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Give-em what they deserve!

By Clark Nida

I remember, as a teenager, reading about a businessman on his way to a fancy dress party, dressed as a pink fairy with tutu and lacy wings. A group of likely lads out for a drink decided that he-she-or-it was an abomination to the Lord, pulled the unfortunate partygoer into the car and beat him up.

In the ensuing court case, one of the accused said “we didn’t hit it any harder than it deserved”.

The story stuck in my mind, at that tender age, not just for the defendant’s turn-of-phrase, but also for the state of the world it revealed, something quite different from how I’d imagined it. I’d thought that to “deserve” something good, or bad, was an absolute relationship to that something, which everyone in their right minds would surely recognise, including the person concerned. What this news story showed me was that the word “deserve” was a subjective assessment: at worst revealing a diseased outlook and best indicative of public prejudice.

In the 1950s, when the above story took place, everybody would have agreed with the young men, both in their assessment of the situation and their subsequent action. Everybody, that is, who could self-identify as “decent folk” without fear of contradiction. The fact that the victim was on his way to a fancy dress party might grudgingly have been conceded in his favour, but most people would have thought it an understandable mistake on the part of his attackers.

Any man who walked around dressed as a pink fairy deserved whatever might happen to him, just as women rape victims did who went out alone at night, or wore clothes some thought too revealing.

Nowadays we are somewhat more enlightened as to what treatment a person deserves, as testified by the near-universal disgust at the louts who beat to death Sophie Lancaster and her boyfriend for being dressed as goths.

But such apparent enlightenment may arise out of fashion rather than a deeper understanding of social justice.

And, like fashion, it can change.

Indeed it can be led, especially by government policy, justified according to the attitudes and principles of those in power.

One principle which seems to have come back into fashion is the concept of the undeserving poor: the “sturdy beggars” of yore.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-11778284

Now before I start to challenge my reader’s prejudices, let’s agree about one thing: it has come back into fashion not through any novel revelations concerning social justice, but because the government, largely at the instigation of a few obscenely rich people, has undemocratically decided that it must cut billions of pounds of public expenditure.

From figures published in http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-11466178 it appears that the government spends £40 billion each year to support people who are in poverty for whatever reason, surely a figure to attract the axe-men.

Now any threat at all to withdraw public funds is going to elicit loud protests from those who are likely to suffer. Protests, we must assume, which are more likely to be heard the more influential those protesting.

Those who spend the defence allocation, whether soldiers or civil servants, have the greatest influence of anyone. They can argue compellingly that inadequate national defence threatens the whole nation. This can only be countered with a clear idea of what “inadequate” really means.

In contrast, the beneficiaries of the said £40 billion represent the least influential members of society, namely poor people. They are the ones least able to defend themselves, let alone how they benefit from the public purse. Therefore their complaints are the safest by far to ignore. It takes a champion to protest on their behalf: a senior churchman who can remind the powers-that-be that Oppression Of The Poor is one of the traditional Four Sins Crying Out To Heaven For Vengeance.

This too should be beyond contention: that the government’s decision to hurt one class of people rather than another has not been arrived at by a proper democratic process. Admittedly those in power can argue that they have been fairly elected by a time-honoured system of voting, even if some consider it broken and unfair. But some of those wielding the axe have gone back on election pledges not to increase student fees, among other things. For this reason the government cannot claim public backing, in a truly democratic sense, for their choice of people to hurt.

Nevertheless it can be given a semblance of public backing.

Those whom the gods wish to destroy, said the Romans, they first make mad. In like manner, those whom the rich and powerful wish to hurt, they first brand “undeserving”.

As was brought home to me in my teens, the word “deserving” always expresses the speaker’s opinion, one might say prejudices, and never any moral absolute. Judges are appointed by the highest authority in the land to give people “what they deserve”, as ordinary folk might see it. But even judges are careful about using the word “deserve”. In their view they apply the law, which they have studied for their entire professional careers. It is right therefore that they should have the monopoly of dispensing justice. It is something that cannot be left to roving bands of ignorant louts.

Nor tabloid newspapers, no matter how loud their headlines scream.

In deciding for ourselves who “gets what they deserve”, ie who is or is not “deserving” of the public support they are at present lawfully entitled to, we (and the politicians we have elected) are turning ourselves into judges – and corrupt judges at that. Because we won’t listen to all the evidence.