Just deserts aren’t what they used to be

It’s possible to stop working as English teacher, but impossible to stop being one. So, as a tribute to my education and first career, here’s the first mistake many people make: it’s indeed deserts, not desserts.

The second is usually sweet, the first is as often as not bitter. Both words come from French, respectively deservir (deserve) and desservir (clear the table).

The first word migrated to English some 600 years earlier than the second, married the word ‘just’, and the couple got to mean getting either the reward or punishment one deserves. The expression got a long lease on life because the English cherish the idea of justice – and words of French derivation.

These days, however, many use the word ‘justice’ interchangeably with ‘fairness’, which is another solecism. To make matters worse, they then identify fairness with equity, which in its turn they misinterpret as sameness and, consequently, mandated equality of outcomes.

For Miss Smith to feel she is getting her just deserts, she first has to change her honorific to ‘Ms’ and then get exactly the same reward for what she does as Mr Jones. Pursuing this quest to its supposedly logical end, she may also insist on acquiring the same primary sex characteristics as Mr Jones. That necessitates another change in the honorific, this time to Mr Smith, and typically also in her preferred pronouns, chosen from a growing list that puts Dr Johnson to shame.

Since such transition involves hormonal treatments, a person who only recently was Ms Smith may end up going bald or, even worse, getting testicular cancer. This possibility is relatively new, but the tendency towards it isn’t. I can prove this with a longish quotation from my favourite political thinker, Joseph de Maistre. It appears in his book St Petersburg Dialogues (1821):

“Hippocrates, the illustrious founder of the guild and profession of medicine, remarked that women never lost their hair or suffered pain in their feet; and yet nowadays they run short of hair and are afflicted with gout. They have put off their womanly nature and are therefore condemned to suffer the diseases of men. May heaven curse them for the infamous usurpation that these miserable creatures have dared to perpetrate on our sex!”

Note that in those unsophisticated times, the definition of a woman seemed to be rigid, lacking our progressive fluidity. None of those simpletons, including Maistre, envisaged the possibility of a Ms Smith turning into a Mr Smith, complete with all the fixtures such a transition would entail.

Since I prefer women to men, I’m not so much bothered by their usurpation of our sex as their betrayal of their own. But the problem, as you can see, goes back a long way.

Thanks to the ideas that were popular in Maistre’s time, the concept of equality, woefully misunderstood as sameness, became standard, and eventually dominant, currency. But this currency is counterfeit. Those who pass it are villains.

Just as women want to become men or men to become women, so have familiar concepts been turned inside out and upside down. Thus justice got to mean injustice in many contexts, and fairness now really stands for unfairness.

This takes me back to just deserts, everyone getting what he deserves. I’d suggest that, if this concept hadn’t been perverted, and people really got their due, no more and no less, millions of Britons would starve, few women would remain in the labour force, and unemployment among certain social and racial groups would be off the scale.

People’s rewards increasingly depend not on what their actions merit but on the volume of egalitarian clamour produced by the group they represent. Everyone hails meritocracy whenever it’s time to knock hereditary privilege. Yet meritocracy has got to mean clamocracy (my portmanteau neologism based on the Latin for ‘to scream’ and the Greek for ‘to rule’).

I first detected this problem in the mid-70s, when I worked as translator at NASA. There were eight of us in the department, but I was the only native Russian speaker fresh off the boat and the only professionally trained translator. Hence I did as much work as the other seven combined, and twice as fast.

Four of my colleagues were women, and somehow they discovered that I was earning some 15 per cent more than any of them. Considering both the quality and quantity of our comparative outputs, that disparity was more than fair. However, considering the insipient madness of modernity, the women weren’t getting their just deserts.

An investigation followed. We were all questioned, but the outcome was predetermined. The ladies all received backdated compensation for the injustice they had suffered. I was actually happy for them – we were all good friends. But that was the first time that I began to reassess my understanding of fairness and justice, by itself or in combination with ‘deserts’.

Today, it’s fashionable not just for children to ‘transition’ to a sex other than their natal own, but also for hitherto indisputable notions to ‘transition’ in the direction of their opposites. This, I believe, leaves the domain of philosophy, linguistics, political science, sociology and even psychology, to enter one of psychiatry.

The world has become certifiably mad, and Maistre thought he had problems. Had someone seriously demanded that he define a woman, he would have called for the men in white coats. Being locked up in a loony bin would have been just deserts for his interrogator.