Complaint: From Minor Moans to Principled Protests (3 page)

The claim that religion is an enemy of complaint may seem to be instantly refuted by the numerous historical occasions when the devout have taken up the struggle against injustice. But how people have chosen to act says nothing about the logical implications of what they profess to believe. The fact that there are Christian socialists does not prove that Christ preached socialism. Christianity tells us to turn the other cheek, yet countless wars have been waged in Christ’s name. Does this aggression in any way negate the truth that the gospels preach peace?

In the same way, the fact that many believers have campaigned for change is no refutation of the claim that their teachings at the very least tend away from complaint and towards compliance. That believers refuse to confine their ambitions to an afterlife merely confirms that human beings find renunciation of their evident mortality harder than suits the priests. Logically, the rewards of eternity should make the sufferings of this all too brief life seem as trivial as a small itch.
That they do not suggests that belief in the divine runs shallower than we might think.

There is an old saying that there are no atheists in foxholes, meaning that, when their backs are against the wall, everyone will pray to some higher power. This is demonstrably false. In
Touching the Void
the atheist climber Joe Simpson tells the incredible story of how he managed to drag his injured body off a mountain and survive against the odds. Brought up a devout Catholic, Simpson says, in the film adaptation, ‘I always wondered, if things really hit the fan, whether I would, under pressure, turn around and say a few Hail Marys, and say “get me out of here”. It never once occurred to me.’

A more persuasive saying might be that there are no theists at funerals. The grief we involuntarily feel when we say goodbye to loved ones only makes sense if on some level we truly think we have lost them for ever.

All religions and belief systems can be understood as reactions to the imperfection of human life. You can accept it and thus renounce life, as the Buddhists and stoics do. You can believe that the imperfection is to be suffered, for perfection is to come later, as most theists do. Alternatively, you can fight it.

This spirit is captured in Dylan Thomas’s poem ‘Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night’, in which the poet beseeches his dying father to ‘rage, rage against the dying of the light’. It is in many ways a futile plea. All sensible atheists accept that death is inevitable and we have to come to terms with it in some way. Passive submission, however, is not the only way to accept the limits of human power. What Thomas’s poem reflects is not the impossible desire to keep breathing for ever, but the fight to make every heartbeat felt. If you truly value human life, you cannot resign yourself to accepting all its imperfections
without any struggle. When things are not as they should, or could, be, that struggle starts with a complaint.

Social progress has been achieved in human history because people have complained about contemporary injustice and then, crucially, been willing to do something about it. The link between complaint and action is critical, because today we tend to see complaining as a self-contained, purely symbolic act. People spend whole nights in pubs complaining about the treachery of politicians, for example, but if you ask them why they don’t stand for election themselves, the answer is almost invariably, ‘What’s the point?’ But you could ask the same of any complaint without subsequent action. Complaining is only useless if done by itself. At its best, it provides the impetus to do something significant.

Most of the key moments in the development of modern societies began with legitimate complaints. Magna Carta has a mythical status in the history of England, despite the fact that few actually know what it was and what it said, an ignorance immortalised in Tony Hancock’s line ‘Does Magna Carta mean nothing to you? Did she die in vain?’

Magna Carta was not a single document, and its actual effect on the power of the king was limited. However, it is remembered as a symbol for how a widespread complaint was finally resolved. The monarch had too much power, including the authority to imprison anyone he wished. Magna Carta represents the citizens’ success in limiting their ruler’s power by law. That it mainly helped barons rather than the wider populace is forgotten.

The belief that the people have a right to complain and should not suffer injustice in silence is implicit in all movements for social change. In the mid-nineteenth century the Chartists, for instance, complained that the country was being governed in a fundamentally undemocratic way. Only a small minority could vote, and the rules for eligibility varied from town to town. This meant that there were many ‘rotten boroughs’, where fewer than 100 people would be able to choose who to send to parliament, while over half a million citizens in Manchester, Leeds, Birmingham and Sheffield had not a single MP between them. You could become a member of parliament only if you owned property, and because parliamentarians were not paid, only people with private incomes could realistically take on the task. Voting was not even conducted under a secret ballot. The Chartists did not succeed immediately, but they were pivotal in raising the importance of electoral reform, and in time their key aims were achieved.

The USA can trace the story of its independence to the first complaint of ‘no taxation without representation’. Slavery would never have been abolished, had no one seen fit to complain about its injustice. The Quakers were at the forefront of campaigns for abolition, as they have been in many social justice issues. It is no surprise that a dissenting religion with a lax stance on the authority of the Bible was ahead of more orthodox denominations which took longer to see the injustice of bondage.

The list goes on. When the suffragette movement started there was no shortage of people who insisted that voteless women had nothing to complain about. Feminists who dared to question endemic patriarchy were similarly mocked and told their complaints were groundless. All emancipatory movements begin with complaints that are dismissed. Getting
people to accept them as legitimate is key to their achieving success.

Complaint is therefore not a trivial matter of petty moans. To complain is not only to be fully human: it is to defy the divine. It is what spurs us to squeeze the most out of our short, mortal lives, rather than resign ourselves to our lot. Without it no progressive social change would ever come about.

At least, that is complaint at its best. At its worst it is a useless waste of energy, a futile cry against the inevitable, a refusal to accept reality for what it is. How is it that something so important can in another guise be so pointless? To answer that question we need to understand the myriad ways in which complaining can be abused and misused.

Right complaint requires considering the possibility of change. Reinhold Niebuhr’s serenity prayer captures the heart of it:

God grant me the serenity
To accept the things I cannot change;
Courage to change the things I can;
And wisdom to know the difference.

The wisdom required, however, is the knowledge not just of the difference between what can and can’t be changed, but of what
ought
to be changed. Mention of God aside, agreeing with the serenity prayer is easy, since in abstract terms it’s platitudinous. It’s how you put the flesh on its bones which counts. My contention is that religion has tended to overestimate the extent to which things cannot or should not be changed. But to underestimate it would be just as much of an error.

Wrong complaints can take one of three forms: they can be about things that can’t be changed, about those that shouldn’t, or about those which neither can nor should be changed. Right complaints are simply those about things which can and should be changed.

However, there are always many more ways of being wrong than there are of being right. So it is with complaint. Hence to understand right complaint it serves us well to contrast it with numerous wrong complaints. If we want to reclaim complaint as a progressive, positive force, it is necessary to identify why it is that complaint so often fails to meet up to this high expectation. To do this, we need a taxonomy of wrong complaint.

In this chapter I’m going to look at complaints which are wrong because they concern things that cannot be changed, while in the next I’ll turn to things we should not try to change.

On inspirational posters, tea towels and web sites we are assured that the only thing that stands between us and our goals is negative thinking. ‘With love and patience, nothing is impossible’, said the Japanese Buddhist Daisaku Ikeda. ‘It is often merely for an excuse that we say things are impossible’, agreed the seventeenth-century French writer François de la Rochefoucauld. ‘The only way to discover the limits of the possible is to go beyond them into the impossible’, inspired Arthur C. Clarke. ‘To the timid and hesitating everything is impossible because it seems so’, chided Sir Walter Scott. ‘The Difficult is that which can be done immediately; the Impossible that which takes a little longer’, said George Santayana. You get the picture.

To respond to this barrage of positive thinking and unlimited aspiration with the suggestion that some things just can’t be done sounds heretically negative. Who could be so cold and pessimistic as to suggest that, actually, sometimes you have to put up with imperfection and get on with it? Well, me. And William Faulkner, who wrote, ‘All of us failed to match our dreams of perfection. So I rate us on the basis of our splendid failure to do the impossible.’

Unless the authors of the inspirational quotes I cited were actually just stupid, Faulkner’s comparative cynicism must be very close in essence to what they really meant. No one
literally believes that nothing is impossible. If Daisaku Ikeda believes that it is only because of a lack of love and patience that I can’t kick a football like David Beckham, then he’s not wise but delusional. Although Scott believed the timid and hesitating found everything impossible, he’d surely agree that only the arrogant and foolish believe nothing is.

Fighting against the impossible makes sense in two ways. First, in order to know the difference between what is impossible and what merely seems so, you have to try to do things which apparently can’t be done. Sometimes the attempt will confirm the real impossibility of the ambition, as was the case with alchemists who tried to turn base metals into gold. On other occasions we will be pleasantly surprised.

Second, the impossible can sometimes be used as a target to aim at, even though we should not kid ourselves that we will ever reach it. This is most evidently useful when the impossibility in question is perfection. Artists, artisans, cooks and sportspeople all aim for perfection, even though they know that at best it can be achieved only in part or fleetingly.

It is often said that it is better to aim for perfection and miss than it is to aim for something less, because it is better to fall short of a higher standard than a lower one. I’m not so sure. The rule seems to hold fine when the outcome is merely the difference between doing well and doing better. But when the stakes are winning or losing, or life and death, it seems to me that pragmatism – that most loathed but necessary of concepts – has to come into it. In sport, for instance, you can find plenty of examples of teams or individuals who tried to play the perfect game and were undone by opponents who took a more practical approach. The victorious Greek European Championship football team of 2004, which beat Portugal to lift the trophy, is one of the most striking examples of how a
well-drilled team of generally mediocre talents can overcome more gifted opposition.

I am also somewhat concerned by the psychological weakness that the lust for perfection entails. There is no logical reason why we must temporarily convince ourselves we can do the impossible in order to do our best, but psychologically, this seems to be an almost universal truth. My own personal motto is ‘less than perfect, more than good enough’. I accept from the start that I’m not going to be perfect, but I push myself by trying not to settle for the merely adequate. I find this more motivating than trying to convince myself I can be the greatest, because I don’t think I could hold on to that illusion for too long. If I make it my goal, therefore, I’m going to be frequently downhearted, dejected and discouraged. As it is, when I see faults in myself, or others point them out, I can accept them and try to learn from them more easily than if awareness of these failings had shattered an over-inflated self-image.

The idea that we should not accept anything as impossible is therefore true only insofar as it does not mean what it literally says. Realism does have to enter the picture at some stage, and realism involves accepting that there are limits on what we can do, as individuals and as a species. Right complaint needs to take this on board too: there is no point in protesting that things are not as they ought to be if they can’t be any different.

That is why complaining about the inevitable or unchangeable is a species of wrong complaint. Perhaps the most common form of this is complaint directed against the fallibility and unpredictability of human nature. This has a significant political import. Historically, many on the left have complained about greed, corruption and inequality in society, and justifiably so. However, you have to be very careful how precisely you direct that complaint. If you think that things could be
organised better so as to reduce inequality and to provide checks and balances against the darker side of human nature, then it seems to me that nothing you are protesting about is impossible to change. But if you blame the system as the root cause of all base motives among people, then your complaint is misguided, for what you are saying needs to change is not just the system but human nature itself. Get the politics right, the theory goes, and you just won’t see people behaving badly. As people optimistically believed in the throes of almost every socialist revolution, individuals will gladly work for the common good with no thought for self-interest because they will realise that the common good is their good too. In such a society cheating and greed would be pointless.