Read Online Complaint: From Minor Moans to Principled Protests by Julian Baggini - Free Book Online

with anything new, just as long as it doesn’t change his way of life in any fundamental way. What he doesn’t like is that he no longer knows all his neighbours, that he feels unsafe walking the streets at night, that women are no longer ‘ladylike’, and that the kinds of jokes he likes telling are now ‘politically incorrect’. The world he now lives in is not the world he knew and felt comfortable in, and, rather than change himself to fit the changing reality, he prefers simply to complain about how we’re all going to hell in a handcart.
    I’ve got a lot of sympathy for people like Ed. Maybe he really is too long in the tooth to change, and so he should carry on complaining as a form of catharsis. But although some ofthings he dislikes about modern life are regrettable, it would be undesirable to try to turn back the clock. The sense of safety and belonging he once felt cannot be replicated, because it has been undermined by greater social and geographical mobility, which is on the whole a good thing. Similarly, though it may be uncomfortable for Ed that women behave differently these days and that you can no longer crack jokes about ‘Sambo’, the gains for women and ethnic minorities that are linked to these far outweigh any loss to Ed and his ilk.
    Not all change is for the better, and even good changes can have bad side-effects. But change is inevitable, and the old saying that we should try to guide change rather than stop it is no less true for being a cliché. Nostalgic and Luddite complaints are species of wrong complaint because they bolster a kainotophobia which stops us from adapting to and changing the transformations going on around us. We don’t need to be neophiliacs to see this: novelty for its own sake is one of the shallowest of human pleasures. The right advice is ‘Neither a neophobe nor a neophiliac be’. In the spirit of the serenity prayer we need the wisdom to see what is good in both the old and the new, and not to prefer one to the other merely because it is new or old.
Misdirected complaints
     
    One of the main reasons why we abuse the noble practice of complaint is that constructive complaining is often so hard, whereas futile moaning is so easy. Most human beings are critical pessimists, always quick to see signs of fault and decline. It’s not just that putting right all the ills of the world would take for ever: analysing all the ills correctly would take almostas long. Hence most of our complaints are issued prematurely, without sufficient thought, and, though provoked by genuine cases of things not being as they ought to be, they are fired off without any accuracy and either miss their targets or hit the wrong one.
     
    Such misdirected complaints come in at least three forms: they can be
displaced
,
disproportionate
or
easy gestures
. The word ‘displaced’ is used here in its literal psychoanalytic sense. Displacement occurs when the mind redirects troubling emotions from a problematic object to something where the emotion can be handled more safely. This enables the potentially threatening nature of the emotion to be neutralised by finding an outlet in a safer form.
    Psychoanalytic concepts such as ‘displacement’ are problematic to the extent that they give therapists power over their patients (as most still call their clients). An analyst may tell a man who devotes himself to the growing of asparagus that he does so merely because he is unable to confront the reality of his homosexual desires, and thus displaces his love on to phallic vegetables. If the gardener protests that this is nonsense, how are we to tell if it is the gardener or the therapist who is deluded?
    Fortunately, however, we do not need to buy into the idea that analysts know our minds better than we do to see some merit in many of their conceptual tools. Where the analyst might see the strength of our denial that displacement is at work as an indicator of the likelihood of its reality, a more