The age of the whinge

Michael Bywater Complaint By Julian Baggini profile Pounds 10.99 (148pp) Pounds 9.89 (free p&p) from 0870 079 8897

Someone once wrote, of a book of mine, words to the effect that "This book could change the way we live". Very flattering, but obviously balls. It makes one wary of deploying the phrase even when spot on, as in the case of Julian Baggini's relaxed, affable yet startlingly lucid analysis of humanity's tendency to complain. I can't think of a human society that doesn't complain except, perhaps, Buddhist monasteries.

The Abrahamic religions are founded on complaint. Not for nothing do Jews proudly declare: "Two Jews, three opinions". The Old Testament is riddled with complaint, starting with God complaining about Adam and Eve, whom a cynical observer might say were set up to be the fall guys, and continuing with His kvetching, cursing and denunciation, even at one point roping in Satan himself, an earlier victim of God's wrath, to help nobble Job.

The New Testament stars Jesus Christ, whom Baggini, even though an atheist, might have selected as one of history's masters of "right complaint", selecting his targets accurately and being absolutely clear about what he wanted changed. Which may be why, unlike his sillier "followers", he didn't bother about what people did with their genitals. St Paul complains all the time, with far worse judgment than Jesus, and the New Testament ends with the most magnificent, incomprehensible and pointless rant on record, the apocalyptic Revelation of St John.

Dug deep into our culture, it's not surprising that complaint has become one of the great English pastimes. "Can't complain," we tell each other, but the truth is no Englishman is happy unless he's moaning and fussing about something, preferably something neither he nor the person complained to can do anything about.

Which is where Baggini takes off. Given the rather open-ended brief, he has produced a short book which touches on just about everything. He cites everyone from Nietzsche to the Dhammapada, taking in Woody Allen ("They're gonna hang me in two minutes, the wrong life is passing before my eyes") and the Second Vatican Council. He assails Utopian dreams and the "lust for perfection", turns his sharply rational eye on American nonsense about "closure" and "moving on", and surgically emasculates our endless complaining about cultural homogenisation. To hell with McDonald's Syndrome, says Baggini, realising that what he, like the rest of us moaners, really wants is "for other people to be culturally monogamous so that I can savour them with cosmopolitan promiscuity".

The list of carefully-nailed shibboleths would be almost as long as the book itself. We rely on laws to tell us what we may do and "see less and less reason to take anything into account other than an act's legality". We are not risk-averse, but responsibility- averse. In a grievance culture, "one's own deficiencies are always someone else's fault". People complain if they do not reach their "allotted" life expectancy because "to die before the median termination date is seen as an aberration rather than the... fate of half the population".

Baggini's analysis of the categories of complaint is, like the book, both rigorous and entertaining. He identifies Impossible Complaint, Mistaken Complaint (sub-divided into contradictory, self- defeating, nostalgic and Luddite, misdirected, paranoid, conformist and empty: guilty on all counts, m'Lud; how about you?), Quotidian Complaint and Grievance. Each turns up nasty refractive jewels which make one re-think some fairly fundamental attitudes.

In my case, it's hell, because the majority of my work stands revealed to me as mere virtuoso whingeing. No: not hell; purgatory, because the need to rethink is oddly cleansing, most dramatically in his attack on the Chomsky-Pilger Mistake. He illustrates this with our liberal orthodoxy about America - essentially that America's motives are always bad, so you can't go wrong if you take the other side in any question involving the US. In the process, he casually exsanguinates Tony Benn: you'll have to read the book to find out how.

In one sense, I'm furious with Baggini. If everyone read Complaint, an awful lot of satire would come to be seen as (a) dreck and (b) silly. You might well come to see Juvenal as a bit of a tit. But this is far outweighed by the positive consequences of his arguments. Philosophy has, as far as the laity is concerned, run into the sand with epistemological fretting and the horrible lucidities of symbolic logic. Baggini writes unabashedly of "right living" and locates complaint within that great goal. He has more in common with Aristotle than with JL Austin or Derrida, and we should be grateful for that.

Complaint should be compulsory reading. Politicians should be tested on it before being allowed to stand for office. Baggini may have sandbagged the polemicist's trade, but am I complaining? Not a bit.

Michael Bywater's 'Big Babies' is published by Granta

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