Sociability • Social Virtues
The Need – Sometimes – Not to Complain
We know so much about the importance of complaining; of standing up against problems; of pointing out what is wrong; of doing our part to fight for goodness and justice.
Yet it’s because we know this lesson so well that it can – at particular moments – pay to let into our minds another far more peculiar and provocative thought, not to replace it but to sit alongside it: the importance of – sometimes – moving silently away from disappointment, letdown, irritation and evil; of falling quiet; of not-complaining.
We may choose not to complain not because we are weak, or wilful or indifferent or cowed or callous, but for a more fundamental and clear-eyed reason: because we are up against something we know we cannot change; because we have enough experience of power and victory to recognise powerlessness and constraint; because we appreciate that to complain about something that isn’t going to change carries as much of a cost as not to complain about something that can.
Through futile pleading, we let go of what remains of our power and further surrender our dignity to an undeserving foe. We pay what is awful too much respect to dwell on it continuously yet in vain. For while we complain, there is so much that we are prevented from doing: innovating, thinking, building, nurturing. Our enemy may have captured our outward circumstances, we should refuse on top of everything else to give them our time and our composure. In the frank acknowledgement of our powerlessness lies a last assertion of our power.
That is why – when we can do nothing about an antagonist, a tyrant, a rumour, a delay, a disease – we may with dignity turn our minds elsewhere. It isn’t that we don’t care. We just refuse to allow the insuperable problem to take up more of our imagination and opt instead to focus on what can still be improved and enjoyed.
This is a philosophy of pessimism rather than of resignation. The pessimist attempts to liberate themselves from futile outrage and reclaim freedom amidst upset by swiftly pricing in what is irredeemable. The pessimist refuses to give the negative the power to overtake them. Their bodies may be in agony, governments perfidious, folly triumphant. They will not be entirely subsumed, they will not allow awfulness a final victory.
We can consider the two great selective non-complainers of the Western tradition, Socrates and Jesus. They tried – as few others have before or since – to replace vindictiveness and irrationality with kindness and thought. But when unbudgeable disaster came, they didn’t challenge. ‘Complain to the government of Athens,’ Socrates’s friends urged him when his death sentence was delivered. ‘No,’ he replied, ‘let’s do a little more philosophy in the hours that remain.’ ‘Complain to the Roman authorities,’ Jesus’s friends urged him. But the time for that was gone: ‘they know not what they do.’
We shouldn’t give our enemies the privilege of consuming our minds. We can fight them with intensity and then – when we can do no more – should turn elsewhere, not in order to escape our duties but so as better to mine what remains of our capacities for hope and love.
