What's "fair?"

Daughter Juli and I had an interesting conversation a week ago, one that's been thrumming along in the back of my brain, perking up little thought-bubbles as I go through my daily chores. Then my brother and I spoke a few days later, touching on similar issues, which also folded into my internal dialogue.

Children, Juli says, have a warped world-view of consequences, brought on by the commonplace give-and-take of family dynamics. If they eat their vegetables, they get dessert. If they misbehave, their privileges are taken away. Within this context, they develop a sense that life is supposed to balance out, that there is a "fairness" to the universe; good deeds will be rewarded, bad deeds will be punished.

As we become adults, though, we learn that life is indeed "not fair" at all. Bad things happen to good people, even criminals go free, consequences weigh heavily on the poor and powerless, less so on the rich and powerful. The righteous seem to suffer, the sinners often get a pass. We try to make sense of seemingly senseless tragedies, and we struggle to reconcile and rationalize when we see miscreants bumble through untouched.

Some become cynics or curmudgeons when forced to recognize the unfairness of it all. Some, like Job, praise God for their misfortunes as well as their blessings. Some shrug it off as "just the way it is," and move through life with a positive belief in the eventual triumph of goodness, despite multiple misfortunes that seem to pile up inequitably on the debit side of the ledger.

The physical laws of nature favor entropy and chaos, not cohesion; yet we humans function as if everything is supposed to balance out, make sense, and be fair. For all of our faith in scientific method--observation, hypothesis, experimentation, & objective proofing--we reject the results of the overwhelming evidence of each of our lifelong tests.

We know life isn't fair, and yet we persist in our assertion that somehow it has to be. It's either a tribute to our resiliency, or the greatest delusion we have been able to devise in order to survive.