of inconsistency. Let's say your friend is looking for a job, and has two different interviews lined up today. After the first one, he says that by bad luck it just so happened that the Perfect Applicant walked in an hour earlier, so the company hired him on the spot and turned your friend away without even interviewing him. Right away you say, "Wow, that really is bad luck. Life is so unfair." 

Then after the second interview he tells you that it turns out the company absolutely requires applicants to have a certain certification that your friend doesn't have. They said so explicitly in the advertisement, but your friend admits he didn't read it all. And so they threw him out with some harsh words about his wasting their time. This time you say, "I'm really sorry it didn't work out for you, but what were you thinking? You applied for the job without even reading the complete advertisement? No wonder they were annoyed. It's only fair. If you don't look where you're going, you'll bump into things. Life's like that." In the space of five minutes you have told your friend both that life is unfair, and that life is fair. And you meant it both times.

It's just a really funny question to ask.  

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* To be sure, the sheer pointlessness of such an accusation didn't stop Ezra Pound from making it. Till now I have not traced the quote to its source, but he is said to have written, "A slave is one who waits for someone to come and free him."       

Saturday, April 23, 2022

Life after life?

Do we reincarnate after death?

Plato seemed to think so, or at least he describes the cycle of rebirth with a lot of detail in "The Myth of Er" (the thrilling conclusion of Book 10 of the Republic). Buddhism and Hinduism both teach reincarnation. But is it true?


I'm inclined to think that there can be no such thing as empirical proof — maybe I should say "empirical proof while in this life." 😀 What I mean is that when I look at the people who believe in reincarnation (on the one hand) and people who disbelieve (on the other), I don't think they even agree on what "empirical proof" would look like. Whatever happens in the world, whatever possible observations anyone might make, I think the partisans of each side would reply, "You see? That goes to show I was right all along." So I don't think it is a question that can be solved in an empirical way.

What I find absolutely fascinating, though, is to reflect how the doctrine of reincarnation functions pragmatically as a source of ethical advice. For example: one time or another we have probably all heard someone say, "You should act ethically because, if you hurt other people, you'll incur a lot of bad karma." If you ask what that means, the answer is very often something like this: If you steal from people in this life, you will be stolen from in your next life. If you cheat on your spouse in this life, you will be cheated on in your next life. If you murder someone in this life, you will be murdered in your next life. And so on. Since nobody wants those bad things to happen to them in the future, the advice is not to incur that implacable and inevitable karmic penalty by doing them to others right now.

But wait a minute. If I tell a child, "Stop poking your little brother or you'll have to go into time-out," the child knows what "time-out" is like and knows it's no fun. If society tells us, "Don't break the law or you'll have to go to prison," we know what that means. We can imagine what it's like to be sent to prison, and we know that it means we will suffer as a direct result of our earlier actions. If you tell me, "Don't steal from others or you will be stolen from in your next lifetime," it sounds like the same kind of advice as the other two. But is it? Think for a minute.

Who exactly is this person, the Future Me that risks being stolen from? Is this person male or female? (Let me pick one at random — I'll assume she's female — so that I can use pronouns and not have to keep repeating the phrase "this person" until I'm blue in the face.) What's her name? Where does she live? What language does she speak? And when someone steals from her, ... is she going to have any idea that it's merely an inevitable karmic retribution for my having stolen something in this life?

A few people claim they can remember past lives, but most of us don't. I don't remember having any past lives. That doesn't mean the doctrine is untrue, of course. But it does mean that when something bad happens to me, I don't immediately see the cosmic justice in it. And as for this woman we were just discussing, the Future Me, she really is somebody else according to how the world measures these things. She won't have my name, she might not live in my country, and she's sure not going to remember having been Hosea Tanatu in one of her earlier lives. In fact, there is absolutely nothing tangible connecting the two of us — nothing at all that the world can see and measure. She is a stranger to me. She is Somebody Else, pure and simple.

And yet I care about her, and I don't want her to suffer. In my mind, I see her as me ... well, sort of. "Me" as I will be in a few years, ... after I've gone through death and rebirth. But still basically me. And because I don't want bad things to happen to me, I will try to avoid doing bad things to others — at any rate, if I believe in reincarnation, or if (as is probably a lot more common) I'm not quite sure but want to hedge my bets.

In other words, the doctrine of reincarnation has the pragmatic effect of making me see the world through the eyes of others. What is it that parents and playground supervisors always tell little kids, to teach them that they have to play nicely with others? "How would you like it if somebody did that to you?" That's what we learn from the doctrine of reincarnation. We learn to see the world through the eyes of a complete stranger — someone that we are literally guaranteed never to meet in the flesh — and think, "That thing I'm about to do to someone else, ... how would I like it if somebody did that to me?"

The doctrine of reincarnation is, in effect, a playground supervisor for adults.

I have no idea whether reincarnation is actually true at a metaphysical level, or whether it is just one more of the thousand-and-one crazy things that people believe. But so long as it encourages us to see our actions reflected in the eyes of those others who are affected by them, ... so long as it does that, I'm all in favor. Sure, hell, sign me up.