Lately, I’ve been thinking about the concept of fairness a lot. We often uphold fairness as the gold standard principle by which society should be organized. Even though we may disagree on the parameters of what constitutes “fair” (i.e., the equality of opportunity vs. the equality of outcomes debate), we can generally agree that a society that’s fairer, however defined, is better than one that is less fair. This way of thinking pervades how we craft our laws and social institutions. Fairness is also the organizing principle around which sports competition is centered, and with all of the justice issues that are coming to the fore regarding what is truly fair in sport, be it the penalizing of Black bodies in swim cap regulations, the controversy surrounding cannabis’ prohibitive status, or the endogenous levels of testosterone in an athlete, the debate over what constitutes fair will likely never abate.    
I won’t delve into these issues in depth in this piece. My wonderful co-author Florence and I have already weighed in on a major topic on the fairness of transgendered athletes competing in the previous issue. Instead, I want to reflect on the philosophical foundations of our obsession over fairness, and why it causes so many of us such consternation when it comes to our own journey in sports and performance, and maybe even life.

I don’t think it’ll be a stretch for me to say that many of our conceptions of fairness is derived from this notion of merit: that’s to say, when you get to reap the benefits of hard work, that’s fair, and when something prevents you from doing that, that’s unfair. Conversely, when we see someone reap the benefits without putting in work, or even someone else’s work, we tend to think that this is unfair. This notion of the virtue of work and its just deserts is rooted in a Protestant Work Ethic, which I’ve also discussed in an earlier Performance Menu piece. This is a highly transactional way of thinking about effort and work: input should always be matched by output, as if work and reward is some kind of credit and debit ledger that needs to be perpetually balanced in order for our world to feel just.

The philosophical term for this transaction is teleology, where measure ourselves against the outcomes of our actions. Most famously articulated by G.W.F. Hegel in the Phenomenology of the Spirit, in which he asserts that human beings are only self-realized and fulfilled when they put forth labor and work towards transformation of the world. So, this begs the question, what happens when all of the work we put in don’t produce the outcomes or results we expect? What happens when the just deserts promised to us by the virtue of our labor doesn’t become realized? Karl Marx’s answer to that question, is that we become alienated from ourselves. We feel a loss of value because the bootstrap theory of our merits has failed us.    

So, this brings me to our collective journey as weightlifters and athletes. I’m sure this feeling of ennui and alienation in training is nothing new. It’s something I’ve been experiencing myself for the better part of the last two years as a competitive athlete, or rather, I should say, as my athletic output became increasingly less competitive. As athletes, we tend to think about results as the most important metric in measuring ourselves. If we are training and competing clean, we expect that the merit of our hard work is better performance and results. How many times have heard the gym adage “the iron never lies”? Implying that the weight you lift is a direct reflection of how hard you’ve worked. So, when training progress stalls, and even regresses, we either think we’re not working hard enough or we’re doing something wrong.

The philosopher Michael Sandel wrote a book last year called the Tyranny of Merit which completely changed how I conceived of what I believe I deserved based on my own hard work, not just in training, but in almost all areas of my life. He not only dispels the myth that a meritocracy can exist at all as many thinkers have before him, by highlighting the enduring structural inequalities that exist which prevents us from getting our fair share, but more importantly, he forced me to consider whether a notionally perfect meritocracy is truly a just system. Even if we accomplish the impossible task of doing away with all the built in inequalities in our meritocracies, it will never be able to account for the pervasive role that random chance plays in determining outcomes. Furthermore, the system still produces winners and losers, which you will no doubt ask, isn’t it the whole point of sports and competition?

The point here isn’t that having winners and losers in sports is inherently bad, the point is how we talk and think about winning and losing that’s the source of our distress. Hands up if you heard commentary like “so and so was edged out because they didn’t want it bad enough”. We like winners, and we also like to think that winners did it because of choices they made, which also conversely mean we look down on the losers because the reasons for their loss are also within their control. Even a moment’s pause will tell us that this is not true. We only proxy how “badly” someone wanted to win based on what we can observe, when we have no actual quantifiable insights into their internal psychology and motivational structure. So, we look up to winners because obviously they’ve worked hard, and we look down on losers because obviously they didn’t. Is it any wonder that when we ourselves don’t see the progress and output from our own performance, we can feel like losers? That pesky old Protestant Work Ethic rears its ugly head again. As one of my friend once said to me, “John Calvin has a lot to atone for.”

To be clear, I’m not saying we should do away with winning and losing and give everyone participation medals. Not at all, that would take away all of the thrill and enjoyment of watching and participating in sports. What I am saying is that we have been over-indexing ourselves on a merit based model of thinking and we should perhaps tip the scale a little more towards merit’s counterbalance – providence.
In divinity, providence is the idea that God intervenes in worldly affairs without care for humanly designs and machinations. As such, providence tells us that where we are and what we get is often due to forces out of our control, a religious version of “it is what it is” if you will. However, the key part is that where a providential lens takes away the judgement of “you get what you deserve”, it replaces it with a sense of obligation. Regardless of whether we think we are worthy or unworthy, merit or not, we have an obligation to honor ourselves and others, win or lose. Sometimes things happen for no reason at all: you discovered the sport at a later stage in life, work-life balance facilitates sub-optimal recovery, childhood injuries, your genetic makeup, a once-in-a-century global pandemic. None of those are products of your choice, you don’t deserve or merit any of that, and they don’t make you or others any more or less.

Closely tied to the idea of providence is gratitude. We ought to be grateful then, that we get to train, that we get to compete, that we are able bodied enough to conduct a physically strenuous activities, that we are privileged enough, financially or otherwise, to participate in something that can be fulfilling, and that we are lucky enough to have found community amongst each other. Those things are not products of our choices, work, or merit. Those things are incidental to our stumbling on the sport as a result of chance and providence. Having just finished reading Greg Everett’s Tough (if you’re reading Performance Menu and haven’t read Tough, what are you doing?), one thing that struck me was that perhaps toughness in life and sport doesn’t only come from the choices we make in developing character, commitment, capacity, and capability. Perhaps toughness also comes from recognizing that we are small in the grand scheme of everything, and that we simultaneously control both more and less than we think we do. Toughness can come from knowing when and where we get to captain our soul and steer the ship of merit, and when and where that same ship has been swept up by fate into the province of providence, divine or otherwise.