Hard to pin down. Is fairness in our DNA? (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Riyadh: Monday 3rd December 2012
I have wanted to write about the concept of fairness since before I have considered blogging. And yet, where to begin?
There are few concepts as problematic and controversial as fairness. To some it is a universal truth and rallying cry, as inspirational and simple as the concepts of Freedom, Liberty, Fraternity or Unity. To others it is a profoundly dishonest and misleading concept which promises happiness but in reality delivers only different forms of inequality.
And certainly it is a strange, ethereal concept, shape shifting and fluid; hard to pin down. Apparently simple, fairness is often quoted alongside the founding concepts of 18th Century French and American Republic, yet correctly belongs in the more morally ambiguous worlds of the 19th and 20th Century’s.
Approaching the idea of fairness is like approaching a large body of water. When you first glimpse it in the sunlight, from between two hills, it has the appearance of brilliant, shining blue solidity, immovable and massive. Approach closer, and suddenly we see its restless, rhythmic, unceasing motion, and vitality. Up close and we see its translucency, its chaotic, inability to begin or end. Plunge in, and try to hold it and we will discover that it simply pours away, returning to the larger body, teasing and unreal.
Men and women have spent entire lifetimes attempting to define it, argue it, implement it, and have passed from the Earth, conscious only of having failed to really understand it.
And yet to children it is one of the most singularly simple and easy to define concepts, indivisible from their own self-interest, and notions of love and kindness. Children will struggle to define concepts like freedom or equality, but grasp fairness on an elemental level and be able from a young age to wield the concept in complex ways in order to define their self-interest.
Consequently Fairness has defied attempts to co-opt it into singular political ideologies while retaining a powerful hold on people and political movements. While politicians hate it, they dare not fall foul of it. To transgress the complex rules surrounding fairness and to be deemed to have acted against the spirit of fairness is something politicians avoid at all costs. In consequence few will even dare to use the word openly, preferring safer, more easily pinned down, relatable concepts such as justice, equality of opportunity, Liberty or honesty.
Fairness is generally seen as a word with positive connotations, and yet, perhaps paradoxically, you are on safer ground when arguing against it. To argue in favour of fairness is to enter a world without shape and certainty, a world where nothing is what it appears to be; where merit is one moment a matter of effort, the next inherent ability; where redistribution can be seen to proportionately reward one person whilst simultaneously penalizing another, beyond proportion, so that what is fair to one person is deeply unfair to another.
Moreover, it is a world in which priority of one interest over another is constantly in flux, where competing interests fight for limited resources and where the arbiters of these disputes are required to regulate their own prejudices merely to retain the moral power to arbitrate.
It is a world where values such as cooperation, selflessness and kindness are argued by driven, ideologues with hate in their hearts and where kindly selfless people are deemed patriarchal, Imperialists by ungrateful recipients. It is a minefield best avoided in the interests of good governance, arbitration and justice.
In particular, it has been studiously avoided by Socialists who prefer to dwell on readily definable objectives such as redistribution and justice and by Conservatives who have traditionally prioritized continuity, tradition and hierarchy above fairness. It has, however, exercised Liberals, both economic and social. And arguably, it has damaged the reputations of all who have wrestled with it.
The lesson is clear. If you want to live life, well, discussion of fairness must be avoided. As a friend put it to me on numerous occasions, Fairness is a dishonest creed.
In the world of adult men and women, fairness has been expunged, and where possible allowed to exist only as a vague and arbitrary emotive force within individuals. In future posts we shall look at the curious exceptionalism of Western culture (particularly, though not exclusively focussing on the Anglo-American elements of this culture), and the way in which Economic Liberalism unleashed Social Liberalism and gave particular voice to concepts of fairness, which other cultures have failed to similarly prioritize. In looking at the reasons for this, we will examine the way in which western culture prioritizes youth and freedom and neglects the prioritization of defined roles and responsibilities, within society, particularly for its young men.
And yet while recognising that Fairness presents particular challenges in a western context we must similarly recognised that, fairness exists within us all, as an instinct, is everywhere in history and has never gone away. Children in particular have a keen and uncluttered sense of it, and skilfully arbitrate their social disputes through its use. Fairness is the best of humanity, and appears not only to be an essential part of our own species’ core but that of our closest relations in the world of animals.
In part two, of this series of posts, we shall look at the way in which fairness exists within each of us from birth and appears to exist as a core mediator of behaviour among a variety of species, which have no ability to consciously conceptualize ideas, and begin to look at the implications for us of this most remarkable and powerful of concepts.
