Complaint: From Minor Moans to Principled Protests (4 page)

This prediction has been shown to be hopelessly wrong. Collectivisation in the Soviet Union, for example, led to economic stagnation, not stimulation, while one’s standing within the Communist Party provided plenty of opportunity for old-fashioned greed, competition and self-interest to persist. However, a remarkable number of people still believe it is true and will argue that the failures of the various socialist revolutions to date show only that no one has yet created a pure enough Utopia for such a selfless society to take root. The complaint is that no state has been socialist enough, but this is wrong complaint, because no state could ever be pure enough to transform human nature as much as the theory requires.

People object to this diagnosis on the basis that it is pessimistic and that it rests on an untenable view about the rigidity of human nature. The pessimism charge is neither here nor there. Any view can be described as pessimistic if compared with another which makes undeliverable promises. Furthermore I don’t think it is pessimistic, because it still allows for many other options to make a better world.

Nor do you need to be committed to a view of human nature in which everything is biologically hard-wired. Indeed, to believe that nothing in human nature is alterable is as blinkered as believing that everything is. Any credible view of the pliability of human nature has to accept that change is possible only within certain limits. Those constraints do not merely check our pretensions to angelhood: they also save us from all ending up as devils. Empathy, for example, is sufficiently finite in humans for us to predict with some certainty that on average people will care more about themselves and people close to them than about strangers. But the existence of that empathy also means that eradicating all feeling for strangers, although achievable in the short run, will never be universal or permanent. Believe in the infinite malleability of human nature and it is true you can imagine a communal Utopia to come, but you also leave open the possibility of forging a racist and fascist future.

An alternative way of saving the Utopian dream is to claim that human nature is not infinitely malleable but fundamentally good, and that only the corrupting effects of society conceal this fact. If you like to believe things without any shred of evidence, you can maintain this. But anthropologists have found that the natural state of human beings is not to be wild, free and pacific. For a start, every human society is just that – a
society
of some sort – and so even talking about humans uncorrupted by society is confused. If you mean uncorrupted by modern, capitalist society, then the argument is just as weak, because pre-industrial societies are still generally hierarchical, misogynistic and not immune to violent conflict, internally or with external enemies. Studies of contemporary hunter–gatherer societies suggest that 90 per cent of them go to war every year, and that over a quarter of adult males meet violent ends.
⁹

The truth about human nature is neither base nor ignoble. The primatologist Frans de Waal makes this case eloquently by comparing us to our nearest relatives, chimpanzees and bonobos.
¹⁰
Of course, you cannot deduce anything about human nature simply by observing apes, but De Waal convincingly argues that we can conclude that these animals reflect aspects of human nature because when we observe them we experience recognition. We don’t assume or deduce that these apes are like us in many ways: we
see
it. And what we see is neither all good nor all bad. We are co-operative in some ways, competitive in others. Pecking orders emerge in all groups, though some are more hierarchical than others. Males and females have different priorities, though that does not mean that overall one has more power than the other. You don’t need to study apes to see that this is also true of human beings; you just need to look at human societies without prejudice.

Wrong complaint against the corrupting power of society, based on a naïve view of human goodness, has had disastrous consequences. Reforms based on right complaint – against the disenfranchisement of women, working people and ethnic minorities – have led to good outcomes, because the problems were correctly diagnosed. Reforms based on wrong complaint, based on a faulty diagnosis, have led to bad outcomes, because the premises for the changes were unsustainable falsehoods. Power was handed over to representatives of the proletariat on the assumption that they would not be as self-serving as the bourgeoisie they overthrew. Factories and farms were collectivised in the belief that people would be more productive than they were when they were mere employees, alienated from their labour. It was thought that status would cease to be important, even though no movement in human history has
ever granted more status to the likes of Lenin, Mao, Che and Fidel than the revolutionary left.

I don’t want to suggest that the socialist revolutions were complete mistakes. Often, if not usually, they did lead to societies in which life for the poor was better, and improving the lot of the worst-off in society should be a prime objective of political reform. The mistake is rather that of missed opportunity. That things are better than they were is not a good defence if things could easily have been better still. That these opportunities were missed is, I believe, largely due to the fact that legitimate complaint against present injustice was infected by misguided complaints about the source of human imperfection. Had those revolutionaries accepted that it is futile to complain about the mix of selfishness and altruism in human nature, they could have made reforms that would have taken better root in the people they claimed to be representing.

To complain that things ought to be different when they can never realistically be so is a waste of emotional energy, an infantile unwillingness to deal with the imperfection of the world. Such acceptance need not be passive. For example, the course of love rarely runs smooth. Does that mean we should not bother with love at all, or that when things go wrong we should just walk away, and shrug, ‘I knew it!’? Of course not. The mature thing is to work with the imperfection. The same is true of political reform. We don’t give up on it, nor do we accept the inevitability that it will all end in tears. Rather, we work in full knowledge of the limits of politics, knowing that good governance will never be perfect governance, and nor will it cure all the ills of the world. This can be hard to do, because many drawn to politics are by instinct idealists, who fear that to be anything else will be to give up and sell out.
This is a fear based on a simplistic black-and-white view of the world, which is itself a source of the kind of moral distortion which leads to wrong complaint.

Where the world is imperfect, the message is not ‘stop complaining’ but ‘complain about what really can be changed’.

The greatest impossibility of all is to change the past. Whatever we feel about what has happened, what is done is done, and nothing can undo it. Yet here we have another example of how complaint can be futile and how right complaint isn’t so much about stopping our whinging as about directing our complaints into productive channels.

In the contemporary West we have become very bad at dealing with the past. On the one hand, it becomes a focus for nostalgia, which is enjoyable for its own sake but which rarely takes us forward. But as well as having a tendency to idealise the good times, we now seem in indecent haste to forget the bad ones. Sympathy for bad experiences doesn’t last very long before we are told in exasperated tones that we must ‘move on’ or ‘get over it’.

This is true of both the political and the personal. When in 1998 judge Baltasar Garzón of Spain issued an arrest warrant for General Augusto Pinochet of Chile for systematic torture, murder and illegal detention during his rule between 1973 and 1990, many said he should not be raking over old ground. Chile needed to move on, forget about it. The same argument has been used in post-Mussolini Italy, post-Franco Spain, post-Hitler Germany and virtually every other country where dictatorships have fallen. To complain that perpetrators of
atrocities have gone unpunished is seen as vindictive and a waste of emotional energy.

In private life the imperative not to look back is taken even further. I was once told a story about someone’s brother, who had been feeling down since splitting up with his long-term, live-in girlfriend. To cheer him up the brother and friend arranged for an obliging woman to arrive at his house in a long coat, only to reveal that underneath she was wearing nothing but lingerie. The idea was that they would then do what comes naturally. The morose man, however, far from being aroused, became even more upset. His brother couldn’t understand this. ‘Come on!’ he said. ‘It’s been
three weeks
!’

This may be an extreme example, but being ‘over it already’ is taken as the hallmark of a strong, emotionally mature person. And it’s easy to see why this view should prevail. There is indeed no point crying over spilt milk, and what’s done truly is done. But those who complain wisely about the past are not suggesting otherwise. Rather, what they insist on is our coming to terms with what has happened and dealing with its aftermath.

Consider complaints about the legacy of slavery, for example. In 2007, on the anniversary of the passing of an act of parliament to abolish the slave trade in the United Kingdom, there were many debates about whether we should apologise for the past. Most thought we should not, for the same reasons that they thought we shouldn’t complain about it either: it all happened a long time ago, and we cannot change it, nor should we feel responsible for it.

I think the focus on apology was misguided. Those who use the slave trade as a focus for contemporary complaint are often as uninterested in receiving a meaningless apology as anyone else. Rather, they believe that in at least two respects
we have not dealt properly with the injustices of slavery. First, the racism and exploitation that enabled slavery to exist for so long are, it is claimed, still prevalent in contemporary society. As evidence, you can point to Western exploitation of developing world producers and the disproportionate failure of some ethnic minorities to rise to the top in various fields. Second, there is a legacy of slavery which has not been resolved, in that a lot of the wealth remains in the hands of ancestors of exp loiters, while descendants of slaves are disproportionately poor.

Whether this case holds or not, it is a clear example of how legitimate complaints which can be resolved today can arise out of a consideration of past events which cannot be altered. That’s why the idea that ‘the past is past’ and should just be forgotten is often too hasty. There is a difference between accepting the unalterable past and questioning the alterable present and future, which are only as they are because of the past.

In personal matters it is also not at all obvious that the past is always best forgotten. If someone has a deep love for another person, for example, and they then lose them or are betrayed, it is an entirely appropriate response to feel terrible for a long time. You may never again be as happy as you once were. We would suspect that the person who got up the day after such a trauma and announced that past is past and they’re not at all miserable about it didn’t actually have very deep feelings in the first place.

When a relationship ends, it can shatter your assumptions about who you are, your values and what can be expected of other people. If you don’t then take the time to re-evaluate all these and simply try to soldier on, you risk learning nothing from your troubles and repeating the same mistakes. This process has a particular kind of complaint at its heart, one which comes close to the medical sense of the word. There is
an acute sense that things should not have come to this, that there is something wrong with the world. And indeed there almost certainly is, but what is wrong is usually not that the break has happened but that the way things had been before was unsustainable. The purpose of focusing on the complaint is to understand why this was so. This is what enables you truly to ‘move on’, not denying that the past has any relevance for now.

We are temporal beings with pasts, presents and futures. In one sense we are firmly rooted to the now, but it is part of the complexity of human life that in another sense we need to live in all three tenses. Right complaint is part of what enables us to make the future better, for ourselves and for others, and although the past can never be changed, some such right complaints can be made only in reference to it.

To see complaint as useless if it cannot alter the world would be to miss the point that the act of complaining can at least change the complainer. Most obviously, having a good moan can be extremely cathartic.

Consider, for example, the mistreated woman who gets together with her female friends to talk about what a bastard her former lover really is. Will this change him? Will it facilitate a reconciliation? Of course not. But will it make the woman feel better? Almost certainly.

As I have said, complaint springs from a sense that things are not as they should be, and although we cannot always remedy the flaws in reality, we can reassure ourselves that we are right to believe it is the world which is wrong. A cheated
lover, for example, will oft en, quite irrationally, feel that she is to blame for her partner’s bad behaviour, and that if somehow she had been different, tried harder or had bigger breasts, then she would have deserved and got better treatment. Getting together with a good friend and complaining about her now ex-boyfriend is a way of reconstructing her understanding of the world which enables her to see that fault lies outside herself. It is good for her to complain that things are not as they should be, even though she can’t change them, because knowing why they are not right enables her to expunge her feelings of inadequacy and regain self-respect. This catharsis may need to be repeated several times until the poison of self-loathing is expelled, but as long as the focus is not on wanting things which cannot be changed to be different, that’s fine.