Why do bad things happen to good people?
This is the sermon I gave today at church. Attendance was pretty low, because it's the summer. But the choir was there, which almost doubled the numbers. And, who doesn't love preaching to the choir?
Why do bad things happen to good people?
I have always considered this the quintessential question that defines a religion. I have a great interest in religious faiths, spurred by my interest in my own. And whenever I get the opportunity to talk with someone of a different faith this is one of my go to questions. How the person, and their faith, answer this, tells you a lot about them, and their religion.
Unfortunately, I'm not going to answer this question today. If I did, we could all go home and not bother with church anymore. But, seriously, when I started to think about this, and look into the different approaches taken by different religions to this question, I was struck by something more profound. Why do we even ask this question?
By any objective measurement, the world is clearly not fair. Calamities happen to all and sundry. Those that are not behavioral or environmental are statistically distributed amongst everyone, regardless of their moral character. The bee is as likely to sting the pastor at a church picnic as the apostate. Rain on your wedding day holds no preference for priest, rabbi or justice of the peace.
I had a friend who came to me, once, depressed at a string of bad things that had happened to him. It seemed like he was barely over one thing and another happened, and then several together. He wondered if he was cursed. Wanting to give him comfort, but being another software professional and both of us challenged in non-technical communication, I spoke to him about probability theory. If you were to cover a page with random dots, you wouldn't expect it to be a formless grey. That's not random, that's uniform. No, a truly random distribution would have clumps and gaps and all manner of arrangements that appeared to give it structure, but when examined no order could be found. (Creating a good random number generator is actually quite a difficult technical problem. As me about it in the parlor afterwards.) He might be having several bad things happening to him at once, but that doesn't mean he is cursed. If anything, it is a validation that he is not cursed, and it really is just random. You just don't notice when the good things cluster together, because it is what you expect. I know it may sound kind of cold or calculated, but it did bring him some comfort. I guess it takes a geek to comfort a geek.
What went over my head at the time, was that even in trying to explain things rationally, I still embraced a logical fallacy. We only notice clumps of bad fortune and not the clumps of good fortune because we normally expect good fortune. But, if fortune is truly random, by what rights should we expect it to be good?
And yet we do. Job's friends, in the old testament reading, state quite clearly "you reap what you sow". Good things happen to good people, and bad things happen to bad people. They impress upon him to consider how he might have offended god to deserve such ill fortune. Never does it cross their mind that the calamities visited upon him might just be random.
The common interpretation of Karma is the same. Cause and effect. Good deeds engender good karma, bad deeds engender bad karma. Although the stated goal of Buddhism is to avoid all karma, good or bad. That's often overlooked in favor of accumulating as much good karma as possible.
Taken to its logical limit, it is used to explain the unjustness of the world through the lens of reincarnation. If bad things happen to you, it must have been some evilness you did in a previous life. If you experience fortune, it is a reward for previous behavior. It elegantly wraps up an explanation for injustice and an incentive for good behavior that doesn't contradict the world we see. Conveniently, it can’t be proven. It can only be accepted on faith.
Jesus does acknowledge that life can be cruel, and cites a tower falling and crushing seven people to death. He proclaims it has nothing to do with the life they lead. But that is much less remembered than the Sermon on the Mount, where those who are abused are promised restitution... after they're dead.
But these moralisms are not just restricted to religion. They permeate our culture too.
Heroes are misunderstood, brave what the world sets against them, win through, and are rewarded in the end. It doesn't matter if it's Odysseus, Beowulf, Arjun, Cinderella, Luke Skywalker, or the Kung Fu Panda. We know how the story goes. Things may get dark, but there are good guys, there are bad guys, and the good guys win in the end. Those are the rules. Those are the expectations. The Hero in “The Last Unicorn” puts it this way:
"I am a hero. It is a trade, no more, like weaving or brewing, and like them it has its own tricks and knacks and small arts. There are ways of perceiving witches, and knowing of poison streams; there are certain weak spots that all dragons tend to have, and certain riddles that hooded strangers tend to set you. But the true secret in being a hero lies in knowing the order of things. The swineherd cannot already be wed to the princess when he embarks on his adventures, nor can the boy knock on the witch's door when she is already away on vacation. The wicked uncle cannot be found out and foiled before he does something wicked. Things must happen when it is time for them to happen. Quests may not simply be abandoned; prophecies may not be left to rot like unpicked fruit; unicorns may go unrescued for a very long time, but not forever. The happy ending cannot come in the middle of the story."
Some people say it is precisely because it breaks these rules, that so many are really upset by the plot developments in Game of Thrones. Even though it is fantasy, the grim ruthlessness and casually cruel happenstance is more realistic than the tropes we've come to expect from fiction.
Psychologists have investigated this and called it the "just-world hypothesis". They've come up with a number of tests and it shows up repeatedly and consistently. In one of these, subjects are made to watch someone receiving electrical shocks. Although initially sympathetic, after the suffering continued, and the observer was prevented from intervening, their attitude changed. They began to denigrate the victim, and assign blame to them. They began to rationalize the suffering as being something that they somehow deserved. Tellingly, when the experiment was performed and they were told the person was being paid for being shocked, there was no shift in attitude.
This has proven to be consistent not just for electric shocks, but also random calamities like traffic accidents, rape, domestic violence, illnesses and poverty. The fact that many states are considering making welfare recipients subject to drug tests, even though all evidence points to a low incidence of drug use, and the high expenses of administering such plans, is said to be another example of this.
This desire, this yearning, for the notion of a Just World is so strong, that when confronted with evidence to the contrary, people will go to great lengths to make it fit this belief. Some will flat out deny it; either ignore, or downplay explicit random injustice. Others will reinterpret the cause, the outcome, or the character of one suffering. Victim blaming. Poor people are lazy. Black people are violent. That woman was asking to be raped.
And it goes the other way too. We lionize rich people, celebrities, and others on whom fortune has smiled. We heed their opinions above others, on the grounds that they must know something because they have done well.
It all sounds pretty grim. What does this say about us, as a species? That we will twist reality around to maintain our sense of well being. We build upon the random injustice of the world by adding our own unjust interpretations. Is that not a cruel mockery of the vision of justice that leads to these behaviors?
As mentioned previously, under it all Bhuddism implores people to take the middle way. To seek neither good karma or bad karma. Christianity puts man above nature. We are not the mere pawns of our urges and predilections. We have self will and choice over how we behave. Science says we are predisposed to believe in a just world.
Well... so be it.
Let us believe in a just world. Let us believe in a world where hard work pays off. Let us believe in a world where good intentions are returned by good acts. Let us believe in a world where the energy we put into good deeds returns to us threefold.
Let us NOT believe in a world where this just happens. Let us NOT believe in a world where the effect is mistaken for the cause. Let us NOT forget that the world is NOT just. Not unless we make it so.
We have moral agency. We have free will. We have the power to break the causal chain of events and, consequently, the responsibility to do so. Our predisposition for believing in a just world should not be an albatross around our neck, dragging us down into deceitful delusions as to what the world is. We should take it as a calling. A standard to bear. A symbol not of the world as it is, but of the world as we wish it to be. Where reality differs from this vision, we should not re-interpret it. We should correct it. I believe we have the capacity to do so. If our conscious actions can, at least, pad the random capriciousness of nature, I feel it is our moral obligation to do so.
Your mileage may vary. But that's fine. I'm just here in my own attempt to make the world more just.
Thank you.
Why do bad things happen to good people?
I have always considered this the quintessential question that defines a religion. I have a great interest in religious faiths, spurred by my interest in my own. And whenever I get the opportunity to talk with someone of a different faith this is one of my go to questions. How the person, and their faith, answer this, tells you a lot about them, and their religion.
Unfortunately, I'm not going to answer this question today. If I did, we could all go home and not bother with church anymore. But, seriously, when I started to think about this, and look into the different approaches taken by different religions to this question, I was struck by something more profound. Why do we even ask this question?
By any objective measurement, the world is clearly not fair. Calamities happen to all and sundry. Those that are not behavioral or environmental are statistically distributed amongst everyone, regardless of their moral character. The bee is as likely to sting the pastor at a church picnic as the apostate. Rain on your wedding day holds no preference for priest, rabbi or justice of the peace.
I had a friend who came to me, once, depressed at a string of bad things that had happened to him. It seemed like he was barely over one thing and another happened, and then several together. He wondered if he was cursed. Wanting to give him comfort, but being another software professional and both of us challenged in non-technical communication, I spoke to him about probability theory. If you were to cover a page with random dots, you wouldn't expect it to be a formless grey. That's not random, that's uniform. No, a truly random distribution would have clumps and gaps and all manner of arrangements that appeared to give it structure, but when examined no order could be found. (Creating a good random number generator is actually quite a difficult technical problem. As me about it in the parlor afterwards.) He might be having several bad things happening to him at once, but that doesn't mean he is cursed. If anything, it is a validation that he is not cursed, and it really is just random. You just don't notice when the good things cluster together, because it is what you expect. I know it may sound kind of cold or calculated, but it did bring him some comfort. I guess it takes a geek to comfort a geek.
What went over my head at the time, was that even in trying to explain things rationally, I still embraced a logical fallacy. We only notice clumps of bad fortune and not the clumps of good fortune because we normally expect good fortune. But, if fortune is truly random, by what rights should we expect it to be good?
And yet we do. Job's friends, in the old testament reading, state quite clearly "you reap what you sow". Good things happen to good people, and bad things happen to bad people. They impress upon him to consider how he might have offended god to deserve such ill fortune. Never does it cross their mind that the calamities visited upon him might just be random.
The common interpretation of Karma is the same. Cause and effect. Good deeds engender good karma, bad deeds engender bad karma. Although the stated goal of Buddhism is to avoid all karma, good or bad. That's often overlooked in favor of accumulating as much good karma as possible.
Taken to its logical limit, it is used to explain the unjustness of the world through the lens of reincarnation. If bad things happen to you, it must have been some evilness you did in a previous life. If you experience fortune, it is a reward for previous behavior. It elegantly wraps up an explanation for injustice and an incentive for good behavior that doesn't contradict the world we see. Conveniently, it can’t be proven. It can only be accepted on faith.
Jesus does acknowledge that life can be cruel, and cites a tower falling and crushing seven people to death. He proclaims it has nothing to do with the life they lead. But that is much less remembered than the Sermon on the Mount, where those who are abused are promised restitution... after they're dead.
But these moralisms are not just restricted to religion. They permeate our culture too.
Heroes are misunderstood, brave what the world sets against them, win through, and are rewarded in the end. It doesn't matter if it's Odysseus, Beowulf, Arjun, Cinderella, Luke Skywalker, or the Kung Fu Panda. We know how the story goes. Things may get dark, but there are good guys, there are bad guys, and the good guys win in the end. Those are the rules. Those are the expectations. The Hero in “The Last Unicorn” puts it this way:
"I am a hero. It is a trade, no more, like weaving or brewing, and like them it has its own tricks and knacks and small arts. There are ways of perceiving witches, and knowing of poison streams; there are certain weak spots that all dragons tend to have, and certain riddles that hooded strangers tend to set you. But the true secret in being a hero lies in knowing the order of things. The swineherd cannot already be wed to the princess when he embarks on his adventures, nor can the boy knock on the witch's door when she is already away on vacation. The wicked uncle cannot be found out and foiled before he does something wicked. Things must happen when it is time for them to happen. Quests may not simply be abandoned; prophecies may not be left to rot like unpicked fruit; unicorns may go unrescued for a very long time, but not forever. The happy ending cannot come in the middle of the story."
Some people say it is precisely because it breaks these rules, that so many are really upset by the plot developments in Game of Thrones. Even though it is fantasy, the grim ruthlessness and casually cruel happenstance is more realistic than the tropes we've come to expect from fiction.
Psychologists have investigated this and called it the "just-world hypothesis". They've come up with a number of tests and it shows up repeatedly and consistently. In one of these, subjects are made to watch someone receiving electrical shocks. Although initially sympathetic, after the suffering continued, and the observer was prevented from intervening, their attitude changed. They began to denigrate the victim, and assign blame to them. They began to rationalize the suffering as being something that they somehow deserved. Tellingly, when the experiment was performed and they were told the person was being paid for being shocked, there was no shift in attitude.
This has proven to be consistent not just for electric shocks, but also random calamities like traffic accidents, rape, domestic violence, illnesses and poverty. The fact that many states are considering making welfare recipients subject to drug tests, even though all evidence points to a low incidence of drug use, and the high expenses of administering such plans, is said to be another example of this.
This desire, this yearning, for the notion of a Just World is so strong, that when confronted with evidence to the contrary, people will go to great lengths to make it fit this belief. Some will flat out deny it; either ignore, or downplay explicit random injustice. Others will reinterpret the cause, the outcome, or the character of one suffering. Victim blaming. Poor people are lazy. Black people are violent. That woman was asking to be raped.
And it goes the other way too. We lionize rich people, celebrities, and others on whom fortune has smiled. We heed their opinions above others, on the grounds that they must know something because they have done well.
It all sounds pretty grim. What does this say about us, as a species? That we will twist reality around to maintain our sense of well being. We build upon the random injustice of the world by adding our own unjust interpretations. Is that not a cruel mockery of the vision of justice that leads to these behaviors?
As mentioned previously, under it all Bhuddism implores people to take the middle way. To seek neither good karma or bad karma. Christianity puts man above nature. We are not the mere pawns of our urges and predilections. We have self will and choice over how we behave. Science says we are predisposed to believe in a just world.
Well... so be it.
Let us believe in a just world. Let us believe in a world where hard work pays off. Let us believe in a world where good intentions are returned by good acts. Let us believe in a world where the energy we put into good deeds returns to us threefold.
Let us NOT believe in a world where this just happens. Let us NOT believe in a world where the effect is mistaken for the cause. Let us NOT forget that the world is NOT just. Not unless we make it so.
We have moral agency. We have free will. We have the power to break the causal chain of events and, consequently, the responsibility to do so. Our predisposition for believing in a just world should not be an albatross around our neck, dragging us down into deceitful delusions as to what the world is. We should take it as a calling. A standard to bear. A symbol not of the world as it is, but of the world as we wish it to be. Where reality differs from this vision, we should not re-interpret it. We should correct it. I believe we have the capacity to do so. If our conscious actions can, at least, pad the random capriciousness of nature, I feel it is our moral obligation to do so.
Your mileage may vary. But that's fine. I'm just here in my own attempt to make the world more just.
Thank you.