Overthinking Fairness
The other day as I got home and parked, I interrupted an intimate act occurring in the tall bushes around our house. Not THAT act, yo. This one: a large bird, likely a small hawk, took off with a swiftness, while a small bird, like a sparrow or wren, hurled itself far into a nearby evergreen shrub. I had interrupted dinner.
The image stayed with me for days. On one hand, I perhaps saved a life with my timely appearance, that of a grateful little brown bird hovering in the cold, quaking with fear, a tiny heart beating way too fast. On the other, a bird of prey circles, thwarted and hungry, its meal stolen and now it must find another just to live.
“Fair” is a funny concept. Even animals have some grasp of fairness. Videos show little capuchin monkeys given different rewards for the same task; the one who gets a cucumber slice instead of a tasty grape will fling it back at the scientist running the show. It’s intuitively clear. Who hasn’t wished that someone were running this show, at whom we could fling bits of limp, drippy cucumber in protest, from time to time?
Get Dawn Allen’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
Where, however, is the fairness in my shrubs? I’m positive that the little brown bird, saved from hawkish clutches, would feel that my intervention was more than fair, especially if the talons had not yet struck a wounding blow. The hawk, though: cheated of both its meal and the labor required to obtain it, would hardly think it fair of me to come home from work at such an inopportune time. Could it speak, it might ask me for a replacement. Instead, it flew off and either found another, or did not. And what of the next wren, or sparrow, or unlucky shrew that served as supper but would have gone free, had the hawk not been so hungry? Surely there is no consolation, no fairness for that poor beast.
And so it is with us.
Life is unpredictable and, as they say, shit happens. The struggle is real. Maybe you had a day today like every other, where you did your job and earned some gruel and a roof over your head for the night, and if luck holds, you’ll do so the next day as well. Maybe a tornado will collapse that roof on someone’s head tomorrow, and is that fair or not? That randomness is part of being alive, absolutely, and every day the survivors of that day’s taken carry on as best they can, fair or not. Perhaps it’s not fair that one is lost and another lives. Perhaps it’s all fair, because who among us hasn’t contributed in some small way to the increasing heat that adds energy to storms, whipping them up just a little harder, just a little faster, just a little more deadly than they would have been, had we not built a civilization that depends upon industrial output and resource drawdown just to provide most of us (not everyone but most) with a bowl of gruel and a sturdy roof on the regular?
And that’s the unfairness here, most likely. The first tentative steps our ancestors took to this place so long ago were, at the time, the apparent right thing to do. Trading wandering for sedentism, whether through desire for roots or the necessity of survival in a more populous world, may have seemed like a way to calm the chaos, to ease the struggle. The fire that cooked the food: that wasn’t so bad, was it? After a while, the children were smarter, and there were always a few more of them. It’s only a little step from the stick to the scythe to the mower to the combine, and if the wood runs out, you burn the coal to keep the children warm. The better the future we secure, though, eventually becomes a future of decline. The sparks that run the machines to provide our comfort and security also take it away if we use that magic too much.
We’ve used it far too much. And maybe the outcome is fair, and maybe it is not. That’s why fairness is a funny concept, and wyrd’s a better one. Not everything the ancestors left for us is fair, but it’s all tangled in our wyrd. Just as the birds continue on, so too do we, doing the best we can with the threads handed to us by the past.
