So the world is constantly fighting us. So we have to come up with some sort of guide to determine what we can change and what we can’t and where the obstacles lie. Do they lie with the environment, or with our own abilities? With how we are matched to our environment? With the effort we are putting in? Humans are curious creatures because they have a certain amount of choice in how they respond to their environment. They may not be able to choose themselves or their environment (to begin with), but they can decide how to respond to them, and in the process actually begin to change both. Animals don’t sit around chewing their cud, thinking “I would rather be at the opera”. They do what their instincts tell them they must. When a baby albatross falls off its nest and its parent stands there, unable to recognize them unless they can get back on, neither the parent nor the chick is silently wondering whether perhaps it would be advantageous to behave otherwise.

So what kind of expectation for justice should we have? What kind of measure should we pursue? It’s painful to us to recognize that there are serious disadvantages that many of us will face in which we had no choice in determining. And perhaps this thought, that life is uneven and has a mixed texture where people and places and situations are all so different, offends us so greatly that we reject the results as inherently unjust. All humans in all places should have an equal chance. Everyone should be capable of reaching equal shares of success.

The problem with seeking equality of outcomes in that, if it is not in fact the case that equality of success is the natural result of a life free of interference, then all your efforts to flatten the outcomes essentially amount to an averaging of outcomes. Excessive success is artificial and must be restrained, its excess results redistributed to those whose success, by some some artificial interference, has underperformed. You flatten out the results and declare that to be justice. Because justice means everyone has an equal right to equal outcomes, free from interference.

But let’s just assume for one moment that there is some possibility that not all potentials for success are fundamentally equal, and as well that not all efforts toward success are equal. More than that, they are not guaranteed. That the natural drift of any individual effort is not success, but failure, the natural tendency of any system is toward chaos, not order. In other words, what if it’s easier to fail than it is to succeed? What if it’s easier to miss the mark than it is to hit it? If that’s the case, if effort and aim really do matter, then applying a law of averaging will have an enormous deleterious effect. Because instead of correcting what you thought was a problem of distribution (the natural production of success not being evenly distributed), you are actually be dealing with a problem of production (meaning you’re really forcing the natural production of failure to be evenly distributed).

If it’s failure, missing the mark, that is the default position, that is what is to be taken for granted, any system that sets its metric and expectation on a completely even distribution of results will not in fact result in the natural arrival of utopia. You won’t democratize success, you’ll democratize failure. And this end result will actually be worse, overall, for the human condition than the inequality of each person being confined to only that success that is available to them, considering who they are, how they are placed, and how they respond to those varying challenges.

This really is a problem of math and what your assumed values are upon which your calculations are based. And I’m somehow not managing to capture it quite properly. There is a calculus we are all making with regard to outcomes. But our assumptions about what will actually drive the best outcomes depend very much upon the underlying values that power the whole system. And if we’re wrong in our assumptions about those, we won’t make the right call. I’ve often wondered why it is that an uneven, competitive system where each has to shoulder their own individual load and leverage their own individual advantages should be the best possible system. I think it is, in fact, apparent that it is. If only because it seems to be the system forced upon us. It might seem nice if there were some other mode of being. But I don’t think you could solve that problem without removing two very important and essential things about humanity: individuality and choice. We are each of us different. We are each a particular, individual type of person, in a specific and individual place and a specific and individual time. That is who we are. And that is a wonderful if painful burden. And we all have choice. We can actually make choices that embrace or work with or work against or ignore who we are and where we are, that can change who we are and where we are and alter our future destiny, simply because we are aware of it and aware of the possibilities in a way no other creature is. And that also is a terrible burden.

The envisioned solution that does away with those burdens is, in my opinion, a rejection of being itself as fundamentally unjust. But that kind of rejection is a rejection of life itself. And any solution that attempts to create justice by denying individuality and choice is doing far more violence to humanity and creating more injustice than the system you were trying to fix. And it’s not, in any case, in any way clear that such an attempt is even possible, that we can remove individuality and choice, that we can declare it a rule that all outcomes should be equal. Can such a declaration, and such an alteration of humanity, even for the best reasons, be wise?

Looking at the world, even just the way the natural world works, can be tragic and disturbing for many. How many turtle eggs must be laid just so one turtle can live to come back to that beach? How much effort goes into the hatching of a hundred thousand mayflies, just so they can spend an hour above the river before falling into the water, dead, their lives and purpose spent? It can take as many as a thousand sea turtles to begin the race of life to produce a single adult who makes it across the finish line to adulthood to continue the species. So if that fact disturbed me and I decided to solve it by declaring that equality of outcomes must be distributed, then what actual outcome is most likely, indeed necessarily, going to be be distributed among all of them? If the fundamental trend, the factual main chance, the easiest outcome, is death, then applying equality of outcome to all will result in the distribution of death to all. One ten thousandth of a life won’t go very far in lifting up the average wellbeing of all those turtles.

The assumption that every turtle born on a beach will just, by the provision of nature, all grow up to an equal adulthood and return to the beach is a fundamentally childish notion. It is the notion of an infant who has been sucked at the teat of its mother and hasn’t been weaned into a world where all the good things of life are not simply provided for you by a cosmic concierge. It is the fantasy that hamburgers simply spring unbidden from restaurant plates to be eaten, that money grows from wallets, that life is a written check you’re just showing up to collect. And it’s easy to see why we might think that, we who are the inheritors of so much. All that accumulated wealth and security and safety and infrastructure assembled through long, long ages that we weren’t around to build or collect, that was just waiting for us when we showed up. The care of a doting mother waiting to receive us. No wonder we take it for granted. No wonder we complain if some of us seem to have got a larger or smaller share of it. And how soon we will spend it and lose it if we do not recognize our own role in preserving and producing it.

It is little wonder that someone like Marx articulated such a vision of the world that takes so much for granted and seeks only to solve the problem of distribution. Marx himself was from a wealthy family and lived all his life off his inheritances and the work of others. The money he received from his family and from his friends like Engels was quickly spent, without having altered in any way his ability to provide for himself. Getting his share of it was a constant concern. He saw the world as he saw his own life. There were stable resources, fountains of wealth he took for granted, and his only problem was how to get his deserved part of them. But when he got his hands on them, in actual life, as in the outworkings of his philosophy, those fountains dried up, because he did nothing to sustain them but assumed that they simply generated themselves by nature. So soon his funds were gone and he would need to be bailed out again. And he no doubt felt it very unjust that capitalism should fail him so by failing to recognize his just dessert and properly reward him with money and comfort for his genius. And haven’t we all felt that way? I surely know I have. But blaming capitalism in this case is a bit like blaming the world and wishing it to be otherwise, or even trying to make it otherwise, like a god reinventing the terms for life itself. And if there is anything that our individuality and ability to choose shows us, it’s that we can, indeed change the world, and ourselves. But not individuality and choice themselves, and their consequences. Those we cannot change, because those are the unique things about us that make change possible. And you cannot achieve justice, you cannot achieve bettering of outcomes, by removing or denying the very things that make justice and bettering of outcomes possible.

And that is the solution. That is why a system based on demanding equality of outcome cannot be just and cannot be better than the system and mode of being we have. Because it is only by virtue of the features that make equality of outcome impossible (individuality and choice) that we are able to have positive outcomes at all. So if we attempt to average the results of a system that has been corrected for individuality and choice, the end result for everyone will be worse.

You cannot solve these problems of injustice without correcting for individuality and choice, and you can’t correct for individuality and choice without destroying your ability to solve the problem (or creating new, worse problems, and again it’s not clear whether you even can actually correct for individuality and choice). So the approach to life that socialism represents, enforced equality of outcome, cannot be achieved. And as hard and unfair as life and its current mode of being might be, there isn’t a better system for navigating it than striving and competition in a way that accepts the burdens of choice and individuality.

So where does this leave us? We cannot fully solve the problem of human suffering and injustice without correcting for choice and individuality. We cannot have good outcomes without allowing the possibility of missing the mark. In other words, sin (which means missing the mark) or at least the possibility of sin, is necessary. You can’t build a world that contains good without creating a world in which evil might occur. It’s an economic, logical, and mathematical necessity. I’m fact the great question we’re left with is, how is any good possible? How is any order, any success possible in such a universe.

I’m reminded of a very amusing list of facts about the universe from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. That because the size of the universe is so vast, and there are only a limited number of inhabited worlds in it, then the average population of any space in that universe is essentially zero. Therefore, if the average population density of the universe is zero, then the population of the universe itself is zero. It’s a silly argument, meant to be absurd. But it makes a point worth thinking about. If what the universe is can be said to be, on average, nothing, then any approach to it based on admitting only consistent averages (a universe of equality and justice and equal value) will result in a total of nothing. You cannot measure the sort of place the universe is according to that sort of system.

In a way, it is collossaly unfair. But that unfairness is what gives us all our individuality, our efficacy, our responsibility, our chance.

What kind of system might be possible, then? If a universe of equal beginnings, equal ends, and equal means to reach them cannot exist?

What is an appropriate measure for justice? It cannot be a simple calculation. That is the main thing we’ve learned. Justice is multi-dimensional and hard for humans to calculate, especially at the level of cosmic ultimate ends. Judging by outcomes is the most obvious way to judge justice, but also the least insightful. That doesn’t mean it isn’t useful or necessary to look at outcomes, in fact they’re incredibly important. But in judging morality, character, and justice, they’re the beginning rather than the end of the calculation. That good outcome might have been the result of luck. That bad outcome might have been luck, also. That mediocre outcome might have been made as good as it was by special effort and care on the part of the person. That other mediocre outcome might have been made as weak as it was because of a special lack of care and effort on the part of the person.

Insofar as we can, it’s in our interest to try to make whatever opportunities we can as equal as we can. Equal with respect to them being equally available to anyone who is sufficiently capable of taking advantage of them. All things that are turtles should be able to take the journey toward adult turtlehood. But it must be understood that all those turtles have a right to fail, so that some of them can succeed. We might want to make it easier for more of every set of competitors to succeed. But we have to be very careful, because the moment you attempt to rig the outcomes by redistributing them, by attempting to alter the fundamental variability of the conditions and the racers, you’ve thrown a monkey wrench in the whole concept of what makes the race work.

I think part of the problem is the lack of individuation in the measure for success. Because not everybody can start in the same place and not everybody can end in the same place and not everybody can run the same sort of race, the judgment of cosmic justice in a life isn’t an easy calculation. It doesn’t reside on the surface. It involves insight into each human life, each human heart. It requires eyes that transcend the scope of human vision.

The true calculation of cosmic justice isn’t about an arbitrary finish line or measure for success or some expectation of what every person should have achieved in some cosmic moral sense, either what every person could reasonably expect the universe to provide or what could be reasonably expected of every person. Those aren’t stable values. Instead, the true measure of cosmic justice and moral value is a judgment based on what each person did with what they were given.

Because demanded equality of outcomes isn’t possible, you can work backward from that to show that equality of starting points isn’t a sure measure of justice either. No one has a right to as good a chance at X outcome as anyone else. What they do have a right to is an equal chance to as good of an outcome as is possible for them, considering who and where they are and come from. It is not justice to demand that I should have an equal chance at becoming a star basketball player as Kobe Bryant, who is a full foot taller than me. It is not justice to demand that I should have an equal chance at becoming a famous composer as Mozart. The qualities that made them able to achieve those results, which are rare, rare results in the scheme of history, not at all the typical expected assumed outcome, are not evenly distributed. We’re individuals. I have things about me that make me able to do the things I can do. They have things about them that make them able to do the things they can do. It is reasonable that, as much as is possible, I should have be able to make of myself as great a composer or as great a basketball player as I could be, given my individual nature. But that chance might actually be pretty small, since the average chance for all humans of achieving those results is pretty small. And I could devote myself to basketball or music and maybe even become fairly decent. Who knows what I might be able to achieve. And there’s nothing really stopping me, I do have that freedom. So as far as that goes, justice is satisfied, even though I will probably not actually get what my childish idea of justice might have been, that of getting to be a world famous basketball player or composer.

It is a child who looks at the world and doesn’t understand it and doesn’t yet understand their own individual nature and place in the world that looks at life shallowly and wonders “Why can’t I have that? It’s not fair!” And it’s not always easy to answer those sorts of complaints from a child. Often my daughter makes those complaints any time anyone has anything she wants. She could have just chosen a giant triple scoop of ice cream, then see someone else who got a cookie as a treat, and complain that it was possible to get a cookie, and that’s not fair, because she wants that. The problem we’re having isn’t that it is fair or unfair to get a cookie or to get an ice cream, it’s that the concept she’s expressing isn’t what fairness is. She wants to be more than herself. She wants to be that person also and have their individuation as well as her own. She doesn’t want to be limited by choice or capacity or singularity. And who does? And many of our fantasies revolve around sudden turns of fate that would redefine what is available to us. But even if such twists and turns of fate did alter our possibilities, hopefully for the better, that still wouldn’t be a moral fact. It wouldn’t be justice for have one situation over another. There is nothing more inherently just or unjust about ending up with a cookie or an ice cream. Justice might be measured in the processes that got you to the point of receiving either. But the moral value between the two outcomes is indeterminate.

I think part of our problem these days is in having access to too high and broad a standard for what success could be. We’ve seen some examples of insane success, and our ambition rises right to that level. Why shouldn’t I have that? We see it before us, so it seems reasonable enough to expect it. And the more we see that sort of exceptional thing before us, the more we expect it. Does that actually help us develop justice or our own moral value? Hungering after someone else’s results? We don’t even know if it’s just for them to have them, or if they actually have moral value in themselves that produced it. They certainly might. It’s not easy to tell at a glance. And you can’t easily answer why you couldn’t be like them without facing the actual ontological problem of why you couldn’t be them. You aren’t them. You’re you. And them is an individual, not merely an outcome. That’s their story. You’re stuck writing your story. Even if you want to try to change it to make it similar to theirs, you can only do it by going through the medium of your own story. It will still be your story. And that’s going to be a challenge, that’s your burden to bear. And that’s your glory and the wonder of it and pride of it too. You can ultimately only be judged according to your own story and what you did with it. And that is the difference between conscience and mere ambition. Ambition tells you what you want or want to become, what outcomes you desire. Conscience is the true inner judgment of to what degree you have steered your story appropriately to reach those ends. Ambition judges the ending of the story. Conscience judges the writing.

And ultimately for human value, in the sort of world we’re in, and for the production of good outcomes, the best way to get them is to focus on this type of justice and this type of moral value. Because the main problem with success is not distribution, but production. So the absolutely most important value to cultivate is the capacity to produce good, regardless of variability of conditions, abilities, and the uneven nature of actual outcomes (since even good plans and good work sometimes deliver less than they should). And anything that actively endangers and subverts that capacity, even in the interest of good outcomes, is itself a potential danger to those outcomes. In other words, any attempt to jury rig the system to always give you what you want is at least somewhat likely to give you less of what you want, on average. Which is a very confounding and annoying thing to observe.

This is a problem I face daily with my children. If I attempt to always make sure everything goes right for them, I will actively deprive them of the capacities they need to be able to actively make things right. I will be depriving them of the opportunity for choice and to develop as an individual. I might produce, in the short term, more justice of outcomes, in terms of what I want, but will reduce their capacity to produce justice in themselves. And since life is uneven and I’m not infinite or omnipotent, and at some point they not only will have to deal with making good out of a situation themselves but also with how to make the best of a bad situation (and as common as it is, we all need the capacity to face suffering and defeat), if I deprive them of those capacities I am not actually helping them at all. I might imagine that value and meaning in life is merely a measure of how many arbitrary good things are provided for them, how nice life happened to be. In which case I’m merely measuring their life by the things rhat happen to accumulate around them, many of which are merely a product of chance. And that’s not meaning, that’s not value, that’s not justice. That’s a shallow conception of a life that could as easily have happened for a pig as for a human. Humanity isn’t even required for such a conception of a good life. Individuality and choice are meaningless. You sink back to the non-moral realm of the animals, without any higher sense of meaning or justice. Such questions become meaningless.

The amazing things about being human is not merely awareness of life, which most all animals have, but awareness of this life, this particular individual life in this time and this place, in contrast to other possible present lives, and in relation to what this life could or could not become. We see that we have this particular life, this individual being, this time, these possibilities, this potential, these desires, this opportunity to make either this or that future more or less likely, more or less good or bad, more or less bearable. Being an individual, being limited and specific, but having choice, having efficacy to alter the present and future within the limits of those specific bounds, and to be judged according to that unique ability that is ours and attains to us alone, that is what it is to be human. It is our right, our damnation, and our glory to be judged according to a measure that no other thing we know of in the universe can be judged by. The meaning and value of a human life, the moral choices that we get to make. Made moral precisely by the fact that we are able to conceptualize and realize individual, specific, distinct states and to cause different possible such states to come into being by our volition.

What an amazing ability! We have discovered the future, the past, the present, ourselves. And what power it has given us. Not only over ourselves, but through ourselves over the world and over others. And that makes it even more complicated. Those are the three primary ingredients that make up the phenomenal world. Three kinds of things. And we can gain power over all of them, merely by becoming aware of choice and individuality. At the same time, we are subject to their power over us. It isn’t a closed system. It isn’t a one way relationship. And that raises the stakes and the level of moral complexity even more. The system is dynamic. There is feedback.

I was interested to read recently about the problem of the human brain and how it is designed. The problem is, it’s structure is so complex that there really isn’t anything in the physical world to compare it to. It’s so enormously complex, there isn’t really any means to possibly store a sufficient amount of data to lay out its designs. And yet we have brains, and they develop according to a very specific and complex design. The sheer scale of complexity is hard to imagine, but comparing one second of human neural activity to the equivalent complexity of every computer on earth running simultaneously in parallel isn’t a bad comparison. At the moment, the technology does not exist to accurately model even one second of human brain activity. And DNA is an almost miraculous information storage device. Fitted into a space so small you couldn’t even see it with your eye is a book so long and complex that if you laid all the DNA in your body end to end it would cross the width of the solar system. Twice. And yet all that storage can’t come close enough to fitting enough information to actually give specific blueprints for something as complex as the brain. So how, then, do we have them? Well, there is still so much we don’t understand, but the solution is very clever. Rather than conceiving of the instructions for building a brain as actual instructions, a specific plan or blueprint, what we have instead is much more like a program. And the program knows how, by process, to build a brain. The basic structure seems to be laid out more directly. But the actual assembly isn’t done according to a plan, but according to a set of principles, or rules. Algorhythms. If this, then this. Feedback loops. Testing, result, action. Testing, result, action. This is why the brain is alive, why it can heal, why it can adapt. Some people have the most astounding things happen to their brains. Some have their brains compressed into a narrow shell of tissue over a void of fluid, and still manage to function reasonably well (considering 90% of the traditional brain structure just isn’t there). People born blind still use the same visual processing center of their brain when “reading” with braille as sighted people do when reading written words. From a neurological standpoint, they are “seeing” the words. We’re only just now beginning to get the slightest hunt of how complex the human brain really is (since most of our actual living tissue tests have been on rats, not humans) and we’re only just now beginning to see how it is put together. The way the human brain is assembled isn’t some static, planned process, like a car coming off the assembly line. In fact the human body as a whole isn’t built like that. It’s a process. It’s more like a custom car being built by an expert machinist. You’re crafted, sculpted, adapted. You’ve got 100,000 miles of blood vessels in every human body, going every which way you could imagine in a crowded space, and if they don’t go where they’re supposed to then that part doesn’t work. You’ve got a neural network around 60,000 miles long. And a single cut neuron could paralyze or kill you. That’s an unthinkable amount of complexity. Mapping and storing every bit of it in specific detail would be almost impossible. But we aren’t just the product of a design. We are, most literally, intelligently designed. We are assembled in an active process according to intelligent principles, processes, and adaptive programs. We are knit together, sinew by sinew. Maybe this is a purely tangential matter, but it seems that I see that same complexity of process reflected in the way that the human heart and mind and path through life are constructed. It’s not merely about some determined plan or designed end state that is laid out. It is something that is alive! It is a living process, a process of purpose and intelligence. We cannot control all the elements, cannot store enough information within us to determine all those elements, delineate all those twists and turns and proper outcomes. We cannot operate and judge according to mere formula. It is a living, adaptive, intelligent process. It’s wonder is in the beauty of how it builds itself, it’s virtue is in how excellent the principles are executed toward the purpose of its design. The most amazing thing about the whole process is the thing we cannot easily see, the program, the actor, the thing that determines the growth. The resulting systems are amazing, surely. The results of the process are amazing. But surely the thing that gave rise to such a result by its own creative action is the most astounding of all. That thing is, in a way, the abstract essence of humanity itself. It is not a human, it is humanity. An active essence, a spirit, that which gives us life and being and definition. And it isn’t just a specific person, and it isn’t simply a plan or representation of a person. It is something more like a principle or purpose or idea, an animus, a way to call that thing into being. A creative id. I’m throwing out ideas right now, hoping to get something to stick. Because I’m not sure what it is that I have by the tail. It’s something whose being is not exhausted by a description as mere information. Nor is its being exhausted merely by its end product in a specific example of its product, a body. It is something from the realm of the living. And by living I must refer you to my other writings on what the essence of life is. The essence of life is, in a sense, purpose. Teleology. And it is not quite clear in what sense or what realm such things exist, if they are not merely either specific material things or an immaterial symbolic value like information. They act, they alter, they test, they develop and grow (not themselves but their objects), they adapt, they design, they build, they create, they have purpose, and they are extremely effective. And when they cease, when they depart, the systems disintegrate into their material parts and live no longer. They seem almost to be a kind of spirit. Spirit, under this view, is not something unliving, but is itself the actual essence of life that in some way shapes and inhabits and is embodied by material bodies. Do they cease because they cannot command their materials any longer? Is the limit in the parts? Because sure, not being composed of the parts but drawing them into composure, they cannot themselves wear out. Any atom is as material as any other, and they were drawn together out of disorder into purpose. So why should that cease because of limitations in the material, for something that can actively and does actively draw material into itself constantly for the purpose of sustaining itself? We devour matter and energy constantly, cycling them through our system at different rates. We aren’t a static body, but a dynamic process of energy and transformation and the continual drawing in and releasing of matter and energy. Can it be that the information wears out? How can it? We start from a single cell, a single copy of the information, but that single copy is lost somewhere in our ancient biological past, as copy after copy after copy is assembled out of the matter at hand. DNA degradation (the loss of telomeres) seems to set a limit upon how many times our cells can be copied, running out at around 115 years. But if all life is dependent upon and limited by descent and degeneration from an original informational repository, then why hasn’t the whole human race died out long ago? Humanity is able to live on, seemingly perpetually. It’s essence does not die as the information ages. Instead it seems to be renewed continually. We are perfectly capable of making a repository of the necessary information that is quite durable enough to give structure and animation to a whole new embodiment at the drop of a hat. Men, in fact, do so on an hourly basis, crafting the information necessary anew out of assembled material elements. The limitation seems quite arbitrary, as if it were all designed to fail. Because it is clear from the ease of the ability for the spirit to inscribe and perpetuate the necessary information that the information itself is not the limiting factor, nor are the materials being used to embody the spirit the limiting factor, as they vary and change continually and were brought together and assembled from disorder to begin with, and are continually being so. The materials persist after the spirit goes. They do not cease to exist, though they return to disorder. The information of what humanity is does not cease to exist, or need not. It is passed on. It persists, so long as we are not extinct. So where and in what way does the spirit of humanity exist? Where does it come from, and where does it go? Does it arise from the information, or does the information arise from it? Is the information real in some concrete sense or is it real only insofar as it consists in a body that expresses it? And how can a symbolic bit of information make the move from whatever realm it exist in into the active shaping of a material body? Where does it cross over, if it does so at all? What is the idea of information, apart from the idea of intelligibility and purpose? And how can intelligibility and purpose be physical properties? Is being something that is distributed across multiple levels of embodiment? Being as living information, being as a living spirit, being as living embodiment. The idea, the activity, and the result? Have we got back to some kind of Platonic metaphysics? Is it a trinitarian concept of being? Is it merely a coincidence that the the two concepts seem to align? Does this mean that the concept of the trinity is not only coherent, but necessary? Or am I getting too analogical and letting my imaginstion run away with me? Sometimes a passing similarity can take on too great a significance.