The "unfairness" issue in particular... (Main Forum)

by Brian Coyne , LINDEN, NSW, Saturday, February 25, 2012, 17:49 (454 days ago) @ Sue

Thanks, Sue. Yes I do understand where you are coming from. I have an experience like your Goldsworthy experience every day and night just walking out onto my balcony here overlooking Sydney. Not far from us here at Linden in the Blue Mountains is one of the first observatories established in the colony of New South Wales. Last night when our television reception went bung while trying to watch "God in America" I had to go out onto the top balcony to check some of the connections to our television antenna. In those few brief moments I looked up at the stars, which were unusually clear last night, and had the sort of experiece you describe. So, I don't doubt that these experiences of the numinous — particularly in those times when people literally did "live under the stars" 24 hours a day — has been a huge driving factor in the evolution of the great religions.

This aspect of "unfairness" — as opposed to the more commonly mentioned aspect of "suffering" — is something that has been impacting on me more recently. Many have written over the centuries of the problem of suffering — and its driving influence in the evolution of religious belief. Suffering is a "universal" in human experience and many have written that all of the great religious paradigms are, in some measure, a response to this problem of trying to (a) either explain suffering; or (b) to provide people with a means of coping with it when they experience it.

The fairness/unfairness aspect of life is a slightly different issue to the problem of suffering albeit that it is often in times of suffering that the human spirit cries out "why me, God (and not someone else)?"

I'd argue that buried deep down in the human spirit is this yearning for fairness or, to use another term, justice. In a country like our own we talk of the concept of a "fair go" which is a reflection of this yearning. All Australians believe at some level in a "fair go". I suspect our desire for a "fair go" is echoed in some way in all human cultures. It is perhaps a paradoxical or contradictory part of human nature that we're less concerned when we are the beneficiaries of some "fair go" and some other individual or group is not but that's perhaps for another discussion on another more negative aspect of human nature.

What I'm essentially trying to argue here is that there is this duality buried deep down in the human spirit. Through one lense of this spirit we have this "yearning for fairness or justice" that is incredibly deep in the human spirit. Equally though, and at a similarly deep level, we have this inherent or intuitive sense that life is "inherently unfair". Buried deep down in us we have this "irresolvable conflict": we want life to be "fair and just" but at the same time we have this sense that it is anything but "fair and just". In a sense our religious impulse or drive is an attempt to resolve what is essentially an "irresolvable dilemma".

We have in society various mechanisms to help us escape the inherent "unfairness" of life — 'keeping up with the Joneses', consumerism, 'shopping 'til you drop', 'retail therapy', even some aspects of 'capitalism' itself might be seen as responses of the individual human drive to escape the inherent "unfairness or injustice" of life. They are, I am arguing in a sense, part of the "mental" or "emotional" games we play with ourselves to try and escape the inherent unfairness or randomness of life. Alain de Botton in his video mentioned "the good life" and that is another big "hankering of the human spirit". I'd argue though that the "hankering for the good life" is not so much a quest "to bring a sense of fairness into the inherent unfairness of life". Rather it is an escape mechanism we have developed to "escape the inherent unfairness of life".

One of the problems with religion, I would argue, is that at its deepest yearning or impulse it is a quest to find "fairness and justice" in life — but not to escape it (i.e. "escape" in a neurotic/pathological sense). Unfortunately some though turn religion into an "escape mechanism" to try and either get away from the inherent unfairness of life and, for some others again, it becomes a psychological, emotional or mental crutch to explain to themselves why they have ended up constantly with "the short end of the straw". Hence, flowing out of that we have this great identification we see in some with "the suffering of Jesus" and this clawing attitude of "Jesus/God will you love me (if I am 'good', 'nice' or 'law-abiding/obedient to statutes'?" Is that what Jesus really came to teach us? Is that the central "wisdom" that Catholicism has to offer humankind? Perhaps it was understandable in the epochs of human development where there was wide disparity between the haves and the have-nots — and the great majority of citizens were "have-nots" with virtually nil prospects within their lifetimes of joining the "haves"? Perhaps that is the origin of "Atonement Theology"? Human society, at least in the Western, industrialised world has moved on from that perception where most people experienced being on the negative side of the "inherent unfairness of life" equation. Perhaps that is a strong factor driving our search for a new theological understanding — both a new understanding of this Mystery we try to condense into words and phrases like "God" or "the Divine"; and a new understanding of the relationship we are called into with this Mystery which resides both at the heart of Life and of each of our lives?

Brian Coyne
[Editor & Publisher]