One of my least favorite things in the modern world—or the world for the last many years, anyway—is the idea that we all deserve. What do we deserve? Well, obviously, the best. We deserve a break today, for one thing. And, it seems, we deserve every inch of happiness in our lives. We deserve a car. We deserve a good job. We deserve a beautiful home. We deserve a beautiful wife.
You may wonder, well, how did we get here? I don't know. I tend to attribute it to the consequences of WW 2, when America was greater than the average destroyed economy of the rest of the world. But I have no real reason to do so. Maybe it's just a convenient approach to selling things. Ads tell us that we deserve not just a car, but a car that thrills us, and ad after ad makes sure we write that idea of desert deep in our minds. Like Arragon in Merchant of Venice, we all assume desert.
There's a countervailing set of ideas that we all hear, to be sure. We're told, for instance, that you don't get what you deserve; you get what you earn. Employers and teachers tend to present that point of view. But even so, it really can't combat the notion that we all deserve better. That we all deserve to be happy. That we all deserve to be loved.
The Beatles were a bit wiser. All you need is love really means that all you lack is love. I've always thought that song to be far smarter than people generally think of it.
With such wisdom in mind, then, for me desert is not so positive a thing. I think of that passage in Hamlet, when the Players arrive and Polonius says that he will treat them "according to their desert." "God's bodykins, man," Hamlet responds, "much better: use every man after his desert, and who should 'scape whipping?" I know, the 420-year-old language gets in the way. But the idea, rooted in a biblical understanding of the human condition suggested in Hamlet's reference to God's body, is simple enough. All humans, regardless of how apparently good they may seem to be, deserve nothing more than suffering. After all, even Jimmy Carter lusted in his heart.
I don't have a biblical take on the idea. I know what we all know, that only two things are certain, death and taxes. In the Shakespearean mode, as Prince Hal says to Falstaff, we all owe God a death. To be sure, Falstaff responds that at least for him the debt is not due yet. Being a human invention, taxes maybe one could avoid. But the inevitability of death is the only thing that nature says we deserve. If nature is nice to us, when it comes, death will be relatively painless and quick. But even that we don't deserve.
