Complaint: From Minor Moans to Principled Protests (5 page)

On a day-to-day level most complaints serve no higher goal than that of reaffirming our sense of how things should really be. ‘Isn’t the weather awful?’ we ask, knowing that agreement confirms that we are not mistaken to find it somewhat disheartening. ‘Politicians are all a bunch of lying bastards!’ we say, which, while not entirely true, affirms the perfectly laudable belief that honesty in politics should be our goal. ‘There’s nothing on the television’, and so we are right to be bored by it. These are hardly the noblest forms of complaint, but in moderation they are at least reasonable.

The danger lies in using complaint for this purpose so frequently that it becomes a substitute for actually doing something. All specific complaints then lead to the point of resignation: ‘What’s the point?’ Complaint ceases to be constructively cathartic and simply becomes an excuse to do nothing. ‘Isn’t the weather awful?’ we ask, justifying a wasted afternoon sitting idly inside. ‘Politicians are all a bunch of lying bastards!’ we say, vindicating our own apathy. ‘There’s nothing
on the television’, but we don’t turn it off. Complaint is genuinely cathartic only in those situations where change is not a possibility or a priority. Otherwise it can become part of the problem, not a helpful way to soothe it.

Recognising that there is a large class of cathartic complaints is a reminder that much of what we say is not about communicating information or making truth claims, which is what linguists and philosophers of language tend to focus on. Words are our most important social lubricants, and it is often more revealing to ask what someone is doing with their words than it is to ask what they mean by them. For instance, ‘Nice day’ is primarily a means of breaking the ice, not an attempt to sum up the prevailing meteorological conditions. People ask after your relatives not because they really want to know but because they want to increase intimacy. In the same way it would be a mistake to see many, if not most, complaints as being primarily about the contents of the sentences which form them. As I said in the introduction, my focus is on what I called sincere complaints, but in this sense of the word insincere ones are not necessarily useless or misguided.

Right complaint helps us to change something, which is why wrong complaint can arise when we fail to see that what we find hard to accept cannot be changed. Such wrong complaint either treats the impossible as possible or makes the possible seem impossible. In that sense wrong complaint is unrealistic and untruthful.

However, I have argued that it would be too simplistic to say that it is never right to complain about things we cannot change. First, we can at least change how we view the
unchangeable. Second, as long as it is not used as a substitute for action we could take, complaint can at least be cathartic, reaffirming our sense that we are right to see that things are not ideal, even if we cannot do anything about them. But we do not achieve a genuine catharsis if our complaints actively promote inertia when what we really need to do is build momentum.

I do not draw these distinctions for their own sake, as a mere intellectual exercise. I believe that becoming aware of them may help us do some important psychological de-cluttering. Complaints easily fill our heads and use up emotional resources. Avoiding the wrong sort and focusing on the right kind is one way to stop our heads filling with distracting, unhelpful noise. The practice of right complaint and the avoidance of wrong complaint are thus parts, however small, of the practice of right living as a whole.

I have argued that wrong complaint can be concerned with one or both of two groups of things: things that can’t be changed and those that shouldn’t. Although the category of things that
can’t
be changed is not as straightforward as it sounds, it is at least less controversial than the category of things which
shouldn’t
be changed. Not that the division between the two is neat: some of the forms of complaint I’ll talk about in this chapter contain elements of the impossible as well as of the undesirable.

The debate over what should or should not be different is endless, because the number of things which could be different is endless. Rather than dip into this selectively, what I want to do is to identify the subcategories of wrong complaints into which misguided pleas for change can be slotted. Constructing a taxonomy of wrong complaint in this way is not only a more manageable task than identifying each member of the species; it also enables us to see patterns which a focus on particular exemplars alone would not. Like all new taxonomies, it will inevitably be incomplete, but it will at least provide a framework for others to amend and expand.

A woman is eulogising her new lover. ‘He’s so laid back, it’s amazing! He’s just cool with how I am and tells me he doesn’t want to change anything. What a relief after Ralf! And he’s so reflective too. I love the way he really thinks about things
when you talk to him, not like most guys, who just bore you with their opinions on anything. And he is so not vain.’

Several months later, the relationship is over. Why? ‘He’s so laid back he’s virtually horizontal. I mean, you need some excitement in a relationship. He takes no interest in what I’m trying to achieve in my life or career: it’s as though he wants to keep me preserved in aspic. And he’s too damned quiet: I often can’t get him to say clearly what he thinks. Sometimes I wonder if anything is going on his head at all. Plus, I wish he’d take a bit more care of his appearance and lose a few pounds.’

The sharpest blades are often on double-edged swords. To be charitable to the disappointed woman, it is reasonable enough that what suits someone at one time may not do so at another. I am not being inconsistent if I want quiet one day and noise the next. It is only if I complain about the noise and the quiet at the same time that my protests are contradictory.

However, although we are rarely so overtly confused that we literally demand incompatible things at the same time, in ways we do not notice we often do find ourselves doing just that. People’s complaints about politics in advanced democracies often betray precisely this fault. On the one hand, you will hear people complain that politics is too tribal, and that the parties spend too much time fighting each other when they should be working together for the common good. Sometimes it seems that they disagree merely for the sake of it. Why shouldn’t the opposition, for example, be willing to praise the government when it does something good? Likewise, why shouldn’t the government simply adopt opposition policies, with thanks, when they have good ideas?

It all sounds very reasonable. But then the same people at another time will complain that the trouble with politics today is that there is no longer anything to choose between
the parties. It’s not just that they’re all as bad as one another; it’s that they also basically believe in capitalism, tempered by regulation, with taxation to fund essential social goods. They differ a little on the details, but there is no one arguing either for a much smaller government in a more libertarian state or for a truly ambitious socialist programme.

In other words, we complain both that the political parties differ unnecessarily and that they are not different enough. You can square the circle by arguing that the parties should be able both to offer radically different models for the running of society and to agree on many more specific policies than they do, but it is hard to believe that the sophisticated mental balancing act this entails is really what advocates of both complaints usually have in mind.

The contradiction arises from a failure to understand the pluralistic nature of social goods. There are many things that we value in private and public life. However, having more of one often requires that we have less of another. Rather than accept this as inevitable, we tend to believe it wrong whenever we have less of any given good that we could have more of.

In the politics example, the plural goods are those of co-operation and competition. Society does have something to gain from politicians working closely together, so that the best ideas can be shared and time isn’t wasted on pointless disagreements. But it also has something to gain from diversity of opinion, since the more options available to the electorate and to governments, the more chance we have of finding the most effective ones.

The trouble is that more of one inevitably leads to less of the other. The necessity may not be logical, but it is certainly there in practice. A highly co-operative political culture, for example, will tend to foster greater conformity of opinion, for
sociological and psychological reasons. It is well known that when people are exposed to a narrow range of similar views, ‘group think’ tends to lead them to accept more readily whatever the locally conventional wisdom happens to be. Conversely, a highly competitive political culture makes the free exchange of ideas between parties more difficult, because, again, the psychology and sociology of difference means that people become unwilling to acknowledge the virtues of their opponents.

In many ways modern representative democracy has been very successful in trying to balance these competing goods. Competition is fostered through elections, but co-operation is also required to pass legislation in parliament. The two factors are thus kept in a creative tension, without either being able to dominate the other.

Because both competition and co-operation are therefore compromised in some way, it is always possible to look at one in isolation and believe there is not enough of it. But this is the tragedy of a world in which goods are genuinely plural: we cannot have full measures of all of them. It is our failure to face up to this which leads us to make the contradictory complaint that there is both too much and too little difference between the parties.

There are numerous examples of how plural goods can give rise to contradictory complaints. Social mobility and increased opportunity are good things, but the better-educated tend to move around more, and so the result is a decline in the sense of community which comes from people living most of their lives in one place. But the same people complain about both lack of educational opportunity and the decline in traditional communities. Likewise, there are complaints about those left behind by increased prosperity, but when greater wealth leads
people to have more comfortable homes, and then inevitably spend more time in them, there are laments about the increased atomisation of modern existence. Increasingly, people complain both about the hassle and expense of air travel and about the fact that the government isn’t doing enough to combat climate change or to protect travellers from terrorism.

However, the answer, as usual, is not to stop complaining altogether. Such examples of wrong complaint can be made right ones by a few adjustments after some careful thought.

One option is simply to renounce one of the pairs of complaints as fundamentally misplaced. For instance, we might just accept that a more atomised, less cohesive society is the price we pay for greater freedom and prosperity.

However, the insight of pluralism is that, although we can’t have everything, there is something of value in many of the things we do want. It may therefore be more sensible not entirely to renounce one in any given pair of contradictory complaints, and to see how we can make the competing claims between values into less of a zero-sum game and more of an opportunity for win-win.

To do this requires us to be more specific about what we are and are not complaining about. For example, if we lament the decline in traditional communities, we should not do so because we believe, all things considered, it is better for people to be born, live and die all in the same place. Rather, we might think that the decline in the shared life of a community has gone further than is necessary. We can’t turn back the clock, but with better urban planning, local democracy and individual effort we may be able to make neighbourhoods more neighbourly. Similarly, it may well be the case that air travel should be more comfortable and pleasurable than it is, but that does not mean it should be cheap and frequent.

Such reframing of our contradictory complaints formally dissolves any actual inconsistency by accepting the impossibility of fully realising plural goods, while seeking to maximise the realisation of both. Hence we stop complaining about the decline of traditional communities and focus instead on the failure to develop a contemporary alternative. We stop complaining about individualism per se and think instead of how it may simply have gone a little too far. And we stop complaining about air travel as a single experience and instead pick on those aspects of it which really can be improved at no cost to the environment or to security.

Such an approach reflects two virtues of right complaint. One is
specificity
. The trouble with much complaining is that its targets are too broad. Such generalised moans are futile because they end up being directed at something that contains both good and bad, without disentangling them.

The second virtue is that of
proportionality
. Some of the most boorish complaints are wrong not in their content but in their extent. It is fair enough to complain about the failures of rail travel, for example, but not if you do so to the extent that you forget about the poor bus and coach users, let alone those sick or dying because of preventable diseases, war or famine.

If our complaints are both specific enough and proportionate to the seriousness of the failure of things to be how they ought to be, instances of contradictory complaint should be much rarer, if not entirely extinct.

Closely related to the category of contradictory complaints are self-defeating ones. These occur when we protest that things
are not as they ought to be, but when the remedy would totally defeat the purpose of the complaint.