The Dice Game of Shiva by Richard Smoley

Author:Richard Smoley
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781577319177
Publisher: New World Library
Published: 2016-11-30T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SIX

A JUST UNIVERSE?

In chapter 1, I mentioned a study of comparative attitudes toward fairness in humans and in our close relatives the chimpanzees. The study showed that a chimp will take a bad deal, because anything is better than nothing, whereas a human will not. A human will walk away from an unfair deal even if he goes away empty-handed.

The implications of this study may be more far-reaching than they appear. What if a human were to take this stance toward that most treacherous of all deals, which is life itself? Other animals accept what life dishes out; they will fight to stay alive no matter what. Humans don’t behave the same way, at least not always. There are those who decide to walk away from what they perceive as the unfair deal of life. This would explain why humans sometimes commit suicide, while chimps don’t.

Suicide, like so many things in human behavior, transgresses the limits of what is natural. If life, stripped down to its core, is pure survival, what are we to say of someone who doesn’t want to survive? While there are extreme circumstances that would justify such an act — those of individuals who have painful terminal illnesses, or of concentration camp internees who make a desperate run for it — most suicides don’t take place in such situations. Nor is it always a matter of privation. In the United States as of 2008, the general suicide rate was about 11 per 100,000. Among middle-aged white women, the rate was 8.2 per 100,000; for black women in the same age group, the rate was only 2.5 per 100,000.1 If suicide were entirely, or even mostly, due to hardship, one might imagine that the rate of suicide among black women, whose poverty level is much higher, would also be higher, whereas the opposite is the case.

No doubt there are clinical reasons for suicide — depression and so on — but sometimes assigning such a label looks like an instance of the naming fallacy: slapping a label onto something in order to pretend you have understood it. What if, for many people, the root lies deeper? What if it is a way of stepping away from a deal they don’t think is fair?

A research psychologist could probably find a way of testing this hypothesis (“of 100 individuals who attempted suicides, 45 agreed with the statement ‘Life is unfair,’ as opposed to the control group, of which only … ” and so on), but as I’m not a research psychologist, this is not a direction I will take. Instead I’m led to reflect on the extremely powerful need in the human soul for justice — and justice, moreover, in the universe as a whole, not merely in human society. Without this sense of justice, it is difficult to see meaning or purpose in life.

Granted, it’s not always easy to believe in the fundamental justice of the cosmic order. The Japanese director Akira Kurosawa titled an early film of his The Bad Sleep Well, and often this seems to be true.

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