Agnes Callard's complaint more chronic than George Floyd protest

What happens if you are incapable of writing a single logically coherent sentence? I mean, a sentence which uses terms either as Tarskian primitives, in which case the terms are completely undefined and logical coherence can be imposed by the reader, or as being well defined for a certain purpose. In the latter case, the sentence must have the property of coherence. The purpose of the sentence- or, at least, its range of reference- must be clear and the thought it expresses must 'cohere'- i.e. stick together- for that purpose. Furthermore, there must be a 'propositional' relationship- deductive, inductive, explanatory or descriptive- between the parts of the sentence. Failure to write such a sentence disables you from following it with another sentence in a manner which could be said to set out an argument.

Agnes Callard suffers from a complaint which appears to be chronic in her profession- she being a Professor of moral philosophy. She can't write a single logically coherent sentence. Thus she is incapable of putting forward any sort of argument. 

Consider this article of hers published in The Point. 

Why Am I Being Hurt?

What is complaint, and what would it mean to see it as “infallible”?

A complaint is something identified as remediable by a protocol bound field of discourse. Thus, there are medical complaints- illnesses which Doctors will try to cure- and there are legal complaints- torts or crimes which Judges can deliberate on- administrative complaints etc. There can also be a literary genre of 'lover's complaints', which arise in courtly cultures. or even theological complaints (e.g. the Book of Job or Iqbal's Shikva) 

I suppose we would see as 'infallible' a complaint which frictionlessly procures its own remedy. Thus whining that one is being 'neglectioned' may be efficacious in getting you an absent minded caress though, no doubt, sooner or later your wife or g.f will leave you for someone less needy. Here, fallibility is associated with an acquired immunity to importunity.

Statements of distress are not necessarily complaints. The possibility that the making of the statement might procure the remedy- fallibly or infallibly- is what makes the thing a complaint. Assuming otherwise vitiates any argument one might advance regarding the nature of complaint in the same way that assuming cats are dogs vitiates the argument that cats say bow wow when they complain of neglect. The fact is, cats aren't dogs. That is part of our 'background knowledge'. An argument about complaining cats is vitiated by the assumption that they sometimes say bow wow. 

In what follows, Callard makes a mistake of this type- 

My youngest son was around ten months old when he figured out how to clap. The first time he did it, I watched his thrill at vigorously exercising this new power morph into tears. He held out his palms to me, wailing with accusation: Why am I being hurt? He had cried before, of course, but that was the first time he cried at me.

Delightful! Babies do know how to play nice games. They have a great sense of humor. This exceptionally bright baby had just figured how an entire genre of comedy works. You do something silly and then discover you have been observed- this is funny. Funnier yet is to reverse expectations and blame the audience for your silliness. This shows advanced 'theory of mind'. Moreover, in a loving relationship, this can highlight a naive cast of mind and cute type of dependence. Hubbies will say- 'due to why did you not even visit me when you went away?' The new bride may say- 'what do you mean? I told you I was popping down to the shops. I was away for just 15 minutes.' 'Fifteen minutes!' hubby howls and then the bride gets it- the fat slob thinks he is her little babykins. Awwwww! Come to think of it, he isn't really that fat. Something could be made of him.

I suppose evolutionary pressures were at work molding babies, molding parents, into such perfect companions for each other. No doubt, this is a male perspective. Still 'mansplaining' is in my genes. Also I'm very old and from a very backward part of the world.

It is axiomatic to me that Mums do the heavy lifting in the early years. But it is precisely Mum's greater sense of responsibility and superior 'multi-tasking' skills and mindset which makes her more worthy of the higher type of care or loving reward babies favor her with. 

Callard seemingly doesn't get that babies soon learn to cry in a particular way at the primary care-giver. This is a vital and wholly unique bond. The care-giver must recognize this. New mums get very good at this very very quickly. They say to Daddy, or Granny or whoever, 'No. Baby wants me. You can get him next time.' 

It seems strange that an educated woman, like Callard, is unaware that babies cry at Mums from before they have any theory of mind. On the other hand, we congratulate Callard- as a Mum- on having such a smart and witty 10 month old child. Clearly she does things right even if she writes things all wrong.     

Eight years later, there is a global pandemic, and he suffers daily from loneliness: “I am bored. Why won’t anyone play with me?”

It's due to daddy won't buy you a bow wow. 

 At the end of the day, he often proclaims, “This was the worst day of my life.” 

Just buy him a bow wow already. 

We mock him—“Was it the worst day of your life again?”—as though it were somehow logically impossible that his life has been steadily getting worse. 

Lack of bow wow is responsible for daily worsening in the condition of little boys everywhere. But puppies too are being deprived of a delightful companionship. 

He is regularly told to stop whining—a word chosen, out of irritation, with the precise aim of demoting his articulate pleas to the level of meaningless, droning noise. He is encountering a world averse to complaining.

Maybe someone in the family is allergic to dogs or puppies aren't allowed under the terms of the lease or something of that sort. Kids do have to get used to not getting things which they really really want. 

When, as adults, we ask for help, we are quick to follow up with “if you can’t, no problem.” 

That is a cultural matter. To refuse a request for help, in Thymotic Societies, is a very serious matter. In modern Western Societies, 'Thymotic functions' are discharged by certain professionals. It would be a very serious matter if a Police officer or a Medical Doctor refused a request for help of an eligible type. 

The phrase is an implicit promise that if the answer is “no,” that will be that; either way, I won’t complain.

But, equally, you may refuse to help me when I ask you to do so. This is made explicit, if you say 'do me a favor'. Favors are things which people return. 

On the other hand, if one is unlikely ever to be in a position to reciprocate, it makes sense to affirm this. This is also the case where no obligation or entitlement obtains.

 (Even the homeless person says, “Maybe next time.”) 

They might do. They might not.

The requests of children, 

are fundamentally different from the requests of those regarding whom we have no duty of care

by contrast, have a sticky, annoying residue.

No. They are delightful. The child is expressing a confidence and faith in us which, sadly, our material circumstances may not justify. This is not to say that the parent's desire to pluck down the moon to offer it as a toy to her lonely child is not perhaps the finest response to the child's 'complaint'. It is a mistake to think the quality of such relationships is a function of monetary or time constraints.

 Whatever they ask for—“can I have this toy?,” “will you play with me?,” “can I stay up a little later?,” “it hurts, make it better!”—it’s clear that if you say no, it is going to be a problem.

It is equally clear that there is some answer other than no which the child would value, or come to value, even more than 'yes'. 

As adults, we wish to project resourcefulness, initiative and toughness; we become proficient at erasing the sticky residue. 

I don't. Why? Because I'm an adult. As a kid, no doubt, I might have wanted to be Batman. But, putting on your y-fronts over your trousers is silly- at least that's the realization I came to in my forties. People kept mistaking me for John Major.

Kant tells you, severely, that “Complaining and whining, even crying out in bodily pain, is unworthy of you,”

it is unworthy of 'homo noumenon', the 'supersensible self', which is beyond our ken. Kant wasn't married. Whining is the only thing which gets me laid. Neandertal men didn't know how to whine. That's why they are extinct. 

 and Aristotle disparagingly associates complaints with “the weaker sex, and the effeminate sort of man.” 

That pedant was always whining about some shite or the other. 

Friedrich Nietzsche is equally dismissive: “Complaining is never of any use: it comes from weakness.”

This didn't stop him whining about all sorts of shite.

 The censure of complaint seems to come as naturally to adults as complaint itself does to children.

Till you complain about their behavior and they call you a big poopy-head.

And yet there was one philosopher, Simone Weil, who

was too stupid to do math 

 saw complaint as beautiful—even sacred.

She went mad and starved to death 

 She wrote:
Whenever a man cries inwardly, “Why am I being hurt?” harm is being done to him. He is often mistaken when he tries to define the harm, and why and by whom it is being inflicted on him. But the cry itself is infallible. …

That batty bint thought 'Justice consists in seeing that no harm is done to men.' She was wrong. It really isn't the job of the Justice system to ensure I don't stub my toe. 

When a man cries inwardly 'Why am I not able to suck my own cock?'- as happens more frequently than Callard might imagine- his cock may in fact be being sucked. Similarly he might say to himself 'Why am I being hurt by some invisible bloke  who just punched me in the kidneys?' However, it may turn out he has a kidney stone. Nobody was harming him in the manner he imagined. 

The part of the soul which asks, “Why am I being hurt?” is the deep part which, in every human being, even the most corrupt, remains from earliest infancy perfectly intact and perfectly innocent.

Very true! Jews really should have shown more empathy for poor old Hitler who was constantly crying out with the innocent part of his soul against that nasty Churchill and that nastier Roosevelt and so forth who kept killing off his soldiers. 

To her credit, Weil did want to wield a gun in the liberation of France. But her eyesight was very poor. She was deemed too grave a threat to her own side.

What is complaint, and what would it mean to see it as “infallible”?

A complaint, as I said before, is well defined by protocol bound decision processes for various useful purposes. I suppose if it were 'infallibly' linked to a remedy, we might say it has that quality. 

Weil’s essential contribution to the theory of complaint comes by way of her

talking mystic bollocks. Still she was a good person- though mad- and her brother was real smart.

 distinction between ordinary suffering and something she calls “affliction.”

There can be an afflicter. There is no corresponding term for the one who inflicts suffering. This is because a lot of suffering isn't caused by anyone.

 Suffering is pain one can bear, 

Not necessarily. Someone suffering from cancer might die. 

pain that does not imprint itself on the soul. 

Which is why it is wrong for people who were tortured in Concentration Camps, where they saw their loved one's being butchered, to pretend that their soul had been harrowed. Incidentally, the Germans had a notion of 'soul murder' connected with extreme child abuse- e.g. that which may have been suffered by Caspar Hauser. 

Sometimes, we even choose suffering, as in strenuous exercise, unmedicated childbirth or getting one’s ears pierced.

That is pain- not suffering.

 Getting beat up in an alleyway by strangers is not like any of those forms of suffering. 

No shit Sherlock!

A violent attack, even one that does minimum physical damage,

e.g when baby tries to eat your nose

 hurts in a distinctive way—in a way that, as Weil would put it, raises a question.

Fortunately, Pearl Harbor didn't 'raise a question' for Roosevelt. He set himself to fuck over the Nips but good. 

“The same event may plunge one human being into affliction and not another,” writes Weil. 

It is true that crazy people, like Weil, might starve to death though food was available. However, we say- as the coroner did in Weil's case- that the balance of her mind was disturbed. We don't say her soul had gone meshuggenneh. 

Her view is that the kind of suffering that makes a mark on the soul is incomprehensible suffering.

Incomprehensible to a crazy person- sure

 

Even as great an evil as religious persecution doesn’t necessarily entail affliction;

if you kill those doing the persecution

 Weil says that the persecuted “only fall into a state of affliction if suffering or fear fills the soul to the point of making it forget the cause of the persecution.”

So you are not afflicted with cancer unless your fear of cancer causes to forget you have cancer. All medical afflictions would cease to exist if only people forgot what was causing them to die. 

It is possible to present Weil's work in a manner which does not make that poor loon come across as an utter imbecile. Weil was well educated and, in flashes, wrote quite well. But Callard can't bring this out.

Many of our frustrations with our children lie in the fact that they have not yet learned to find certain forms of—trivial, mundane—suffering to be intelligible.

This is not true. Our frustrations with our children are a function of our lack of aptitude for parenting. I get frustrated trying to do maths- coz I iz stooopid. I suppose I would get frustrated if I were trying a kid maths- coz I is stoopid and terrible at teaching and kids run away when they see me.

 Young children do not seem to understand any suffering. 

This may be the case of small babies or developmentally challenged infants. The fact is most babies are very good at using the few communicative signals in their possession to utterly enchant their carers. I noticed that baby, who had been happily playing with me for an hour, suddenly gives out a great howl of distress on seeing Mum come through the door. She in turn understands that baby thinks Mum is super-special. Being away from her is a terrible torment. But then, her husband showed similar behavior during the courtship or (in India- where there is arranged marriage) the honeymoon.  

Yet even after we exit childhood, we are guaranteed to encounter misfortunes that surpass our understanding.

A misfortune is understood as a departure from the desired state. That is all we need to understand to wish to find a means to overcome it. 

 If Weil is right, the form that these experiences take is interrogative:

she is wrong. It is investigative and experimental. We first try various 'ready at hand' solutions before resorting to 'interrogative' methods. Thus, I thump the computer and check the connections and press Alt/Control/Delete etc before I start shouting at it demanding to know why it won't fucking work. 

 the expression of affliction, because it is a request for understanding, comes in the form of a question.

Coz asking your toaster why it won't function properly is the sensible thing to do. 

At a low point in his life, in a cemetery in Greece, my husband cried out to God: “Why am I so lonely?” A puppy approached him—one of the countless starving, wretched offspring of the roving bands of dogs that plague Athens. The puppy was grateful to be petted, and tried to follow when my husband turned to leave. The puppy’s pleading eyes tugged at my husband’s conscience, and he reports imagining a speech he might give it: “I could take you home, and take care of you, and relieve your suffering. That is within my power. But it would require an overhaul of my life—I’d have to move to a different apartment, for starters. I’m not willing to do all that on your behalf. You can’t grasp these reasons, but they are why your suffering will continue.” And then he realized perhaps God would have given him a similar speech: “Yes, I could end your loneliness, but I choose not to. I have my reasons; they transcend your understanding.”

The guy didn't see that the benefits of having a dog would outweigh the costs. God may feel similarly about some of us believers. That doesn't 'transcend our understanding' at all. We feel sure, the really good people will be taken up by Him to continue to do his good work or receive an eternal reward.

We do not usually feel able to speak in this way to another human being—to ask after the cause of our suffering,

God is omniscient. Other people aren't. Asking God why there is cancer is not the same thing as asking the dude sat next to you in the Dentist's waiting room.

 as my husband did when he spoke to God, or to answer such a question with the brutal directness with which my husband imagined answering the dog.

Imagination may be a good thing. Buy imagining stupid shit is a stupid thing to do. 

It is not the homeless person’s voice but their face that asks you “Why am I cold?” and “Why am I hungry?”—or, worst of all, “Why is it that no one will ever expect anything of me?” 

This is not the case. The 1966 BBC film 'Cathy come home' highlighted the plight of 'respectable' working people who could slide into homelessness. Voters then forced Governments to change Housing policy such that the problem was properly tackled. It turned out, doing so more than paid for itself.  

Callard, it is true, is writing of a diverse country where there is considerable variation in Housing policy and entitlements. However, economists tend to agree that tackling the problem would reduce other types of Government spending even more. This does not require talking bollocks. It requires doing sums- or Googling the people who have already done the sums.

Imagine really asking this question, out loud, with words; imagine really trying to answer it, out loud, with words.

What happens? You notice you are speaking in an unctuous tone. You catch a glimpse of yourself in the mirror. OMG! You have turned into a virtue signaling blathershite!

In the (admittedly

but insufficiently

 small) contemporary philosophical literature on complaint, one finds a sharp distinction that I will mark with the terms “protest” and “venting.” 

The problem with valorizing 'protest' is that everybody hoards up grievances of their own which they can use to trump the protests of others. 

Protest is complaint that calls out injustice and demands what is morally due.

If the matter is justiciable, then there may be a legal complaint but not necessarily protest. A political protest may or may not be moral. Its purpose is to signal 'preference intensity' and affect 'coalition formation'. The problem is that people who join in protesting one thing- e.g. the plight of the Palestinians- may find they have only contributed to something else entirely- viz. anti-Semitism. 

 It aims at concrete social change,

It may do, but it may be equally about preserving the status quo. It seems Callard is talking about some special sort of protest which

 

 operates within the constraints of a normative system that dictates who is owed what, by whom, under what circumstances. 

The problem here is that 'normative systems' are not closely tied to states of the world. They are compatible with a variety of Structural Causal Models.  Thus it can't be the case that something which aims at 'concrete social change' is 'constrained' by a normative system. There could always be a SCM associated with the desired transition vector which would fit any normative system.

Venting is complaint as emotional expression. 

It may be strategic. Thus, if I know you are a bore and want to bite my ear off about Global Warming, I start venting about the terrible persecution endured by Iyers at the hands of Iyengars. 

When we are in distress, whether justifiably or not, we often turn to our intimates for a sympathetic ear, and to get things off our chest.

But they retaliate in like terms. 

Though these two activities can be mixed with one another—a given instance of protest may include an emotionally expressive element; venting is often infused with accusations of wrongdoing—it is nonetheless striking how much they intrinsically differ.

And yet, politicians understand that they cash out as the same thing. Protest becomes venting if it is just ceremonial and doesn't change anything. Venting can become protest if there is a possibility the thing could change things. 

Consider the Yellow Vest or BLM or other similar protests. At what point, in the opinion of their opponents, did they cease to be 'protests' and degenerate into mere 'venting'? Could that be reversed? Will there be a back-lash? Much depends on how protests are managed. That means disintermediating cretins like Callard. 

 The expressive courting of empathy 

doesn't necessarily involve 'complaint' or 'protest'. 

and the indignant moral demand 

a demand may not be a complaint

don’t, on the surface, seem to have much to do with each other. Why are both of these things called “complaint”?

They aren't. Callard is merely saying that 'complaint' may be a subset of both. This is like saying cats and categories don't seem to have much to do with each other. Why are they both called 'words'? This is a stupid question because that cat over there isn't called a 'word'. It is called a cat. On the other hand the cat that you will now see within brackets (cat) isn't a cat. It is merely a word. 

Protest depends on the existence of a normative relationship:

No. The relationship may be purely economic. Tax payers may protest not because they think taxes are unfair but because they don't want to pay them. 

 we stand to the people around us in relations determined by rights, duties, agreements, promises.

This is not true. There have been plenty of protests against America or Israel by people who don't think there is any normative relationship between themselves and the Americans or the Israelis. They are merely expressing their extreme displeasure that all the Americans and all the Israelis aren't dead. That is why they shout 'Death to America'. They don't think Americans have a duty to die or have promised to did, they just want them to fucking die already. 

 Venting, by contrast, depends on the fact that we stand to others in kinship bonds of emotional connection and sympathetic communion. 

Quite untrue. I will happily vent about all sorts of shit to anybody too drunk to move sharply away.

I propose that the reason these are both called “complaint”

only by Callard

 is that both normative and sympathetic relations can, under conditions of suffering, become parasitic on a deeper one: the interrogative relation.

Only in the sense that chopping off your head and shoving it up your arse could, under the condition of the suffering caused by having your big fat head crammed up your poop hole, become parasitic on the interrogative relationship founded upon your talking out of your arse.  

 In addition to being someone I respect, or someone I care about, a third role that another person can play, for me, is that of being a source of questions or answers.

Only if you ascribe that role to them. However, you could equally assign them the role of the Cat King of Belgium, as far as you are concerned, to anyone unfortunate enough not to be able to get away from your incessant chatter. 

 We are familiar with this role in the context of intellectual inquiry;

We are more familiar with this role in the context of conversing with cretins

 the phenomenon of complaint proves that it has a place in the ethical sphere as well.

No. A phenomenon is not a proof. 

The basic content of complaint is a question about why some bad thing is happening. 

No. A complaint arises when there is a report that a bad thing is happening. That is the case with medical complaints, legal complaints, lover's complaints etc etc. An aetiology may be supplied or several may be suggested. But it is not necessary for there to be an aetiology. It is sufficient that a bad thing is happening for a complaint to exist. 

Protesters and venters ask this question rhetorically. 

They may do. They may not. Shouting 'Death to America' may be enough for their humble purposes. 

The venter asks it of her intimate friends, expecting not answers, but empathy; whereas the protester asks it of fellow citizens of some normative community, expecting not answers, but change.

Not necessarily. Furthermore, there is no need to 'vent' to get empathy from intimates nor does one have to stage a protest to get fellow citizens to agree that such and such change is needful. 

Venting and protesting are sophisticated permutations of something that is simpler, more direct and nonrhetorical.

We don't know that. They may be purely mimetic or strategic signaling or screening devices. We don't have a deterministic structural causal model of 'venting' or 'protesting'. These are descriptive words which do not correspond to well-defined mathematical functions. 

 Originally, a complaint is a question. 

This simply isn't the case. It is an assertion or is inferred as in the doctrine of res ipsa loquitur.

And while it is possible to protest unreasonably or to vent improperly, the source of protest and venting is something that is immune from these kinds of error. 

Nonsense! Callard may think the Capitol Hill riot- or shitshows dreamt up by QAnon- are ab ovo, 'immune from errors of reason or propriety'. But we think she is a cretin.

One cannot go wrong in noticing one’s own pain,

Yes one can. There may be something more urgent you need to be noticing. Anyway, most of the time, one doesn't have to make any special effort to do so.

 and one cannot go wrong in wanting to know why one is being made to feel it. 

Yes one can for the same reasons.

A rhetorical question

is one for which no answer is expected- e.g 'what the fuckity fuck?' or 'are we having fun yet?'

 is a disguised assertion,

No.  It may be purely phatic. An assertion, disguised or otherwise, has propositional content. 

 and so it can be true or false; a real question doesn’t have a truth value,

If it has informational content, then it is a 'mixed proposition' with some truth value. 'When did you stop beating your wife?' is a mixed proposition. It may be a real question or it may be an ad hominem attack. 'What is who?' may be a real question. It may be nonsense. 

 and this is why there is something buried inside every complaint that is, just as Weil says, infallible.

but only in the sense that we can infallibly assert that the head you stuffed up your arse is talking through it. 

Weil thought it was also somewhat ineffable. 

Why? Because she believed that when Christ on the Cross said 'Eloi Eloi lama sabachthani', he was complaining about how Crucifixion is like real painful dude. But this is the opening line of Psalm 22. Christ was saying to everybody- but most especially to his Mum who was in the crowd- I was cast upon thee from the womb: thou art my God from my mother's belly- the word for womb (rahum) being linked, in Semitic languages, to mercy, compassion and forgiveness. In this case, we feel the mother was consoled though what she was watching was unbearable. 

She describes the question as existing, hidden and buried, only within the recesses of the deepest part of the soul:

But Psalm 22 had been around for a thousand years! Everybody there- save the Roman centurions- knew every single word of it! The thing wasn't buried or hidden. It's what everybody heard at Synagogue and learnt at shul!

It is true that some stupid academics were making a big thing out of alterity and the  I-Thou relationships and so on back then. It was just a fad. So long as Marxism was around, there was a small but secure enough market for Hegelian shite. But why should any of us bother with that nonsense now? We know that Husserl was useless. Brouwer was useful. The concept of a 'two-ity' has been productive. Husserlian shite has been an absurd waste of time. 

 “the cry hardly ever expresses itself, either inwardly or outwardly, in coherent language.” 

The language may be coherent. But the voice is too muffled to make out. That's one good reason why you shouldn't chop off your own head and stuff it up your pooper. 

Weil thought it took a genius to articulate the question of affliction:

Then she starved to death coz she wasn't enough of a genius to figure out that eating is a good idea. There's a trick or two Gandhi could have taught her. Sadly, her brother, at Aligarh, adopted a Gandhian reading of the Gita (apparently from Vijayraghavan) and this stupidity of his almost cost him his life. Still, his mathematical work has proven very useful. Shame about his sis. Maybe, if she'd been put on the right meds she wouldn't have written such stupid shite.

to find the words which express the truth of their affliction, the words which can give resonance, through the crust of external circumstances, to the cry which is always inaudible: ‘Why am I being hurt?’ … they can count only upon men of the very highest genius: the poet of the Iliad, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Shakespeare as he was when he wrote Lear, or Racine when he wrote Phèdre. There are not very many of them.

But the author of the words Weil was talking about was King David or some other such dude from 3000 years ago. 

The Greek chorus complains, in a detached, impersonal and universalist vein, of man’s short, painful destiny and of his fickle, ignorant nature; and Shakespeare’s heroes and antiheroes complain, often in private, inward monologue, of the torments of their own existence.

And every other old Tamil or Bollywood movie in my video collection has at least one song on this theme. 

 Elsewhere Weil mentions the laments of Job, which I would note are peppered with interrogatives—for example, “Why did I not perish at birth, and die as I came from the womb?”

Why? It was already known in the Nineteen Thirties that this was an established genre of wisdom literature across the Empires and Kingdoms of the region. 

 Great art is great partly because it gives us direct access to the heart of complaint—true complaint, expressed nonrhetorically.

Callard has had access to a really expensive education. Yet she is as stupid as shit. 

 But if, outside works of art, such questions are typically buried and hidden and unspoken, what is the import of recognizing their presence?

Access to bullshitting is gained.

Railing against American political correctness in the 1990s,

as it was fashionable to do after Allan Bloom's 'Closing of the American Mind' became a best-seller

 the Australian critic Robert Hughes disparaged what he saw as an “infantilized culture of complaint,” in which “to be vulnerable is to be invincible. Complaint gives you power—even when it’s only the power of emotional bribery.” At one point, Hughes references, as the universal target of complaint, an embattled character he calls “that Blond Beast of the sentimental imagination, the heterosexual middle-class white male.” That is but one of the many indications that his critique of complaint traces back to Nietzsche.

Callard is confusing the 'culturing'- i.e. fostering- of a thing in an artificial way- with the thing itself. Hughes does not critique complaint. He suggests that the thing has hypertrophied in an unhealthy and unnatural manner. He attacks neo-cons for creating an 'exaggerated bogey called multiculturalism', and the fact that the 'white American male' had started 'bawling for victim status too'. 

Hughes thought there was something wrong with America's 'therapeutic culture' which fostered false complaints which it then got rich treating. He says 'The all-pervasive claim to victimhood tops off America's long-cherished culture of therapeutics. To seem strong may only conceal a rickety scaffolding of denial, but to be vulnerable is to be invincible. Complaint gives you power - even when it's only the power of emotional bribery, of creating previously unnoticed levels of social guilt'. This has nothing to do with Nietzsche who went mad and died before any sort of 'Psychoanalysis' was available. I believe there were some very painful treatments for syphilis- which is what that nutter had. 

Nietzsche was a great complainer—one of the greatest who ever lived.

He had a painful medical complaint. That's true enough. But, unlike Callard, he could write well.

 I believe that many of those who praise his writing style are responding to how well he can recruit our emotions in the service of attending to his myriad complaints. 

This is because Callard has no literary taste whatsoever. The fact is Nietzche got off some zingers. 

Unfortunately, Nietzsche’s understanding of complaint was not on par with his skill at engaging in it. Nietzsche’s account of complaint is that it aims to spitefully infect others with one’s own emotional pain—“there is a subtle dose of revenge in every complaint”—as well as to fabricate grounds for moral condemnation.

No. Nietzche does not have an account of complaint. He does not say there is no such thing as a medical or legal or a noise complaint etc. He says there is a type of complaining- one which seeks an aetiology (which is what Callard thinks should happen) so as to fasten blame on an alterity- which is mischievous. 

He says of the 'anarchist' - 

'A drive to find causes is powerful in him: it must be somebody's fault that he's feeling bad . . . Even his 'beautiful indignation' does him good; all poor devils like to whine--it gives them a little thrill of power. Even complaints, the act of complaining, can give life the charm on account of which one can stand to live it: there is a subtle dose of revenge in every complaint; one blames those who are different for one's own feeling bad, and in certain circumstances even being bad, as if they were guilty of an injustice, a prohibited privilege. 'If I'm a lowlife, you should be one too': on this logic, revolutions are built.'

Beneath a façade which “insists on ‘right,’ ‘justice,’ ‘equal rights’ with such beautiful indignation,” the protester’s true motive is to find an excuse to pin the blame on someone: “it must be somebody’s fault that he’s feeling bad.” 

Nietzche says the Christian is just as bad though he pretends to blame himself and get us to say 'we are all guilty'

Venting is really sadism: “all poor devils like to whine—it gives them a little thrill of power.”

No. A devil who is poor has nobody to be sadistic to. Whimpering in a corner with a fellow whimperer isn't sadism. It's just a case of 'birds of a feather'.

Nietzsche’s understanding of complaint is

unknown to us. He has described more or less fraudulent types of complaining. Nothing more. 

 one on which both the moral connection foregrounded in protest

Nietzsche denies there is any such moral connection for either the Anarchist or the Christian. In his day, both Church and State were far more hierarchical than they are now. Some believed this hierarchy should be overturned but Nietzsche condemned them. He thought the result would be degeneration ('the last man') rather than upward evolution. 

 and the empathetic connection foregrounded in venting take a pathological turn: the complainer stands in a dysfunctional normative and emotional relationship to the person addressed by the complaint. 

No.Nietzsche is saying there is a large herd of poor, uneducated, rancorous people who would only too willingly give ear to angry 'Anarchists' as well as unctuous 'Christian' pi-jaw merchants. 

In particular, this relationship is adversarial; complaint, according to Nietzsche, is a mechanism by which sufferers abuse those people to whom they have moral or emotional ties.

No. They have no 'ties' to those they 'ought' to be subordinate to. We don't say we have ties to the Queen. We say we are the loyal subjects of her Brittanic Majesty. No doubt, many of us may feel we have 'emotional ties' to a beloved monarch. But they are not reciprocal. Few of us imagine we could pop down the street to Bucking Palace to borrow a cup of sugar.  

Strikingly, Nietzsche correctly identifies the intellectual problem at the heart of complaint: he says that the complainer “cannot grasp why he really suffers,” 

Callard is lying. Nietzsche does not say that a guy complaining of pains in his chest can't grasp that he is having a heart attack. The fellow may have been mad. He wasn't entirely stupid. What he said was- “When the anarchist, as the mouthpiece of the declining levels of society, insists on 'right,' 'justice,' 'equal rights' with such beautiful indignation, he is just acting under the pressure of his lack of culture, which cannot grasp why he really suffers, what he is poor in– in life.'

So, the problem is 'lack of culture'. 

and that this is what leads him to cast around for someone to blame. But Nietzsche refuses to take seriously the human need to render suffering intelligible.

Rubbish! The guy just said 'lack of culture' is what frustrates this 'human need'. Provide more culture (but properly feed and house the people first) and there would be no need to fear the mischief caused by the anarchist or the unctuous Bible basher. 

Nietzsche is right that the moral and the empathetic relation can become adversarial; 

as when your head is adverse to being cut off by you and your poop hole is adverse to having your head stuck up it

what he fails to note is that the interrogative relation is precisely the one that cannot.

coz interrogating yourself while talking out of your arse is not adverse but perverse

 Insofar as I see you as an answer-haver, I cannot see you as my enemy. 

Yet Kiefer Sutherland kept torturing all the various terrorists who were his enemies  so as to get answers.

The interrogative element is not only fundamental to the complaint but also the infallible part of it;

It is neither fundamental nor infallible. 

 silencing it perverts the communicative act of complaint

silencing communication tends to reduce its efficacy

 into something that is liable to become abuse.

Interrogation can become torture but a torturer who asks no questions and isn't listening to anything his victim says is not engaging in interrogation. This is purely an exercise in punishment or sadism.

I suppose what Callard is getting at is that iff 'why are you doing this to me?' is the 'fundamental' structure of a complaint and iff this question always elicited a response and iff 'silencing' is going on- for example gags are being used- then instead of communication, some type of coercion is occurring. 

But the truth maker for 'liable to become abuse' is abusive behavior. There is no necessary or sufficient link between what Callard has posited and its occurrence. We may gag or otherwise coercively rid ourselves of a noisy nuisance. But this would occur whether or not that nuisance involved saying 'why are you doing this to me?' or singing 'Bird is the word' loudly and incessantly.

 Like every form of cynicism, Nietzsche’s leads one to treat people in such a way that their responses will confirm one’s theory;

No form of cynicism leads one to treat people in any specific way. There is no 'conceptual tie to action'. A cynic or a stoic may continue to treat people in a well bred manner- if they are actually well bred. Furthermore, they can easily decide to interpret the responses of other people in the light of their own theory. 

Lots of different people, with very different personalities and styles of behavior were followers of Nietzsche. Callard is making a vulgar error. She thinks people who read Machiavelli were machiavellian. Those who read Nietzsche were Nietzchean. Why stop there? Why not say people who read Batman are caped crusaders against crime? Those who read Harry Potter are wizards?

 a Nietzschean approach to complaint causes the very pathologies it describes.

No it doesn't. Telling whiners to fuck off does not cause them to whine- at least not to you. 

 If we currently live in what Hughes disparaged as a “culture of complaint,” or what Julian Baggini calls “a grievance culture,” this culture is born partly from a Nietzschean misunderstanding of complaint.

Rubbish! If everybody who complained about anything was told to fuck off, or beaten till they fucked off, or just gassed in a Concentration Camp, there would be no 'culture of complaint'. Nazi Germany really didn't have a Jewish Lives Matter or Gypsy Lives Matter or Gay Pride parade. 

 We would do better to start taking our cue from Weil.

And starving to death at the age of 34. At least that would prevent us writing more and more shite. The fact is, if Hitler and Co. had heard of Weil's death and her ludicrous notions re the efficacy of crying 'why are you doing this to me', they would have laughed their heads off. Thankfully, Churchill and Roosevelt didn't whimper about why Tojo and Hitler were being so mean. They fucked those two scoundrels over but good. 

A standing trope in heterosexual relationships is that women become annoyed when men respond to their venting by trying to fix the problem. 

It was preceded by the trope that women talk too much. They should be obscene not heard. 

This is often cast, by men, as a mysterious and irrational proclivity for communal anguish. 

No. Men just say 'bitches be kray kray. Their mouth always be flapping'. 

So Aristotle: “the weaker sex, and the effeminate sort of man, welcome those who join in their groans.” 

Whereas smart dudes share good fortune but keep misfortune to themselves. The pay off is your true friends turn up to relieve you unasked. Obviously, this also happens to women and 'effeminate men'. However, if they tend to get more frequently asked to do stuff for others gratuitously then putting up a screen of complaint makes sense. It deters those who want stuff from you because they have to put up with an earful before managing to get a word in. 

Perhaps the more Nietzschean among men even see women as taking pleasure in forcing others to suffer. 

From syphilis?

Drawing on Weil suggests a different approach; let me illustrate with my own life.

I am involved in a long-standing relationship that causes me substantial suffering. When I complain about it—as I do, regularly, to my husband, my ex-husband, my friends, my sister—I can feel, on their part, a standing temptation to respond with “just break it off!” 

We feel they may want to break things off with Callard.

And sometimes they yield to this temptation. But I’m grateful for all the times they don’t—for all the times they not only put up with but even actively elicit, from me, my newest and sharpest account of why and how I see myself as being mistreated.

Perhaps Callard has some charm in person severely missing from her writing. 

 You might wonder why I subject myself to such a relationship—I wonder about it, too, and the people I love, instead of cutting off that wondering, are willing to help me do it.

Perhaps in the hope that Callard will take up wandering instead of wondering.

We often speak, vaguely and somewhat vacuously, of the importance of being a good listener, but Weil gives us a substantive grip on what this might mean. 

Indeed. A good listener would starve to death while you just drone on and on. Fuck. I've just realized why nobody comes to my dinner parties. 

A good listener does not merely hear what you say, she listens for the underlying question that animates your words—the question hidden inside your complaint.

But what about the complaint hidden inside that question? A really good listener would listen for it, while a Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious listener would listen for the question hidden inside that complaint hidden within the previous question while doing the washing up and putting out the garbage.

 Listening well isn’t, in the first instance, about empathetic connection or moral accountability. It is about occupying the interrogative position.

Listening to Callard is about occupying the toilet stall next to hers and not being able to get away coz u have diarrhea and that bitch just keep flapping her mouth.

So much for venting; 

Thank you 'the Point' for letting this pinhead vent to us at such pointless and inordinate length! Apparently, the guys who founded it were doing PhDs in useless shite at Chicago. We get it, guys. You were swindled. The education you received was worthless. Sue the bastids and get your money back. 

now consider an example of protest. In the spring and summer of 2020, people around the world carried signs that read “Justice for George Floyd.” A plausible interpretation of those signs—it was mine, at any rate—was as demanding that Derek Chauvin, the police officer seen on videos to be suffocating Floyd, be held accountable for his actions.

That is not a plausible interpretation at all. Placards reading 'I can't breathe' indicate that something systemic was being protested against. Only if the placards mentioned Chauvin would Callard's interpretation be plausible. 

 However, a year later, when Chauvin was convicted of Floyd’s murder, U.S. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, echoing the sentiments of many, described the verdict as “not justice” and “not a substitute for policy change.” She also said, “Justice is George Floyd going home tonight to be with his family.”

What's wrong with that? It is highly plausible that Floyd's life- like that of millions of other African Americans- would be very different but for systemic discrimination and injustice of a type which has raised taxes and made things worse for everybody. Even racists want to change this crazy system. 

A Nietzschean interpretation of Ocasio-Cortez’s reaction is easy to construct: the idea that a protest aims at a concrete, achievable social improvement is mere pretense.

Does Callard really not believe that 'achievable social improvement' won't arise from 'pattern and practice investigation' and 'consent decree' based reform? There seems good evidence that the thing works. The problem was that momentum towards this was lost because of Trump's surprise victory. 

 Bait and switch is built into protest, because its true aim is the unlimited infliction of suffering by the powerless on the powerful. 

Why accept a 'Nietzschean' picture, when you can accept a QAnon picture whereby Oprah and Ellen and maybe AOC and Kamala Harris are all using the Post Office as a cover for a vast pedophile ring. I may mention that they are also after my hot bod. AOC literally raped me with her eyes the last time she appeared on my TV screen.

On a Nietzschean picture, the idea that protest aims at concrete social improvement involves false consciousness.

the notion that morality is good for you? How so? Callard won't tell us. I suspect she is thinking of the Engelian notion of false class consciousness.

 When protesters speak as though some “policy change” would satisfy them, a Nietzschean might say that they’re using that term so expansively that its chances for realization within our lifetimes are about equal to those of Floyd’s being brought back from the dead.

In other words, they are the dupes of a sinister elite who may be using the Post Office as part of an evil plan to get hold of my hot bod and let AOC sate her vile lust upon it. 

If we use Weil to interpret reactions to the verdict, we can 

starve to death

accommodate shifts in the target of protest with a much less nefarious rationale. Protest speaks in a translated language, the original of which was complaint. What gets lost in translation is the part of the complaint that could not be formulated as a request, or as a demand, or as a right, or as an entitlement. Complaint is what animates protest; protest politicizes complaint—but never fully, because the protester’s demands must capture, in the language of a demand, something whose form is essentially that of a question. We should expect variation, over time, with respect to what the question projects into the normative and political sphere.

So, the George Floyd movement was about stupid peeps scratching their heads and saying 'why, dear racist cop, are you hurting me?' Sadly, this question (which Callard says is a complaint) was translated into 'stop racist cops hurting peeps'. For Callard, this represents a 'loss'. But we think Callard lost her marbles long ago. 

Commenting on the verdict, Floyd’s brother Philonise said, “We ought to always understand that we have to march. We will have to do this for life. We have to protest because it seems like this is a never-ending cycle.”

What is the context? It is that the Trump Presidency involved a roll-back of Justice Department pattern and practice investigation and consent decree based reform. Any complacency which might previously have existed in this connection has been dispelled. The world was shocked that Police Union Chiefs could get their members trained in 'killology'. The larger question was whether Trump would be re-elected because of a White backlash against BLM. As things are, some States appear to be going down a very bad road indeed. Will Biden be able to avert this? This remains to be seen.

 And yet he also said, holding back tears of relief, “We are able to breathe again.” His experience is, on the one hand, of having gotten the outcome he asked for, and, on the other hand, of knowing that he will for the rest of his life be continuing to pose the question: “Why are we being hurt?”

I doubt this. Philnoise is an ordinary bloke- a trucker, I believe. His brains have not been buggered by Post Graduate degrees in worthless shite. He knows, all Americans know, that the 'why' has to do with money. Opioid addiction was very very profitable. There is a profitable nexus between the criminal justice system and privatized prisons as well as police departments which use fines and confiscations to finance themselves. 

What is important to identify is the 'how' of the hurt. Disable the mechanism through which the injury is inflicted- i.e. change the incentive structure- and you reduce the injustice.

Wailing and shitting yourself and invoking Simone, the nutter, Weil while making big big eyes and screaming 'Why are you doing this to me?' won't help anybody. 

On the other hand it is good to know that Agnes Callard thinks George Floyd getting choked to death was as important as some long standing relationship she is in which she keeps venting to all and sundry about. It is sad that there has been so little global protest against her horrendous suffering. Why is she being hurt? For Simone Weil, there was the notion of the khorban or pharmakos- the scapegoat- which suffers hurt so as to harrow Hell and bring about a universal redemption. What about Agnes? Are her terrible torments and travails a new chapter in the Book of Life? Is she the Paraclete- come to heal our souls?

I asked Prof Magnus Mallard whether Agnes was indeed the prophesied Doctor for our complaint. 'Quack' he replied.