Moan, Moan, Moan.
Old Fogey alert! I was a kid in the war and I was fifteen by the time the austere post war years with everything rationed ended. Old enough to remember and be fashioned by the prevailing culture that you didn’t complain, you ‘got on with things’, which is somewhat different to the modern advice to ‘get over it’, you didn’t even allow it to become serious enough to be ‘got over’. You put it in its place, you kept a sense of proportion. Oh people used to grumble, about the rationing, the weather, whatever, but grumbling was somehow a good natured activity, a social pastime. Complaining on the other hand is self centered with a sense of entitlement about it, an unspoken expectation that someone else should ‘do something about it’ for you.
Now there is a book about complaining, Complaint by Julian Baggini.
Publisher’s description
Starting with God’s protests to Adam and Eve and working through the French and American revolutions to the war on Iraq, this book examines what we complain about, why we do so, the kinds of complaints we make, why men and women complain about different things, why we complain less than Americans, and whether we should complain differently.
Read an excellent review of it by Theodore Dalrymple in The Guardian.
Sphere: Related ContentThe best chapter in the book (or perhaps I should say the one with which I most heartily agree) is that about a prevalent modern form of wrongful, or perverted, complaint, namely litigation. In a society with few agreed moral boundaries, people increasingly look to the law to draw those boundaries. For them, anything that is legal is permissible; only the illegal is impermissible. ‘There’s no law against it’ or ‘There’s a law against it’ become incontrovertible moral arguments. This, however, means that we have abdicated our freedom and given legislators total moral authority over us. Nothing stands between the isolated individual and his egotistical whims on the one hand and the government and its diktats on the other. The result is a strange and unappealing mixture of inflamed individualism and collectivist conformism.
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"Conjure magic for them and they'll be distracted. Take away their freedom, and still they'll roar. The beating heart of Rome is not the marble of the Senate. It's the sand of the Coliseum. He'll bring them death... and they will love him for it."
