Complaint: From Minor Moans to Principled Protests (13 page)

Complaints relate more to practical things of individual concern: public transport, which older people tend to rely on more; personal ill health; the weather; and the cost of living, which becomes more of a factor, as income is usually much lower after retirement than it is in peak earning years.

There is something dispiriting in the fact that complaint about the big issues of public life, such as politics and religion, is largely the preserve of youth. It is perfectly rational that, as we age, we come to see the futility of much raging against
the machine. Our mistake is to let this become too much of a habit, so that a justified cynicism about the possibility of change makes us too weary to act when it really could count. The benefit of age and experience should make us better equipped to fight the battles that can be won and really do matter. Right complaint should combine the engagement of youth with things of real importance and the wisdom of old age to see what can actually be changed.

If my survey results are no more than suggestive, then at least I hope they show that there are serious issues which could be raised by a more systematic and rigorous study of patterns of complaint. The few sociologists and psychologists I could track down who had done substantive work on complaint both reported that little other work on it had been done in their respective fields.

This is a pity. That this is not at all a trivial subject can de demonstrated by considering what it might mean if the broadest summary of my survey were corroborated: that people generally complain more or less equally, irrespective of culture, gender or age, but that what precisely they choose to complain about can be revealing about their values and beliefs. The first part of the conclusion points to the existence of that rare and endangered species: a human universal. Against the tides of cultural relativism few truly transnational human traits remain standing, and those that do tend to be the most basic: eating, working, copulating, forming groups and creating rituals. Complaining belongs on this list, not as a curiosity but as a reflection of our
possessing both a moral sense and the spirit to talk, and act, on the basis of it.

The variety in what people choose to complain about, however, is potentially even more interesting. If it is indeed true that culture affects complaint behaviour more than gender, for example, this would feed into the often frenzied and muddled debates about nature and nurture. What it suggests is that, although there are real differences in the underlying psychologies of men and women, reflected in their complaint patterns, it would be a mistake to focus too much on these, since most of these differences pale into insignificance when compared to cultural ones. If you want to know why someone complains comparatively little about poor service, for example, the answer is in the passport, not the chromosomes. And if this is true, then the extent to which such sex differences as there are reflect nature or nurture is highly questionable.

The psychology and sociology of complaint therefore feed into its politics. I argued earlier that complaint is at the root of all social change. But who gets the opportunity to complain the loudest? Whose complaints are heard without prejudice, and whose are dismissed? These questions are important, for they have a direct bearing on how much power different social groups have to reshape the world into a more just and equitable form. Once again, complaint is shown to be no trivial matter, but an issue which is at the heart of who we are as social animals.

In the USA recently I caught sight of a large billboard by the side of the highway. It looked like an advertisement for a TV crime drama or a film: a couple of smart-suited guys stood confidently, superimposed against the backdrop of a nocturnal cityscape. In fact, what this slick, stylish ad proclaimed was ‘We Sue Drunk Drivers’.

Litigation has been big business in the USA for many decades now, and there are signs that the UK and Europe are following suit. In recent years there has been an increase in British lawyers seeking damages for clients on a ‘no win, no fee’ basis. Advertising campaigns now ask people if they have had an accident and whether someone could be to blame. If you answer yes, then the promise is that a big cheque could be yours.

This trend is much lamented. Robert Hughes’s
Culture of Complaint
was one of the first serious attempts to critique the book’s eponymous phenomenon.
²⁴
That every page contained some kind of complaint by the author was ironic but not damning: right complaint
should
drive out wrong complaint. Ever since, people have been queuing up to complain about the complainers. Their argument is that we have developed a grievance culture, in which we routinely try to deal with our misfortunes by seeking legal redress.

Although I agree that we do live in a grievance culture, I think its nature is not properly understood. To see what lies behind it, we need to look at social changes coalescing around three key concepts: responsibility, freedom and entitlement.

It is often claimed that the grievance culture stops people from taking responsibility for their own actions. Accidents are no longer things that just happen: they are opportunities to pin the blame on someone else and make yourself a fortune. However, it is not just that we are given an incentive to shift the blame to others; we are almost forced to do so, because in a grievance culture, if you can’t blame someone else, someone else will probably blame you.

You see this at work in the advice given to motorists by insurers, never to accept responsibility in the event of an accident. People are not merely choosing to deny their responsibility, they are being obliged to do so by the people with whom they enter into legal contracts. This can require us to deny what we know obviously to be true. For example, when I wedged the bumper of the car in front of me into its rear left tyre, I knew it was my fault for not keeping my distance and braking too late. Why on earth should I deny a self-evident truth? But this is what happens when the idea of responsibility ceases to be a moral notion and becomes a legal one. One pins blame and denies responsibility for legal reasons, and the question of who was morally responsible is irrelevant. From a moral point of view, for instance, it is insane to suggest that a café’s owners have to make sure you don’t burn yourself on the coffee they serve. But since Liebeck
v
. McDonald’s in 1994 – when the fast-food chain was successfully sued by a woman who burned herself on a take-out coffee she had placed between her knees – the legal precedent has been set, and the moral argument is swept away.

The overturning of morality by law is the recurrent pattern of the grievance culture. There are several different social
and historical factors which are all working to push us in this direction, as the possibility for genuinely moral interaction with our fellow citizens diminishes.

Actual morality, as opposed to theoretical ethics, has generally had two rather different pillars: the institutional and the social. The key institutions of morality have been religious authorities, which have set out the moral law for laypeople to follow. However, the extent to which these edicts have really shaped behaviour is debatable. For sure, many sexual mores, for example, have been fashioned by the Church. But in the quotidian interaction of people social constraints probably have had more force than theological ones. When we lived in small towns and villages, the knowledge that we would see the same people again and again acted as a natural moderator of our more selfish impulses. Many of the moral injunctions that guide us on a daily basis are necessitated by the practical needs of living in close proximity with others. For example, life becomes very difficult in a small community if you get a reputation as a liar, so truth-telling becomes a practical as well as a moral imperative.

Both these pillars have come tumbling down in modern urban and suburban life. Most people no longer recognise an ecclesiastical authority as a source of moral rules. When the most Catholic country in Europe, Italy, has one of its lowest birth-rates, you know that the authority bishops command over their flocks is very weak indeed. Nor can we rely on everyday social life to provide our moral compass: when so many of us don’t even know our neighbours, the kind of moral self-regulation small communities evolve is also dying out.

Social conservatives say that the result is a crisis of moral legitimacy. They are right, but what is striking is that this has not yet translated into a crisis of moral behaviour. People are
floundering around without any clear sense of what grounds their values or constrains their actions, but this has not led to the decline of Western civilisation. Indeed, on many counts, the decline of moral certainty has positively correlated with great moral progress. People today are much less tolerant of spousal abuse, sexism, racism, ageism, ableism, drunk driving, violence against children, rape and exploitation of workers in the developing world: and the list could go on.

The crisis so far has largely been manifest in a confusion about what justifies and grounds ethical values. In terms of how we actually live, I see little sign of moral disaster. But, of course, that doesn’t mean we should assume this will continue. If our ethics lacks an understood and agreed basis, it is vulnerable to challenges from alternative moral systems, amoralism or, as has already happened, legalism.

The priority of law over ethics is thus an understandable development. Law gives us a framework to order our behaviour which promises to combine the objectivity of religious codes with the rationality of modern thought. It also deals with the problem that we can no longer use daily interaction with neighbours to nurture our sense of moral propriety. For example, in the UK neighbours have frequently been in dispute in recent years over the height of Leylandii hedges. Since neighbours don’t know each other as they used to, and may not even be able to presume they share each other’s core moral commitments, the possibility of resolving these disputes through reasonable dialogue has diminished. Into this void steps the law, so that you can take the matter to your local authority for them to sort out. Instead of relying on neighbours to behave well towards each other, we now rely on rules to determine what we can or cannot do.

Making the concept of legal responsibility central to our
ideas of right and wrong enables us to avoid worrying about our moral responsibility. This kicks in at two levels. First, we become less inclined to worry about whether something is morally right just as long as it is legal. The distinction between tax evasion and tax avoidance is instructive here. Tax evasion is illegal, but tax avoidance uses legal mechanisms. Most people would be delighted to be told by their accountant that they can avoid tax by exploiting some kind of legal loophole. Anyone who felt uneasy about following such a course of action would probably be told that there is no need to, because what they are doing is totally legal. However, taxation is also a moral issue, based on the Marx-lite principle that each contributes to the common purse according, roughly at least, to ability. If you support the moral case for taxation, it is hard to see why finding a legal way to avoid paying your share is something you should feel smug about. But as our norms become more and more guided by law and less by an autonomous ethics, we see less and less reason to take anything into account other than an act’s legality.

The second level of loss of responsibility concerns our choice of moral values themselves. Jean-Paul Sartre argued that we cannot avoid being responsible for the values we choose. Even if we simply follow rules set out by priests, we still have to take responsibility for choosing those priests as moral authorities in the first place. However, Sartre argued that we do not like to admit this to ourselves or others, because the responsibility would weigh too heavily on us. Hence we prefer to kid ourselves that deferring to the authority of others transfers our responsibility over to them.

Sartre would recognise straight away a key psychological motive for the drift from ethics to law: while it is hard to deny that we choose our own values, we are genuinely not
responsible for most of the laws which we are obliged to follow. We choose our legislators only in a very indirect way, and most people at any given time have not voted for the government in power. So if laws provide the normative underpinning of our behaviour, we can truly achieve the kind of escape from responsibility Sartre claimed we craved.

Seen in this light, the relationship of cause and effect between the rise of grievance culture and the decreased willingness to take personal responsibility for our actions is more complicated than it may at first seem. The increased legalisation of normative discourse has occurred in large part because the moral discourse has become so enfeebled. Once this trend reaches a critical tipping point, it becomes self-reinforcing, since the de facto precedence of the legal becomes a cause as well as an effect of the decline of the moral. Simply to blame the increase of litigation for the waning of morality is to put the cart before the horse.

The moral-to-legal shift also explains the diminished moral status of complaint. A more legalistic public discourse encourages more vocal and strident complaint, since if you do have a bona fide legal complaint, you are in the legal right and there is no arguing against you. There is thus an objectivity to legal complaints which brokers no dispute, in contrast to moral complaints, which always have to be argued for and can never be adjudicated with any finality. For that reason, if you are seeking resolution to a grievance, it is far better to make a legal complaint than a moral one.

This obviously means that, over time, we hear more and more legal complaints and fewer and fewer moral ones. This in itself diminishes the sense that complaint is a moral act. What’s worse, the complaints we do hear no longer have any basis in morality, only in law. And finally, because such complaints
are so often about individuals or groups seeking redress for their own problems, complaint becomes associated with self-serving pleading, not a cry for an end to general injustice.