Complaint: From Minor Moans to Principled Protests (6 page)

For instance, on arriving at the ruins of the Inca city of Macchu Picchu in Peru, you might marvel at it but also protest about how much better it would be if the crowds weren’t so big. Yet if visitor numbers were strictly controlled, the chances are that you wouldn’t be there to have the improved experience in the first place. Why would you think that you would fall into the, say, half of current visitors still able to get to the site, rather than the half denied the privilege? Unfortunately for anyone but a dictator, no one is ever going to pass a law which prevents
other people
from visiting places, but not
you
.

The complaint rarely seems self-defeating for us because we adopt all sorts of biases of thought which enable us to think restrictions wouldn’t apply to us. We might believe that erecting obstacles would deter others but not ourselves, which would be to make unwarranted assumptions about the motivations of others. A wealthy tourist might assume that tighter rules would keep the smelly backpackers away, while the backpackers might assume that it would be coach parties who would be banned. Indeed, we could avoid being self-defeating by explicitly complaining in this way, but this would simply transform the protest into another form of wrong complaint, the self-serving kind (which I’ll come to shortly).

In general, most complaints of the kind ‘This is too popular’ are self-defeating if taken as reflecting genuine beliefs that things are not as they ought to be, rather than as mere expressions of frustration. If it is hard to get a table at your favourite restaurant, that is probably because it is very good, and the only realistic way things would be easier for you would be if the restaurant lacked precisely the qualities that make you love it as you do. Complain if you will, but only as a form of catharsis.

Perhaps an even better example of a self-defeating complaint is the one often heard by advocates of diversity in culture. I’m a good (or bad) example of someone who likes to enjoy dabbling in cultural difference. As such a person, the heart always sinks a little if I go to a foreign city and find a Starbucks or Pizza Hut defiling an otherwise idlyllic scene of benign difference. If I were to complain about this, what would I really be saying? That cultures should retain their differences, and that we should not end up in a world where there is one big grey sludge of a monoculture, with nothing interesting and ‘other’ to embrace. But why would this be a good thing? Because that way people like me could enjoy the diversity.

But hang on a minute. The diverse world I want is one in which people like me could not easily thrive. I do not preserve any particular culture in its purity. My culture is a multi-culture, of curry one day, pasta the next, washed down with French wine, to a soundtrack of Brazilian bossa nova. If everyone were like me, everywhere would be culturally mongrel, and there would be no ‘pure or ‘authentic’ national cuisine or music to dip into.

So it is clearly not true that I really want cultures to retain their purity, since to wish that would be to wish myself out of existence. What I really want, it seems, is for
other people
to be culturally monogamous so I can savour them with cosmopolitan promiscuity. It’s like a libertine who wants his innumerable conquests to be chaste virgins. Once again, the only way to avoid my complaint being self-defeating is to make it self-serving.

Self-defeating complaints have something very important in common with contradictory ones. Both spring from a lack of acceptance of the limitations of life. In the case of contradictory complaints the problem is that of the plurality of goods.
This can also be the case with self-defeating ones. There are goods in both cultural purity and diversity, and having more of one can result in having less of the other. But self-defeating complaints can also spring from problems of accepting finitude. There are, for example, too many people chasing too few remote places. This is an unalterable fact. So if we do want to complain about there being too many visitors to such places, we need to do so in good faith, accepting the consequence that we ourselves should be able to experience less. The price we might have to pay for an unspoilt view of Macchu Pichu is that we never get to see the Galapagos Islands at all.

We find this hard to accept because, in the West, we have become experience junkies, reading lists in magazines and books of the hundred places we must visit or things we must do before we die and getting paranoid that we’ve only ticked off ten so far. Accepting we may have to settle for much less than everything is disquieting because it requires acknowledging how the finitude of our existence means many doors will never open for us.

Yet if we cannot accept this, we are doomed to utter more and more self-defeating complaints about how too many people want to do what we want, while failing to see that we are one of the people we are complaining about. Either that or our complaints lack any moral weight and become mere self-serving moans.

I have a great deal of sympathy with anyone living near an airport who tries to halt its expansion. Trying to sleep under the flight path of a low-flying 747 is nobody’s idea of fun. However,
I am very suspicious of any claims made on behalf of these local protesters (as opposed to peripatetic activists) that they spring from no more than a concern for justice and fairness. I am not aware of any research which would prove this, but I would be very surprised if the average protester against local airport expansion took fewer flights than someone of the same socioeconomic group living somewhere completely different. Their concern is not with how airports interfere with sleep, but with how one
particular
airport may interfere with
their
sleep.

Fortunately, however, anti-airport protesters do not need to make their pursuit of self-interest naked, because there are now many environmentalist arguments doing the rounds which enable them to present their self-concern as concern for others. It may be true that the new runway will destroy sleep, but why rest my case on this if I can say instead that it will destroy the planet? If I am willing to fly from somewhere else, making such a green case would be profoundly dishonest. Honesty, however, is probably not the best policy, since though many may sympathise with your need for nocturnal rest, most will think a decent offer of compensation will more than make up for your loss.

Most anti-airport campaigns now run on a twin track. Green protesters take the moral high ground, arguing against all airport expansion, while other local residents argue for a more pragmatic case that further expansion is OK in principle but not here. Consistency is more readily available to the greens, just as long as they don’t criss-cross the planet to make their protests, like the hundreds of people from all over the planet who descended on Puerto Alegre or Seattle to complain about globalisation, without any trace of irony. However, for the ‘OK but not here brigade’ double standards are hard to avoid, since everywhere is ‘here’ for someone.

Nevertheless, it is not difficult to find persuasive reasons why your area is the wrong one if you want to. For instance, as I write, Lydd airport in Kent is trying to get planning permission for expansion. Lydd is in one of the least built-up areas of the south-east and is close to the coast, and therefore expansion of flights there would probably cause less disruption to fewer people than probably any other airport proposal on the boards. Yet the Lydd Airport Action Group (LAAG) is not short of reasons why, actually, Lydd is a terrible place to expand air traffic. It cites factors such as ‘serious public safety issues associated with locating a regional airport close to a nuclear power complex’, a high ‘risk of bird strike […] as Lydd Airport is under one of the main migratory bird routes in the south of England’ and threats to the jobs of 430 people who work in caravan/chalet parks on Romney Marsh. When it argues, however, that expansion would be better at the ‘existing better-equipped Manston Airport’, it is hard not to conclude that the main justification for this is the belief that expansion at Lydd would ‘significantly reduce the quality of life of local residents’.
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Many, if not all, of LAAG’s complaints therefore seem to be self-serving ones: complaints that seem to be based on justice but are in fact based on self-interest. This is the type of complaint most associated with ‘Nimbys’: protesters who say ‘Not In My Back Yard’. Of course, no one is a self-confessed Nimby: the very idea reeks of hypocrisy. You can argue ‘Not At All’ on principle, but if your only objection is that it is close to you, the chances are you’re guilty of supporting something as a social good which comes at a price, without wanting to be one of the people who pays that price. Any unpalatable side-effects must be somebody else’s problem.

Of course, just as a stopped clock is right twice a day, so
it will be the case that sometimes, actually, Nimbys are right that their back yard is the wrong place. But like conspiracy theorists, the fact that a minority are right is no reason not to be suspicious of the majority who aren’t.

The trouble with Nimbyism is not that it exists at all, but that it hides its own nature. As I said, I’d hate to have an airport expand near me, and if such a thing were proposed, I’d be entitled to say so. There is even a case for arguing that the decision should be made partly on the basis of who complains the loudest. For instance, the best argument LAAG has that Manston would be a better location is that the people there don’t seem as bothered about it as Lydd’s residents. The Manston Airport Group, for example, is explicitly not against expansion, it simply wants it to be done properly.

Yet Nimbys are rarely honest in this way. Or rather, they may be honest, but they act in bad faith, persuading even themselves that there are objective reasons to do with birds, rare frogs, jobs or whatever why their back yard really is the worst place in the country to build an airport, prison, recycling facility, wind farm or any other useful but unpleasant social utility. Such self-serving complaints are forms of wrong complaint not only because they dress up self-interest as justice but also because they manifest a self-interest which
believes itself
to be justice.

The call for a more honest Nimbyism, however, is likely to fail, because without the veneer of objective virtue, most such complaints fail to elicit any sympathy. Take the fuel protests of 2000 in the UK, for example. These were triggered by rising petrol costs, and the main focus of the protesters was the government’s fuel price escalator. This was a policy of increasing duty on petrol above the rate of inflation as a means of reducing air pollution by encouraging more efficient use of energy.
This policy, with its clear social benefit for the vast majority, was eventually abandoned because of blockades organised by farmers and hauliers who felt the rising petrol costs were making UK trucks uncompetitive. The consequence of this volte-face, according to Cambridge Econometrics, was that by 2010 annual fuel use would be 11 per cent higher and carbon emissions 4 million tonnes greater than would otherwise have been the case.
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It is interesting in this instance how thin the protesters’ argument really was. ‘Parity with Europe’ was the usual way of putting it: why should UK truckers and farmers pay more than their competitors on mainland Europe? Yet the protesters were not suggesting the solution was to raise fuel taxes over there, and hence get even greater environmental benefits. Equality merely provided an apparently fair justification for what was essentially an attempt to keep costs down. Nor is it at all convincing that rising costs threatened jobs overall: in the years after the protests fuel continued to rise in price on average faster than inflation, yet employment remained buoyant.

But then the veneer of justice did not need to be very thick, because most people drive and so aren’t very keen on higher fuel prices. So it was that a great many people were able to convince themselves that their self-serving complaints were really something more noble. They were wrong, as many of us frequently are when we allow our self-interest to ally itself with a spurious, but apparently more ethical, aim.

People always used to be so much better at complaining that nostalgia ain’t what it used to be. The past so often seems better
than the present. Woody Allen, in one of his stand-up skits, captures something of this in his tale of what happened when he faced hanging by a bunch of Klansmen. ‘And suddenly my whole life passed before my eyes. I saw myself as a kid again, in Kansas, going to school, swimming at the swimming hole, and fishing, frying up a mess-o-catfish, going down to the general store, getting a piece of gingham for Emmy-Lou.’ Yet here, as so often, the past is not quite as it seems. ‘And I realise it’s not my life. They’re gonna hang me in two minutes, the wrong life is passing before my eyes.’

The problem is that when we recollect the past, it’s very often a false life that passes before the mind’s eye. Fings may not be wot they used to be, but they’re not usually as we remember them to have been either.

Consider some of the things which are often said to have got worse in Western society over the years, such as diet. Today we are constantly told that we eat far too much processed, fatty and sugary food. It would be far better if we ate as our ancestors did, munching on wholesome food plucked straight from the garden or frying up a mess-o-catfish from pure, flowing rivers.

It’s certainly true that the average Westerner’s diet leaves a lot to be desired, but the idea that it was generally better in the past is surely delusional. Lack of fresh fruit and vegetables through the winter months meant that for much of human history northern Europeans were, by modern standards, malnourished for a large part of the year, if not the whole of it. In the 1930s the poor had what George Orwell called in
The Road to Wigan Pier
an ‘appalling diet’ based on ‘white bread and margarine, corned beef, sugared tea and potatoes’. This was not just due to poverty. ‘English people everywhere, so far as I know, refuse brown bread’, wrote Orwell. ‘They sometimes give the reason that brown bread is “dirty”.’
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