whine, v.
2. To utter complaints in a low querulous tone; to complain in a feeble, mean, or undignified way.
1530 Bible (Tyndale) Num. xi. 18: “Ye haue whyned in the eares of the Lorde saynge: who shall geue vs flesh to eate?”
If the long tradition of Moral Philosophy has taught us anything, it is that obligation obtains only in relationships of Power equal in quality and kind. It is thus that the slave has no obligation of any sort towards her master, and that the dog which bites the hand that feeds it is simultaneously to be valorized and understood not as the active result of a weighing of good against good (the good of Freedom against the good of Sustenance), but rather as a fundamentally extra-moral action which, obtaining not of obligation in any direction, neither can be rendered to moral judgments even of the compromissary kind.
As Tyndale’s New Testament makes clear, whining is thus the act of asserting the obligation of another where none obtains—the Lord, as we know, owes us nothing, but instead we ask of the Lord to render our lives such that certain conditions are satisfied. We do this not in a “feeble, mean, or undignified way” but rather instantiated in ritual: “Give us this Day, our Daily Bread, and forgive us our Trespasses, as we forgive those who Trespass against us.” The sacrifice of Christ rendered the question of engagement with the Lord in the realm of obligation utterly moot, and the Lord’s Prayer reminds us that it is to each other that we owe obligation—here, the obligation to forgive—and the Lord is not a landfill where we might dump our Sin and have it forgiven; Christ died not that we might all be forgiven now and forever, but that the relationship of forgiveness be reforged in its proper kiln: the kiln of everyday life and mutual human interaction.
To suggest that Wesleyan students are whining is thus to make a category error: our Numbers and Righteousness render us the greater Power, and the regime of Landhláford Roth is thus in no position of obligation to us. Rather, in these matters of Great Power, considerations are nothing if not political—please, never moral—and our supposed “whining” is thus evidence only of our belief in our paucity of Power within this Institution: the reality of our Influence and Strength is far, far, greater than we imagine.
As Christ taught, “There is nothing from without a man, that entering into him can defile him: but the things which come out of him, those are they that defile the man,” Mark 7:15, KJV. Let us not defile our own humanity by whining for what we ought to demand, and, when demands fail, take Righteous and Direct Action in service of Justice in this World. To whine is to believe that Justice is Divine, when it is in actuality constitutively Human.
Hamill is a member of the class of 2011.
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