An Essay on Complacency

It is customary these days to begin an essay with sitting down in a cafe and having a good chinwag with a definition. Yes, people want to see the goods. Define it. What the hell is complacency? So, I did just that, I ordered an Americano, and there is some doubt about exactly what is an Americano is. Is it a jumped up espresso, watered down, or a double shot? Well, I like a double shot of caffeine, and it assists in the process of writing. Complacency comes from the French, meaning to please, to delight and to be obsequious according to Hensleigh Wedgwood in a second edition of “A Dictionary of English Etymology” published by Trübner & Co in 1870. Now, I am not so sure how reliable good old Hensleigh is these days. Who calls a kid Hensleigh? Can’t you just hear the jingle bells? I doubt if Hensleigh would be fond of Americano or Lady Gaga for that matter. Well, you can take a second opinion from Horace Gerald Danner’s “A Thesaurus of English Word Roots” (2014) published by Rowman and Littlefield; we see that today that complacency connotes also a quiet satisfaction or contentment. Bingo. That’s it. People these days are too complacent, and they are smug about it too. You are going to say that’s totally untrue, as the majority of people are not happy, the world is not full of Scandinavians or the Dutch. People grumble and are deeply upset. True they are, however while they don’t seem outwardly happy, they must be content and rather complacent with how things are. Is that what they call the double-bind? What I had planned to do, and this reminds me of poor Billy Liar in the eponymous film, the one starring Tom Courtney and featuring Julie Christie. Ah, Julie Christie as Lara. No anyway, Billy says he has already published a book to persuade a girl friend. Here I had dreams of a tome on complacency. It would be one of those New York Times bestsellers like the books by Malcolm Gladwell. “Complacency.” You might be sitting in a meeting room, or today in a zoom conference, and up goes the screen, and a power-point presentation begins, “Complacency in the marketplace.” There might be a Health and Safety Officer. Ex-cop, tapping the desk in front of interns telling them off, “We can’t afford complacency.” That’s exactly what started it all for Nathan Vixen. Why couldn’t he have been Nathan Fox? God knows how many times people nudged him in the bar and asked him, is that surname for real? He became complacent. It crept up upon him like a boa constrictor escapee and strangled him on his sofa while he was watching Fargo on Netflix. He had become utterly complacent. His girlfriend Virginia was an activist. She had badges. She had vlogs. She protested. Nathan said whatever. That is as far as he got. As long as he got laid, he just went along, virtually. There was absolutely no risk. She was on the pill, and he made sure that his comments were kept private. While you allowing that to sink in, we could spend a moment thinking about the evolution of complacency. For this we will have to talk a little about fruit flies. Have you ever got close up to a fruit fly? I have and I must say their eyes are remarkably beautiful, not of course as divine as Julie Christie’s! From my earlier readings for papers in biosemiotics I had much about the homeobox the genetic model drawn from the “workhorse” of genetics the fruit fly, Drosophila melagaster. Imagine looking at Nathan Vixen and trying to establish what are the genes responsible for “complacency” Is there a disposition toward complacency? Had it evolved? When I walk in the cemetery and look at the grey squirrels, is there one of those furry long tailed rodents that is “complacent” ? One of the discoverers of the homeobox did a series of lectures for the Terry Institute and these were collected and published in his book entitled “Master Control Genes in Development and Evolution” (1998) Yale University Press. The author Walter J. Gehring. It is a charming book, the author is affable, empathetic and very erudite. However was miffed there was no mention of Rosalind Franklin. But, the book’s focus was on the homeobox. There is a story about when he submitted the article to Nature that the editor was not happy with the word, homeobox! Indeed he had something else lined up, fortunately it was too late because it was published with homeobox in it. This power of the editor in science is worrying. During the pandemic, we see all those scientists vying with each other – and while there is a lot of international cooperation, one must never forget that things have not changed since the Cold War. The scientists are under the thumb of the Russian and Chinese regimes – something that the editor of the “Lancet” is rather “complacent” about. Of course there are no single genes that express complacency. Several years ago I did a paper on anger in invertebrates. I challenged the research that insisted on trying to find aggressive/agonistic behavioural correlates in fruit flies. If we return to what I said right at the beginning we do have problems in the definition. There is the positive French root, and then the not so pleasant English definitions. From an endocrinological perspective a fruit fly might be “satisfied” and feel content. But, whether the fly can register on an emotional level a sense of contentment is dependent upon its wetware. Here we can say that answer is emphatically no. On top of this, the complacency seems rooted in the psychology of an individual in a social context. Nathan Vixen is quietly satisfied about his situation. Is it private or public? Smugness is public. Quietly satisfied suggests a form of introspection quite beyond the capability of a fruit fly. What about a fruit fly being “nice.” Here we might lump that under altruistic behaviours. However, when as the teachers of grammar used to complain nice is not a nice word, it originates from the Latin word for ignorance. In that case a fruit fly could be viewed as being very ignorant. Or can it? You must measure its intelligence within the compass of the total fruit fly knowledge to date. But, can a fruit fly know? Where do we find the first example of complacency in evolution? Look at these statements. She is nice. She is very complacent. She is violent. She is happy. She is angry. She is a neurotic. Can we find any of those in a fruit fly homeobox? No. Nathan Vixen is not a fruit fly. There is a huge developmental and evolutionary gap between them despite the commonality of genes in their respective genomes. Would it be possible for a fruit fly to become complacent? The answer is yes. If I observe motor behaviours and ignore the “black box” and say that these correspond to complacency in humans and by chance some of those genes do express part of complacent behaviour, and I publish this in one journal which is peer reviewed by scientists, which is then quoted in Nature. Well, we are on the road to having complacent fruit flies, and there might be mutant nice flies, mutant Netflix watching fruit flies.