Complaint: From Minor Moans to Principled Protests (2 page)

The serpent was the first character in the story to suggest that all was not well in Eden, but even he did not complain. He merely gave Eve an alternative story to the one God offered. ‘Ye shall not surely die: for God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.’

What was Eve to do? She did not know the difference between good and evil, so by definition she could not have known that she ought not to do what the serpent suggested. To have known eating the fruit was wrong she would have to have known what she could have known only after having eaten it.
And so, naïve and innocent, she naturally helped herself, as the serpent suggested, and then gave Adam a bite.

Immediately the possibility of complaint arose, since for the first time the couple were able to see that things were not as they should have been: they were naked. But still they did not complain, they ‘sewed fig leaves together, and made themselves aprons’. Quite wisely, they knew that there is no point in complaining if a simple action can solve a problem.

The first complaint came not from Adam, Eve or the Devil, but from God himself. ‘Who told thee that thou wast naked? Hast thou eaten of the tree, whereof I commanded thee that thou shouldest not eat?’ God got mad, and then he got even. He gave women pain in childbirth and a duty of obedience to their husbands, and he expelled both of them from Eden, to a life of toil. Why? Because ‘man is become as one of us, to know good and evil.’ Humanity’s crime was to become too much like God. It was bad enough that we knew the difference between good and evil; God could not risk that we would gain immortality too. Hence, ‘lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever’, God banished us.

Far be it for me to argue with the divine creator, but there do seem to be serious issues surrounding the justice of all this. Leaving these to one side, the myth describes something very important about the role of complaint in human life. Complaining is both supremely divine and human. God complains first, yet it is only after we become fallen beings, and hence human beings in the full sense, that we can do the same.

This is the paradox of the fall. It is often related as a tale of paradise lost, as though we would all be much better-off if it had never happened. Yet it is obvious that Adam and Eve before the fall were more like overgrown children than true, reflective adults. We say that ignorance is bliss, but without the
capacity to understand right and wrong we would be less than fully human. The fall is not what ruined us; it is what made us.

God didn’t like us eating from Eden’s tree because it made us better, more like him, and so he had to resort to throwing his superior power about to keep us in our place. Knowing the difference between right and wrong enables us to complain when things are wrong. The Bible is full of stories that suggest God has never been very happy for us to use this ability. Theologically speaking, complaining is bad for us.

Despite being the most upright man alive, Job, for instance, has miseries piled upon him with the acquiescence of God, who wants to win a bet with the Devil. ‘My soul is weary of my life’, says Job, but ‘I will leave my complaint upon myself; I will speak in the bitterness of my soul’. The lesson of Job’s story is clear: no matter how miserable our lot is, we should never complain to our creator about it. ‘Wilt thou also disannul my judgement? Wilt thou condemn me, that thou mayest be righteous? Hast thou an arm like God? Or canst thou thunder with a voice like him?’

Similarly, the Christian New Testament, although it commands us to be charitable, teaches us not to try to alter the basic injustices of life. We must render unto Caesar and accept the poor will be with us always. Christ didn’t lead a terrestrial rebellion to overthrow the Romans, which is why, according to the legend, the people turned against him. ‘My kingdom is not of this world’, he testified at his trial. St Paul even encourages slaves to know their place and keep in it: ‘Exhort servants to be obedient unto their own masters, and to please them well in all things; not answering again.’

The great success of Christianity was that it made not complaining seem so natural when, to an outside observer, a world in which millions of people live in misery should be up in arms
at the deity who created them with so little apparent concern for their happiness. That is certainly how the author of western Europe’s first overtly atheist document saw it. Jean Meslier (1664–1729) was a rural French priest who wrote a secret testament, published only after his death, in which he argued against the beliefs of the Church he purportedly served. What kept him from resigning was partly fear of being burned at the stake, but also a sense of service to his parishioners, whose welfare he tried to promote with incredible dedication.

In his play about Meslier,
The Last Priest
, David Walter Hall captured Meslier’s realisation of how religion had managed to distort his parishioners’ sense of justice:

They don’t complain, well they don’t complain to me. I wonder what they pray about, whether they’re all at home complaining, as they rightfully should be, as I would be. And why aren’t they knocking on my door, with a disgruntled message to take to their creator?
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Another pioneering atheist thinker, Friedrich Nietzsche, argued that Christianity glorified moral resignation so much that its ethic deserved the name of ‘slave morality’. The religion spoke to the poor, the weak and the dispossessed, and, instead of encouraging them to overcome these limitations, it taught that being at the bottom of the pile was virtuous. People should not complain about social injustice; they should take heart from the fact that they will inherit the earth and it will be the fat rich who struggle to squeeze through heaven’s gates.

Of course, Christ’s teaching had a strong social message, but it was based on voluntary aid, not resistance to oppressive power. He with two coats should give one to a person who has none, but we should certainly not seize the excess clothing of the over-attired in the name of redistribution of wealth.

Indeed, the Catholic Church in particular has a poor track record on resistance to despicable regimes, as long as it is allowed to continue to serve its higher authority. It supported fascism in Italy and Spain and signed a concordat with the Nazi government in Germany in 1933. In Rwanda, Catholics were implicated in assisting the Hutus in the genocide of the Tutsis, but far from condemning them, the Pope’s only direct intervention was to appeal for a stay of execution for those found guilty of these horrendous crimes.
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The ease with which the Church can accommodate itself to tyrannical regimes would seem puzzling in the light of its central moral message, but the mystery vanishes once you understand that it does not see its duty as being to challenge earthly rulers.

The negative proof of this thesis, at least as far as the Catholic Church is concerned, comes with the rise of liberation theology in Latin America, which saw Christ not only as a spiritual redeemer but as the liberator of the oppressed. For a short while, after the Second Vatican Council of 1962–65, the movement found favour with the Catholic hierarchy. But this was a bit of a blip, and John Paul II in particular turned against it, with Benedict XVI following in his footsteps. The message is clear: it is heresy to see the Christian faith as being more concerned with worldly change than spiritual transformation.

Fortunately, the reverence religious believers have for their sacred texts is honoured more in the breach than in the observance. Many devout people have worked selflessly for social change. Christians may revere the Bible, but those who truly live by it are atypical, and somewhat frightening. No matter what believers actually say and do, one central message of the Abrahamic faiths’ holy books is all too clear, if you care to look: do not complain, but accept God’s will.

Complaint is a secular, humanist act. It is resistance against the idea, promulgated by religion, that suffering is our divinely ordained lot and that we can do no more than put up with it piously. It is an insistence that justice must not wait for the next life but must be attained here. It is the result not just of seizing knowledge of the difference between good and evil, but of actually using that understanding to challenge what rulers and priestly castes have always told us is the natural order. Religion laments the fact that we ate Eden’s apple and thus had our eyes opened to the grounds of complaint. Humanism celebrates it.

All the traditional teachings of the main religions conform to this pattern, even though their followers have on many occasions taken a stand against earthly injustice. Buddhism is perhaps most obviously antithetical to complaint. The Buddha teaches that nirvana lies in freeing ourselves from all striving and attachment to material conditions. In particular, Buddhism teaches that suffering is a part of life and that if you set out to avoid it within this mortal realm, you will inevitably fail. To end the cycle of suffering that is life and death, one starts by accepting its inevitability. Release is found not by changing the world but by changing yourself. Like the stoic philosophers, Buddhism teaches that you can’t completely control what happens to you, but you can be the master of how you react to it. ‘As a man who has no wound on his hand cannot be hurt by the poison he may carry in his hand, since poison hurts not where there is no wound, the man who has no evil cannot be hurt by evil’, says the Buddha in the
Dhammapada
.
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For example, when the Buddha talks about abandoning sorrow, he talks about ‘six causes’, but none of them is an imperfection in the world that you should strive to change. Rather
you should ignore them, avoid them, abandon or restrain the desires that lead to them, use things such as food and drink properly so that they don’t cause any sorrow to arise, develop yourself so that you are above such suffering, or endure.
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Strikingly absent is any talk of the cause as we would understand that term politically. Consider how this teaching would apply to someone suffering because of homophobia. The advice would be: avoid or ignore homophobes; abandon or restrain the desire which leads to the homophobia, which could be the sexual desire itself or the desire to have one’s sexuality publicly accepted; use one’s sexuality in such a way that it doesn’t lead to a homophobic response, which sounds like staying in the closet; develop yourself so that you rise above the bigots; or put up with it. Complaining that homophobia is wrong and campaigning to end it just don’t make the list.

The monks who led the protests against the Burmese junta in 2007 may seem to provide a clear counter-example, but in fact they are the exception that proves the rule, in the proper sense of the expression. The role of the monks was so noteworthy precisely because they had renounced the secular world, and so their involvement in politics was an exceptional occurrence. They were moved to act as they did because of the centrality of compassion in Buddhist ethics. The suffering of the Burmese people had become too great for them to remain silent. Extreme circumstances therefore required them to suspend their usual detachment from worldly affairs. Hence their remarkable protests actually highlighted the extent to which they usually do not complain strongly about terrestrial injustice.

The reasons for this are theologically coherent, even if they are philosophically suspect. Buddhism teaches that the self is an illusion, that you are merely the sum of all thoughts and
experiences that the various parts of yourself have. ‘There is no self residing in body and mind’, taught the Buddha, ‘but the co-operation of the conformations produces what people call a person.’
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Nirvana requires that we give up all attachment to the self, because if we don’t, we remain attached to a fiction. Such a dissolution of the self is the supreme expression of a belief system that believes it foolish to attach any real importance to matters of the world. ‘You too shall pass away. Knowing this, how can you quarrel?’
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To complain is thus to reveal that one has failed to realise that all things pass, and that one is mentally fighting illusions.

Islam too teaches us to accept our lot rather than fight against it. The word ‘Islam’ means submission, to God’s will. I got a crash course in what this meant soon after the Asian tsunami, when I took part in a televised discussion about the ‘problem of evil’: how could a good God allow such pointless suffering? I was used to debating this issue with Christians, who resort to complicated ‘theodicies’ to resolve the problem. But the Muslim woman in our discussion said that in her religion, you are taught not even to ask why God would allow such a thing. If something happens, it is God’s will, and that is all you need to know.

The Qu’ran certainly says that all that happens, good or bad, is God’s will. All life’s sufferings have a purpose: ‘We shall test your steadfastness with fear and famine, with loss of life and property and crops. Give good news to those who endure with fortitude; who in adversity say: “We belong to Allah, and to him we shall return”’ (2:155–6). An example of ‘unjust and foolish thoughts about Allah’ in the Qu’ran is: ‘They complain: “Had we any say in the matter, we should not have been slain here.”’ What we are told we should say in return is: ‘Had you stayed in your homes, those of you who were destined to be
slain would have gone to their graves nevertheless; for it was Allah’s will to test your faith and courage’ (3:154–5). Believers can certainly petition God, but we should not fool ourselves that anyone other than God can remedy our complaints: ‘If Allah afflicts you with evil, none can remove it but he’ (6:17).
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Once again, believing that things ought not to be as bad as they are is impious.

Such a belief may be comforting in times of disaster, but believers do not apply the principle uniformly. It is clearly not God’s will that Palestinians should be denied a proper homeland by the Israelis, for example. The rule seems to be that things we don’t like but cannot change are simply God’s will; but for other things we don’t like it is God’s will that we change them.