Complaint: From Minor Moans to Principled Protests
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Authors: Julian Baggini
COMPLAINT
JULIAN BAGGINI
is the co-founder and editor of
The Philosophers’ Magazine
. His books include
Atheism
,
What’s It All About? Philosophy And The Meaning of Life
,
The Pig That Wants To Be Eaten
,
Do They Think You’re Stupid?
and
Welcome to Everytown: A Journey into the English Mind
. To find out more go to
www.julianbaggini.com
.
As the twenty-first century moves through its tumultuous first decade, we need to think about our world afresh. It’s time to revisit not only politics, but our passions and preoccupations, and our ways of seeing the world. The Big Ideas series challenges people who think about these subjects to think in public, where soundbites and polemics too often provide sound and fury but little light. These books stir debate and will continue to be important reading for years to come.
Other titles in the series include:
Jenny Diski
The Sixties
Paul Ginsborg
Democracy
Ian Hacking
Identity
Eva Hoffman
Time
Steven Lukes
Moral Relativism
Susie Orbach
Bodies
Renata Salecl
Choice
Slavoj ŽiŽek
Violence
FROM MINOR MOANS TO PRINCIPLED PROTESTS
Julian Baggini
First published in Great Britain in 2008 by
PROFILE BOOKS LTD
3A Exmouth House
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London EC1R 0JH
This eBook edition published in 2010
Copyright © Julian Baggini, 2008, 2010
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
eISBN 978 1 84765 278 2
1
THE NOBLE HISTORY OF COMPLAINT
Nostalgic and Luddite complaints
Towards a future complaintology
Appendix: The complaint survey
So I have not said to my people: ‘Get rid of your discontent.’ Rather, I have tried to say that this normal and healthy discontent can be channeled into the creative outlet of nonviolent direct action.
Martin Luther King, letter from Birmingham Jail, 16 April 1963
Think of the word ‘complaint’ and you’re likely to conjure images of moaning, whining rants about mainly trivial matters: the trains don’t run on time, people are so rude these days, there’s nowhere to park, there’s nothing on the television. Complaining has become a pastime of the resigned and the nostalgic. It has even become something of a leisure activity. In the UK the best-selling book one recent Christmas was the self-explanatory
Is It Just Me or Is Everything Shit?
, while the year before the runaway hit was
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
, a protracted complaint against the decline of proper grammar. The TV series
Grumpy Old Men
, which comprised people complaining to camera, was such a success it spawned the sequels
Grumpy Old Women
and
Grumpy Old Holidays
, as well as spin-offbooks and even a touring stage show. Even indie rock bands have discovered that being world-weary is cooler than getting angry, with Blur releasing an album called
Modern Life Is Rubbish
and The Kaiser Chiefs scoring a hit with their song ‘Everything Is Average Nowadays’. Complaining has become synonymous with moaning.
It needn’t be this way. At the root of every complaint is a sense that things are not as they ought to be. To complain is to speak out against this, and we can do so petulantly, aggressively, calmly, pointlessly or constructively. It does not even matter whether we are truly upset by what we perceive to be wrong. Many people are never happier than when they get the opportunity to complain, while others are deeply unhappy with how things are, but just accept it. Complaint occurs when
we refuse to accept that things are wrong and try to do something about it, even if that something is no more than articulating the fault.
Although the precondition for complaint is a belief that things are not as they should be, the mere recognition and expression of this fact are not enough for a fully formed complaint to be born. For example, a stoic may believe that it is important to accept the imperfection of the world, and so to recognise that things are not as they ought to be would, for her, be not to complain but simply to describe. Likewise, a committed pessimist may also like frequently to comment on what’s wrong with everything, but again this is not really complaint because it lacks a
non-acceptance
of what is wrong.
There is an additional final component of complaint which is hard to pin down. Complaint is doubly transitive: you don’t just complain
about
something, you complain
to
someone or something. However, as a criterion for identifying genuine complaints, this is hard to apply, because often what we direct our complaints to is entirely abstract: God, the fates, fortune or just the universe. Such generalised directedness can be hard to identify, but I think we can tell, in our own cases at least, the difference between merely thinking that something is wrong and hurling our rage about it into the empty air, as though someone should be listening and taking note.
Complaint can therefore be defined as
a directed expression of a refusal or inability to accept that things are not as they ought to be
. The definition is a little loose and almost certainly has exceptions, but, unlike many philosophers, I’m happy with that. Language is more flexible than logic, and if you want to describe the world as it is, rather than remake it in a form fit for logicians, you have to be prepared to live with a certain amount of ambiguity. It also seems to me that complaint is
a particularly indeterminate concept. Consider, for instance, the familiar scenario when someone appears to be having a moan, and they are told to stop complaining. ‘I’m not complaining,’ comes the reply, ‘I’m just
saying
.’ Often the person really is complaining and doesn’t want to admit it, but the very concept of complaint opens up the wiggle-room for plausible denial. This is, I think, because the features of directedness and non-acceptance which are central to complaint admit of many degrees. It can therefore be hard to know how much our expressions that things are not right contain either or both.
Even if you prefer a slightly different definition, it should be plain that what we complain about can be trivial or profoundly important. All major social advances have started with a complaint. Emmeline Pankhurst and the suffragettes, Martin Luther King and the civil rights campaign, Nelson Mandela and the anti-apartheid movement: the changes they brought about all began with a complaint that the status quo was wrong and needed to be changed.
The act of complaining is hence not what is fundamental to complaint: it is a symptom, not the disease itself. Just as the severity of a medical complaint should be measured not by how loudly it draws attention to itself but by the extent to which the body really is damaged, so we should not mistake the loudness of a complaint for its seriousness.
Complaint has a noble history. It has driven human society forward and led to the abolition of systemic injustice. That it is now primarily associated with inconsequential moans and frivolous litigation is a travesty. This is the main complaint of this book. For instance, the grievance culture that infects America and Britain is just the latest and most striking example of how complaint can go wrong, and I will be examining it in some detail in the final chapter.
I want to reclaim complaint for the forces of progress and wrestle it from the hands of the lawyers who see it as simply a means to personal gain, and from those of the doom-mongers and naysayers who believe that nothing can be done except whinge. To do this I need to look at what we complain about, why we complain, what our complaints say about us, and whether we should complain more, less or just differently.
Although my claim is that complaint is at the heart of many genuinely important things, I do not wish to neglect the more mundane moans of everyday life. It is a long-standing belief of mine that the profound and the trivial live side by side, that human beings are not separated into their nobler and baser parts but are a thorough mixture of the two. In the details of everyday life we often see the fractal patterns that mirror the larger, most important contours of our nature. So later in the book I will be turning to some observations about quotidian complaints, with some help from a specially devised survey, the results of which make some intriguing suggestions about how our complaints reflect who we are. I would not go so far as to say that complaint provides the key with which we can unlock the hidden secrets of human existence, but it is certainly a lens worth looking through, one which puts into sharp focus aspects of life which usually appear to the mind’s eye as a vague blur.
What I will not be discussing is what might be called insincere complaint. Research psychologists and sociologists have generally neglected complaint, but the few who have examined it have identified many types of complaining behaviour which are not really about things being wrong at all. For example, we may complain about the price of opera tickets to signal that we’re rich and cultured, or we may join in a collective complaint to identify ourselves with a group.
1
One particularly vivid example of insincere complaint was the newspaper
columnist who complained that morning sex with her new four-times-a-night boyfriend made her driving worse. Poor woman. No comprehensive account could ignore such instrumental uses of complaint, but for my purposes I want to focus on cases where the sense of things not being right and our expression of dissatisfaction with that are essentially sincere.
What I’m offering is a kind of meta-complaint: that people tend to complain about the wrong things for the wrong reasons and that, as a result, complaining has been debased. But in so doing, I hope to demonstrate that complaint can be constructive. Indeed, our ability to complain is part and parcel of what makes us human.
THE NOBLE HISTORY OF COMPLAINT
What was the first complaint in human history? For those who believe Genesis is a historical record there is a factual answer to this question. For those who believe it is merely a myth, that answer is still of interest because it reveals something about how we have understood complaint in the development of humankind.
When God created the world, he saw that it was good. Everything was as it should have been, and there was hence nothing to complain about. Adam and Eve, in their original state, were incapable of complaint for they did not know the difference between good and evil, right and wrong, and without any sense of this, how could one even conceive of the idea that things are not as they ought to be? There is no awareness of ‘should’ in a prelapsarian state, only of ‘is’.