[00:00:02.520] - Wesley
You're listening to journal entries, a podcast about philosophy and cognitive science, where researchers open up about the articles they publish. I'm Wesley Buckwalter. In this episode, Kathryn Norlock talks about her paper, Can't Complain, which is published in the Journal of Moral Philosophy in twenty eighteen. Kathryn  is the Kenneth Mark Drane chair in ethics at Trent University, where she researches moral emotions and ethical virtues like forgiveness, humility, receptivity and care. 

[00:00:34.280] - Kathryn
In the canonical philosophical literature, when you read Aristotle and Kant they say that complaining should never be done.

[00:00:40.640] 
And the point of this paper is to argue that more than never complaining is good, not just permissible, but a good thing to do. The way psychologist Robin Kowalski defines complaining is as the expression of dissatisfaction and. Most of us use Robin Kowalski's definition because it's so broad and accommodating, it covers a lot of kinds of complaining, including protest. I'm describing in this paper a subset of complaining. And the subset I'm describing is the expression of feeling subjective experiences of pain.

[00:01:16.970] 
What Aristotle and Kant object to is the expression of feeling pain and dissatisfaction, because if you are expressing your feelings of pain, then you are failing to exert your mind over matter. You are giving into the soft bodies temptation to yield pain rather than exerting yourself to have a agential control. So they're going to be criticizing what Aristotle calls whinging or wailing as women do and what Kant calls a feminine or feminine and soft. I mean, in both cases, they say in this really gendered way, that is the expression of feeling pain.

[00:01:54.260] 
That is is to be deplored because you're failing at being a more self-controled man. So every semester I teach Bernard Voxels self-respect in protest and in Bernard Voxels work, he says, of course you can protest without necessarily having any affective feelings at all. If I want to say I, too, wish to sign a petition saying this policy is bad and it ought to be changed, I count that as a protest. The protest is signing a petition that says this policy is bad and should change.

[00:02:28.400] 
And I can do that whether I am feeling happy or sad, hungry or sleepy. Right. My affect does not really matter to protest. The essence of protest seems to be in asserting that a wrong should be made right. And that is one form of complaint. So it fits into Robin Kowalski's broader psychology definition of any expression of dissatisfaction. In Aristotle and Kant defend protest too. Aristotle does say, you know, to put up with insults to yourselves, your friends is slavish.

[00:02:58.980] 
He does not include the sort of wailing and complaining that women do in protest, right protest is defensible. It says, I'm an active cat who asserts their judgment and complaining is implicitly a failure of judgment you're giving into your feelings rather than having control over exactly how you act. Kant seems to say the same thing, that complaining indicates kind of civility, a lack of integrity, and ultimately you described it as soft. And I think he, depending on what translation use, he also will describe it as effeminate.

[00:03:35.480] 
And even as I read this in Kant and Aristotle and I'm teaching this to my students, I'm teaching Kant and Aristotle by day. And at the same time, I've moved up to Ontario where the culture is not what I'm accustomed to. And I run into a number of people, you know, here. And well, when I moved up here, it was 2010. I ran into a number of people in twenty ten who would tell me, well, you can't complain because they're a part of a natural conversation in my area.

[00:04:03.350] 
But I'm from I just moved here from the Washington, D.C. area where complaining is an icebreaker and the idea of complaining being something that we should not do, that it's not polite. As a number of my friends and neighbors here in Ontario tell me, it doesn't solve anything. And I thought, I don't care if complaining solves something. You know, there's more moral functions and psychological functions to complaining than solving things. But that's where I realized the work has to start.

[00:04:36.860] 
I've got Aristotle and Kant saying to to want to complain for reasons other than to fix the thing you're complaining about is bad. And I do not believe that. And it's more obvious to me than ever during the pandemic. That is just not true. You can't complain. Doesn't make anything better. All the number of times I've heard you can complain followed by it doesn't make anything better. I'm like. You know, I'm not going to sell the f ing world, I just need to complain to somebody, any relationship, baby, and I need relationships whether I can make the world better or not. And then Kate pounded her desk.

[00:05:15.810] 
I wrote this paper thinking, I just want to correct Aristotle and Kant and obviously friends and neighbors who tell me can't complain because I think they're wrong. So I just want to correct Aristotle and Kant and this sort of cultural mistake I see. And then I started doing the literature and the only other philosopher to write about complaining at any length in philosophy is Julian Baggini, whose book on complaining is wonderful, but who really does end up focusing on defending, only complaining when you can do something about it.

[00:05:47.490] 
So he focuses on constructive complaint as the single. And if I recall his book, right, the only form of complaining that's morally acceptable and to be that ended up boiling back down to Aristotle and Kant saying protest is good, but what women do is bad, as if women don't protest. But I'm letting that go. So I also wanted to correct the philosophy literature and say, OK, there's got to be space for something that's not constructive, complaining much as I like Julian Baggini's book, I also want to defend this other form, which is it's not productive.

[00:06:21.210] 
It doesn't make the world better. I complain about the weather. It doesn't make the weather better. And I think that's worth defending as well because it has these other functions. So the structure of the paper is that Part one says the canon is wrong, that complaining is thoughtless and their reasons are very gendered and overly rigorous. And then part two says, my positive account, that complaining can be thoughtful. And at times it's so useful to a situation that I would go so far as to describe it as either an imperfect active duty or a skill proper to virtuous people.

[00:07:02.050] 
So when I say active duties, what I mean is that I ultimately argue I think you ought to complain when it seems like the emotional environment is such that complaining would be the best way to help someone else in addition to helping yourself. And if that's an active duty, if there are times that we ought to be sensitive and attuned to the emotional environment and offer a complaint as a way of offering an opportunity for solidarity. Then it is good to complain, in effect, you ought to complain, you ought not to pretend that no one is has anything in common with you, you ought to extend your vulnerability and say, let us share it. And since writing that, I've gotten I've gotten contacts from people I did not expect saying I need someone to talk to about a feeling that I have, and I think that you will share this feeling and that I won't be so alone. 

[00:08:02.460] 
On a regular basis, I teach ethical theory, it's an intermediate class to my students where we read Aristotle and Kant on Ethics and his lectures on ethics. And when I teach Aristotle and Kant, they have some differences. But one thing they have in common is that they both had this rigorism with respect to complaint. You will find it in the ethics and you'll find it in Kant's lectures. And I think his metaphysics of morals, both of them will say at some point men can protest when there's an injury and they can have indignation at the injuries of others. But it is soft and effeminate and womanly and servile to wail or whine or moan about your pains.

[00:08:46.030] 
So it's a form of complaining. They reject and they reject it so rigorously that both of them use the word never. They say it is never to be done by a man with moral character. And I think that rigorism is what attracted me to this topic that I just wanted to say that can't be the case. It's way too rigorous. And when you find rigor and Kant, you are unsurprised. Kant is known for being an absolutist philosopher, so rigor is proper to his project.

[00:09:13.570] 
If it uses yourself as a mere means than it always does, you should never do it. In Aristotle, it's a little more disappointing because I think of Aristotle as a more empirical dude who will appreciate context and facts and actualities. So you wouldn't expect the same rigor and Aristotle. Except that, of course, Aristotle is also, as is well-established, rather masculinist. Right? Not all the time, but some of the times and rather sexist in his apprehension of what women are capable of compared to men.

[00:09:46.280] 
Actually, a great deal of appreciation for Aristotle thinks about the nature of the sexes. But here I think he really gets it wrong and his biases get in the way. To an extent, I would go so far as blameworthy. He's got people around who would tell him he's wrong. He just doesn't agree with them. But it was that rigour and Aristotle and that attracted me to this. So I wanted to argue it can't be that it's always wrong to express a pain or a moan or a wail.

[00:10:12.290] 
When you can't fix the thing that makes you sad, there have to be times when it's understandable at a minimum and maybe even to be recommended when it could promote the good life. I mean, if anyone should see this, it should be Aristotle that it would be conducive to a successful sociality to work with each other on times when the situation is bad. It's frustrating, so on the one hand, I think Aristotle and Kant are overly rigorous and in addition, I think they're both overly gendered.

[00:10:46.090] 
It's possible to say things about sex difference and gender difference and not a denialist of all difference. But they are so gendered that they go so far as to, say, real men who are in control of themselves, who are mentally disciplined, never complain and they should never complain. That is what women do. So it's both overly rigorous and overly gendered. One of the reasons it was important to me to write this paper is because I think that for the sake of men, women and all genders, it is bad to attach whether or not you can express your pain to your gender identity.

[00:11:25.080] 
That seems as bad for men as it does for all the rest of us, because if if a prohibition to complain leaves you sort of isolated alone and wondering if you're the only one who feels bad, then graduating that to something that expresses your gender identity really punishes men who feel a pain and also feel really alone. I find that kind of horrifying that we would continue to carry on a culture where men should feel tacitly discouraged from sharing the fact that they have a pain.

[00:12:01.740] 
I think men would be less lonely. I think all of us would be less lonely if we all agreed that complaining can be done excellently, that complaining is a skill and you should keep up practices of doing it so that you know how to do it well. And it's not hard to relearn the skill over and over again. What I haven't had a chance to do yet is work out what this skill is and exactly when and whether to exercise it, because I do think there is this active duty to complain in situations that call for it.

[00:12:35.820] 
And it seems like the next step is to figure out what are the situations that call for it? When does your active duty give rise? So. The example I outlined in the article, and that's an easy one, and that is at times when you actually think you could help someone else and open the door to letting them complain because you think they need to. So my example in my article is two her coworkers plotting from opposite directions in a cold rain, really pouring down.

[00:13:02.350] 
And they get inside and they're both shivering and stomping and one looks at the other and says, hell of a day out, isn't it? And the point is to open that door so the other person feels free to complain. So helping each other is nice and that resembles empathy or sympathy. But it is also a recognition that someone may need to disclose that they're in pain or may need to disclose that they're uncomfortable or vulnerable to the weather, and if they are refraining, they might be refraining out of politeness.

[00:13:30.530] 
They might be refraining because they don't think you'll agree. It's a way of indicating that you'll agree. It's prosocial. But I don't just want to limit it to the prosocial. I think also we have an active duty to complain so that we're not misrepresenting ourselves. So I do think there is something related to integrity, which I feel odd saying, because Kant would say complaining is the opposite of integrity, but I think there is something that bespeaks a kind of integrity or authenticity.

[00:13:59.320] 
If you let people know that you are not perfect, that you're not a rock, that you, too, suffer from some things that other people may be suffering from. One of the things I've tried to take seriously when I'm active on social media or when I'm active on a blog, I'm very much aware that I am not the underemployed, vulnerable kid that I was. I am now a tenured, gray haired senior person who might be more free to make complaints than other people are.

[00:14:31.600] 
And I think there is something good and important that those of us with Paines ought to do, which is to say, I feel alone here, and I feel like I'm in pain. And I think if we do that, we are being more honest about who we are and then it has the secondary effect of continuing to help other people who might need to know that lots of people suffer. 

[00:14:55.580] 
I think the duty is dual, maybe dual is not the right word. This duty seems to have a couple moral functions, and one of them is to help others, and another is to give an account of oneself to be honest about who one is. I would go so far as to even say and again, I feel awkward saying this because Aristotle takes courage to be a really basic character virtue and complaining to be wrong. But I want to say it even requires one to observe certain duties of personal courage and be less afraid to announce that one is in pain or vulnerable.

[00:15:37.760] 
So I do think this affective duty that I haven't completely worked out yet myself, that it will have this dual nature, that it will be for others sometimes.  It will be for oneself at other times, so that one could be a more honest, more courageous, less isolated person. 

[00:15:59.270] 
In the paper, I address the fact that some people say the reason I'm complaining is bad is because it expands it, it becomes sort of a contagion, it brings down a whole room. And every time I've done an interview about the complaining paper, someone will bring up someone they knew who complained a lot. Right. That it can be done to excess. Everyone knows someone who complains too much. And because we all know someone who complains too much, it seems obvious to us that complaining when is this excessive seems bad. So I want to acknowledge the fact that when it's excessive, it is bad in all the ways that psychologists like Robin Kowalski recognize and Julian Baggini catalogs it as well, that complaining can. It can complain and can affect a kind of a mood contagion where your complaint brings down other people rather than allowing them to help you. Complaining can become a habit and it can be a sort of association you run to when you could have tried to get hold of yourself to bear up under difficulties to help other people. So I think the problem is with the excess, and that's when I started thinking perhaps some of the grad students who have workshopped this paper to workshops are right, that then complaining is a virtue it emits of an excess.

[00:17:22.820] 
My paper saying there's such a thing as not complaining enough and we all know people who complain too much. So it's a virtue. And there I want to say it seems like at best it's a burdened virtue because I really take Aristotle's view of the good life very seriously and a good life and a good world and a good society. You wouldn't have to complain that much because we'd all be healthy, happy and well supported. So I don't know if it's a virtue, unless it's a burdened virtue in an ideal world.

[00:17:52.140] 
And that could be. And I think instead it's more like the skill of people who are really successful at sociality, who know when to share themselves, who know when to help others, and who know when to contribute to a relationship. That's what it seems to be. So I'm still defensive of complaining, even though I appreciate some serious negatives. 

[00:18:11.940] 
Future work on this has to include sorting out where the line is between complaining not enough and complaining too much. And I'm thinking about the psychological research that suggests if you complain and someone confirms your complaint, then I have to say they agree with you. They just have to say, wow, that sounds hard. You sound like you're suffering. If you complain and someone affirms you, then it lifts up your mood higher than it was before you complained. And they feel good seeing that you feel good. And if someone doesn't affirm you, your mood is lower than before you complain.

[00:18:44.180] 
It says bad news that if you complain and no one affirms you, you're worse off than before you complain. That's really bad news. But if that's the bad news than it does start to suggest an area where that line might be, the line might be somewhere where you believe that there's an opportunity for the other to affirm you. And if you know that you're talking to someone who is also burned out, who is emotionally depleted, who's suffering themselves.

[00:19:12.880] 
You're past the line of someone talking to someone who could affirm you and lift your mood and their own. So I think I'm on to something, but that's an area for future research and I might need a team of social scientists to help me do it. 

[00:19:29.900] 
In my article, I said, complaining helps ameliorate isolation, it helps people bond, you know, it reduces our loneliness or at least reveals us to each other in a way that would build relationships in my paper.

[00:19:42.080] 
The reason I often run to workplace examples is because I really do have this worry, especially here in late capitalism, that workplaces are set up to isolate us. So I am especially worried about students of mine who go into service professions and service jobs with high degrees of danger of burnout and ceasing to care about other people and feeling like you don't have other people. I worry about workplace situations because our employers I say this with all love in my heart from my employer, Trent University, excellent school.

[00:20:14.240] 
But all employers are set up to encourage you not to have complaints. They would prefer that we show up every day, that we never miss a day of work, that we don't give in to our feelings when we're giving a presentation or trying to sell something or trying to conduct business. Right. But because our workplaces are set up to. Intentionally or not, exploit workers and isolate workers. I think that is all the more reason to make a space for telling each other sometimes it's important to complain and not just to make the workplace better, but to build relationships in workplaces where we can trust each other to understand when we're having a bad day. 

[00:21:00.030] 
I think we're in a bad place, especially here in twenty twenty, where we are in late stage capitalism, where precarious employment is on the rise, where the gap between the rich and the poor has not been this wide, literally in a century where there's more displaced people on earth than there have been since World War Two, I think we are in a really bad place where it would be hard to describe many people as so powerful they have nothing to complain about.

[00:21:30.390] 
And instead, all I see around me in the world are people in differently awful positions. So I think even those of us who are extraordinarily lucky as I am, are in a position to model some skillful complaining and to encourage others to trust us with some of their complaints so that we can start to get together on what it is that hurts and how we can trust each other better to work together. Maybe not to make the world a better place, but to help each other bear up under it better.

[00:22:05.600] 
All of the topics I write on in one way or another keep returning to the same fact, which is that the world we live in is in an ideal world. And if anything, I would suggest that a material empirically measurable ways the world is worse than it was when I was five, when I was twenty five. We are worse off on many dimensions. When I say we, I mean humankind in all those different places, in all its different phases.

[00:22:35.630] 
So I think we're living in such not ideal circumstances that my attention is rather focused on how to manage how bad things are because they're good for so few of us comparatively. Well, I'm depressing. Why don't you talk to a happy person? Oh, no. The best thing about doing ethical theory is that it's about the practices of aiming for and maintaining something like a good life when the world is a bad place. But to me, that's the job of life.

[00:23:14.760] 
The job of life is to be happy anyway because we have robust capacities for happiness. We just have to figure out how to exercise them in a really bad world. I am I am completely convinced that social media took off for exactly this reason that we were so unbelievably and unconsciously lonely for affirmation, so desperate for it. And the longer we work at these jobs were staring into computers all day, the longer we work at precarious employment where we're constantly commuting and we're bouncing from town to town all day, the less opportunity we have to get affirmation of how we feel, in part because we don't feel free to complain at work.

[00:23:58.970] 
We don't feel like we're going to be affirmed in the public sphere and political communities or to the leaders that are frustrating us. We don't feel like we can affirm ourselves sufficiently. We feel alone and trapped and isolated. I think social media has done a lot to ameliorate isolation and I've really seen this during the pandemic that friends and acquaintances of mine have found social media a relief. You can't complain to your kids that they're food poisoning is slowing your ability to do your job full time.

[00:24:29.900] 
And when you're socially distancing, who else is there to complain to except possibly the live in partner who's also struggling with all the same things? My poor partner. So I think social media is a real life saver. And if it looks saturated with subjective complaints, that's because we have so few outlets to do it well and.

[00:24:50.600] 
Late capitalism seems the perfect time to turn to social media and complain. So the first time I ever wrote about complaining just did a quick conference paper to get my research off the ground. And the example I use was one that really bothered me. It was a friend of mine who had recently had knee surgery, who had been standing in their airport gate for three hours. There was no seat and they announced the plane was delayed again. And so the friend of mine took to social media and just did a public post saying plane delayed again.

[00:25:19.910] 
And someone immediately wrote back first world problems. And I thought, what an insensitive response to the friend of mine who's just had knee surgery recently. And then I remembered it's a public post to everyone in the world. They don't know that this person recently had knee surgery. They know only that someone who gets to fly places that sound fun is complaining about an aspect of flying. And that's when I first started thinking, there's got to be a way to complain well. To complain thoughtfully. And that means complain to the right people in the right time, at the right way and for the right reasons. So I know I sound like Aristotle's virtue ethics, but it's really useful in this situation. 

[00:26:02.260] 
I want to work on what the skill of complaining is. I think there are ways to complain badly, including maybe especially in groups where you are turning to people as friends or at least as recipients who you think you can trust with a complaint. I think it is a mistake to build into your complaint an apology for complaining. I see that a lot. But I think at moments when you need to contribute to your relationship or self disclose your pain. Apologizing for complaining is not skillful. It's a way of saying we agree that complaining is bad. But I don't agree that complaining is bad, and if someone apologizes for complaining again, I feel like they're saying implicitly, I shouldn't complain in turn.

[00:26:44.460] 
And that's not good, that's going to remain that's going to continue to maintain a culture which says none of us should be doing this. So I think skillfull complaining should never include an apology for complaining. You might want to include an apology for potentially tasking someone who's got troubles of their own. And I think there is a skill to complaining that involves not assuming anything about your recipient, because what I witnessed when I look at Twitter and Facebook is I witnessed one person saying indigenous people don't have drinkable water and someone will chime in who's not indigenous and say, my well runs ran dry and no one cares about my problems.

[00:27:27.570] 
And he seems to be saying is you can't complain because I have a complaint. But what I really see happening there is someone saying I, too, am suffering and no one seems to notice that I'm suffering. So the strategy is to invalidate the others complaint when in fact, what those two need to do is agree. We both need water. We both need water. Right. So I think if anything, there should be people who intervene and help people get together on their shared complaints.

[00:28:00.270] 
I saw this in the state of Wisconsin, too, where I got my PhD and still have family. I have enduring fondness for Wisconsin. But when I witnessed the people protesting at Wisconsin for better work conditions, for living wages, for things like a right to health care, a right to subsidized child care, there were counter protesters who would say things like, why should you have those things? I don't have those things. And of course, some of the labor activists were saying, I want us both to have those things.

[00:28:34.400] 
That's a form of skill, complaining when you tell the counter protester, I agree with you, that it's bad that you don't have these things, I'm not saying I should have them and you shouldn't. I'm saying all of us should have them. That's skill. 

[00:28:47.440] 
An interesting anomaly of the pandemic is that when it began, when a lot of us were thrust into working from home, when a lot of my colleagues were thrust into attempting to work from home and also doing twenty four, seven child care and also attempting to teach their children in addition to care for their children, in addition to doing their own full time jobs continually.

[00:29:08.590] 
And my friends with children found this ultimately not possible to do maximally. You cannot maximally work and care for your children and teach your children, elementary school kids, all three of these things simultaneously since you can't do all three of these things simultaneously. Many of my friends and acquaintances with children took to social media to complain. Their complaints were often not as skillful as they could be, and they took the form of saying that they wouldn't be suffering like this if they had no children.

[00:29:39.370] 
Those of us who are childless said that we felt a little put off by that because now I feel like I cannot complain as I don't have children, except I had complaints of my own. I, I was also thrust into positions I didn't expect. And so a lot of non skillfull complaint can happen on social media where we ended up criticizing each other when ideally we would have helped each other instead of criticizing each other for complaining non skillfully. So I think there is a lot of work to do there, too, to affirm each other's complaints instead of say, wait, but I have complaints too.

[00:30:15.970] 
Or but you don't have the complaints I have. I think there's something there's some skilled affirmation to do in the course of complaining. I think, among other things, we need to practice it. I think this means developing friendship networks on purpose, where you say, I believe that you are people I can trust and whom I can occasionally complain. And we don't do that often because, again, we tend to be encouraged to keep it secret that we have problems and pains at all, even when we're interacting with people on social media where presumably we're friends.

[00:30:47.920] 
But since I think it needs to be practiced, I think this does mean you should deliberately set up some close friend networks of two people or five people or nine people where you say, let's agree that we're going to meet on occasional basises. We can have some meetings where we drink coffee at each other. Right. Or we can just check in with each other on a regular basis and ask each other, how are you doing? And give each other honest answers.

[00:31:16.880] 
And I know social media doesn't encourage that because so much of it is pictorial, what it encourages is putting up the best photo of yourself and your family and your dog and your lawn that you could possibly put up. But we need this other thing, too, and we're bad at it, and I think it's why we ought to practice it all the more. 

[00:31:38.730] 
If there was anything I wanted to say about complaining during a pandemic, it would be that we should all help each other to create trusted spaces where we could complain to each other, because during a pandemic, almost everybody has a justified complaint of one sort or another.

[00:31:57.450] 
And I worry for people I know who start complaints on social media with the statement that they know they have nothing to complain about but, or they know other people are worse off but. I want to encourage people to recognize a pandemic is a pandemic. It is worldwide. There's no one untouched, and therefore everybody gets to complain a little. We should help each other be vulnerable together. We're stronger together, even when we feel like we're not strong.

[00:32:30.700] 
If I were to say one more thing, it would be. Everyone who hears about the ethics of complaint has homework, and that is to locate a trusted source and tell them explicitly, I want you to hear a complaint of mine and just let me know if you share it. So go out and build that trust network, try to start complaining excellently. This is only going to take off if multiple people work on developing that skill. Thank you in advance.

[00:33:10.070] - Wesley
That's it for today's episode. Visit our website at journal entries dot fireside dot fm for more information about katyhern norlock, her work and some of the resources mentioned on today's episode.