Complaint: From Minor Moans to Principled Protests (14 page)

The sense in which a grievance culture is one where responsibility is diminished is therefore much more profound than is usually thought. We are encouraged to complain more and more, but without a moral basis. Moral responsibility is undermined because morality itself is undermined, replaced with a straightforward, unambiguous but ethically shallow legalism.

Where do you hear most the complaint that our hard-won freedoms are under attack? In countries that are the most free, of course. This is not illogical: the more freedoms you have, the more you have to lose, and the more opportunities people who don’t like your freedom have to try to remove them. However, this does have the somewhat perverse result that the freer people are, the more problematic that freedom appears to be.

The argument that our legalistic grievance culture is one of the most pernicious current threats to freedom follows from the concerns about responsibility. Because people are less willing to take personal responsibility, they are also less willing to take personal risks. The connection is twofold. First, the grievance culture fosters an intolerance of failure. When bad things happen, the first thought is that someone must be held to account, and legal, or quasi-legal, mechanisms must be brought into action to do so. In such a climate the baseline assumption is that someone, somewhere, is underwriting the
risk for you. It is simply intolerable to accept that that something could go wrong without recourse.

One well-documented consequence of this is what is known as moral hazard. This is where people modify their behaviour and take more risks because they feel that they are not fully responsible for the consequences. For example, people may worry less about household security if they are confident that their insurance will cover any losses. Similarly, tourists may take valuable equipment into situations where there is a high risk of loss or theft, if they know that their travel insurance will cover them.

However, less discussed is the risk-
reducing
effect of the grievance culture. Although we may become more willing to take risks that are underwritten in some way, we are less willing to do things that are not. The presence of some kind of insurance is not an extra reassurance, it is the norm, and so to do something in the absence of guarantees becomes reckless.

One example is travel insurance. People used to travel abroad routinely without any cover. Most did so without any problems, but the few who hit difficulties paid a high price. Travel insurance has helped those few, but it has now become so routine that to travel without it seems dangerously rash. What was once an extra level of security now becomes a minimum requirement and is indeed often a contractual obligation when you book a holiday. Yet is it really a risk worth worrying about, for example, to travel without insurance as an EU citizen within the European Union, where reciprocal agreements between governments ensure that you are covered for emergency health problems anyway? I don’t think so, but it is surprising how many people feel exposed if they arrive at the airport realising that they have no insurance cover.

This has a negative effect on freedom because it turns us
into risk-averse self-constrainers. Sometimes it is others limiting our freedom, such as companies who require that you get insurance before they take your custom. But more often it is ourselves who step back from doing things which we fear are not adequately covered. The whole notion that life is naturally fraught with risk is undermined in a culture that holds all risks are ultimately the legal responsibility of someone else.

The second link between the grievance culture and freedom is that the fear of litigation limits what people are prepared or able to do. There are many stories, for example, of schools organising fewer trips and extra-curricular activities because they are afraid they could be sued if anything goes wrong. One British teaching union, the NASUWT, recently went so far as to advise its members against taking part in outdoor activities because of the risk of litigation in the event of an accident occurring. As Michael Power put it in his pamphlet
The Risk Management of Everything
, we are becoming not so much risk-averse as responsibility-averse.
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The fear of being held responsible for something going wrong makes us unwilling to take any risks, with the consequence that we are less and less free to do what we want.

These two links reinforce each other and end up severely limiting what we are willing or able to do. We want others to carry the can for anything that might go wrong, but others are understandably reluctant to take on the responsibility. Our two fears are equal and opposite forces that leave us paralysed, unable to do what either party wants. Schools and parents both want school outings, for example, but each party wants the other to shoulder the responsibility for failure.

There is a great political irony here. Traditionally it has been the political right which has criticised the ‘nanny state’ for limiting our freedoms, and indeed it is often still the right
which complains about the culture of litigation. Yet this grievance culture is rooted not in state paternalism but in the privatisation of responsibility. Private solicitors acting on behalf of private individuals are suing private (and public) bodies, within the framework of civil law. The root of the problem is the unfettered pursuit by individuals of their own personal interests. Where the statist left arguably reduced people’s sense of personal responsibility, the grievance culture exaggerates the sense we have of other people’s individual responsibility. Between left and right, an appropriate sense of our own limited but real responsibility has been squeezed out.

Yet without an appropriate sense of responsibility and its limits we can have no true freedom. Freedom and responsibility are intimately linked. We do not give freedom to people such as young children, who are not able to take responsibility, nor can we truly grasp our own freedom unless we are able to take responsibility for ourselves. The grievance culture makes this harder for us to do and thus threatens one of our most precious capabilities.

‘Have you had an accident or been injured in the past three years or assaulted in the last two years? You may be entitled to compensation.’ There is nothing particularly unusual in this claim, made by a British firm of personal injury solicitors.
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Variations of it are made by many such companies. What I find most interesting about it is the use of the language of entitlement. The sense of entitlement encouraged by the grievance culture, with its legalistic discourse, is fundamentally affecting the way we view life’s vicissitudes, and much for the worse.

The idea that people’s feelings of entitlement are rapidly displacing feelings of gratitude has been articulated by many people for several years now. Mary Warnock, in her book on fertility treatments, lamented the fact that potential parents now see children as a right rather than a blessing.
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Michael Sandel, arguing about the dangers of genetic enhancement, similarly decried the erosion of the sense of life’s giftedness.
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It is no coincidence that common to these complaints is a religious form of language that is sounding increasingly alien; ‘blessings’ are bestowed by the divine, and ‘gift s’ are from God. No wonder that an increasingly secular society finds it unnatural to think in such terms. But also part of both arguments is the claim that we do not need to subscribe to theological beliefs to have these feelings of thankfulness. All that we need to do is to appreciate the fact that the good things we receive in life are not ours by right but depend on a combination of fortune, circumstance and, sometimes, individual effort.

This is certainly true, but I fear it is nonetheless the case that feelings of gratitude come more naturally to those who hold religious beliefs, while feelings of entitlement are second nature to those who grow up in a secular, consumerist, grievance culture. But while the role of secularism and consumerism in this is widely discussed, the importance of the grievance culture is less widely appreciated.

The decline in religious conviction removed the belief that everything depends on divine grace. This does not logically entail that therefore everything is ours by right, but once you believe that there is no higher authority dishing out life’s goods, it is a small psychological step to thinking that you are entitled to anything you want.

This step is harder to take in a society where many people are poor and you see blameless suffering on a daily basis. But as
the West got richer, extreme misfortune became the exception rather than the rule. Better diet and medicine increased life-expectancy: an unfortunate phrase, since such figures never indicated that one should really expect to live the average lifespan. But this is what we increasingly do, and to die before the median termination date is seen as an aberration rather than as the natural fate of half the population. And while we still do live, consumerism tells us that we too can have all the material goods and life-enhancing experiences we want.

By themselves, then, secularisation, increased wealth and consumerism diminish the sense in which good fortune is contingent, and make us feel that life’s opportunities are there for the taking, and indeed normally should be taken. However, although this takes us close to a feeling of entitlement, arguably it is the rise of the grievance culture which makes entitlement seem like second nature. The progression, crudely, is that the decline of religion makes us believe that we are not dependent on any higher authority for desired goods; consumerism makes us believe that all goods are ours for the taking, should we have the inclination and resources; but it is the grievance culture that makes us feel that we are entitled to have them whatever. This is because in a grievance culture one’s own deficiencies are always someone else’s fault. If you did badly at school, it is because the system failed to cater for your special educational needs. If you fail in your personal relationships, it is because your parents failed to provide suitable role models for successful loving partnerships. If you fail to become a pop star, it is because friends and family did not believe in you enough. All of this, of course, means that you would have done well at school, had a good relationship or been a pop star if only others had done their part. Hence it is easy to think that you have been robbed of your true entitlement.

However, it is not enough to lament this trend, because much of what lies behind it is highly desirable. It is good that we no longer think of a higher power apportioning fortune according to divine caprice. Indeed, even most intelligent believers in a deity are glad this kind of God is not as worshipped as he once was. It is good that we are wealthier and have more choices. You do hear people claim that we were better-off when we were poor, but most such complainants don’t know what it was like back then and wouldn’t last one day in a coal-mine or steelworks. It is even good that we have become more aware of the role that education, parents and peers play in our development. Dyslexics, for example, used to be routinely failed by the education system. It is also good that people take parenting more seriously than they used to: the increased role fathers are playing in the upbringing of their children is to me one of the clearest examples of how things have got better, not worse, in recent decades. The problem is that undesirable side-effects seem inexorably to follow from these developments. Raised standards raise expectations.

The grievance culture too has a positive side. To some extent it has been a by-product of the growth of the rights culture. A now standard critique is that rights have been promoted at the expense of responsibility. People see their rights as being unconditional, and this clearly links with a sense of entitlement. While there is something to this criticism, on balance, the promotion of rights following the UN’s Universal Declaration has surely been more of a good thing than a bad one. To oppose the entitlement culture does not require hostility to the emphasis on rights in general, merely a recognition that having a right does not absolve you of your duties.

It is also right and proper that people should be held to account for their neglect and wrongdoing. Consider, for
example, how children used to suffer beatings and even sexual abuse at the hands of adults in authority over them, in schools and churches. Informal systems failed to safeguard the well-being of these children, and it was therefore right that laws were introduced so that miscreants could be stopped and punished.

Similarly, you would not want to trust to good will alone to make sure landlords keep their gas appliances safe, that concert halls and pubs have sufficient and clear fire exits or that coach operators keep their vehicles safe. Legislation rightly enforces such things, and with this comes the right to sue and seek redress if things go wrong.

The problem, most people say, is that this has simply gone too far. Yes, a pub should have proper fire escapes, but should it be liable for someone slipping on a floor because a punter had spilled her beer? Schools should not beat their pupils, but if routine playground teasing affects a particularly sensitive student badly, is the school guilty of not protecting him against bullying?

If we approach the question from the point of view of responsibility, I think the answers to these questions are not always obvious or clear-cut. And, indeed, this is just how the question is approached in a legalistic culture. But there is another way of looking at social and moral norms, which is to consider the cumulative effect of certain habits or routine practices. This is the approach commended by Aristotle, who argued that human beings are creatures of habit, and that moral development is a matter of inculcating habits conducive to human flourishing.

Foregrounding a sense of entitlement does not help develop such habits. Whereas a sense of gratitude encourages us to locate our own fortune in proper relation to that of
others, a sense of entitlement encourages an egocentric view, focused on what is ours by right. Whereas a sense of gratitude makes one more able to deal with life when it doesn’t go well, a sense of entitlement leads one to be always dissatisfied at the imperfection of it all. This is fundamental: anyone unable to accept that life isn’t perfect is, to my mind, not equipped to be a mature, morally autonomous adult.