Complaint: From Minor Moans to Principled Protests (8 page)

Such a solution appeals to the voice inside us that insists something
must
be done, even as another voice reminds us that not a great deal
can
be done. The complaint about the deep structural causes of social inequality can be displaced on to a complaint about school dinners, and thus instead of a
painful, head-against-the-wall struggle we can focus our guilt on a single issue that can be solved by an education minister changing the menus. (Actually, the changes prompted by the programme had an unforeseen effect: the number of children taking school dinners went down by 20 per cent as they introduced healthier, but also less popular, menus.
¹⁶
)

How many of the people who got excited over Jamie Oliver’s quest for better nutrition were actually displacing complaints about the horridness or plight of the working class, I cannot honestly say. My point is to illustrate how displacement complaints can work, not to guess whether or not in this case they were at the heart of the phenomenon. What is surely true is that we are often tempted to complain about an issue which seems black and white rather than engage with an issue which is more complex. In a way, who can blame us? Life is hard, and expending endless energy on intractable problems is neither fun nor fruitful. But to displace our complaints is to avoid hard truths. You may prefer an easier life to a more honest one, but you should at least have enough honesty to recognise the fact.

It’s not just supporters of Jamie Oliver’s campaign who sometimes misdirect their complaints, however. So do those who criticise it. However, the fault here is one not of
displacement
but of
proportionality
. To protest too much about something that isn’t very important can be an even more egregious example of wrong complaint than having a small moan about something you should be sanguine about.

In the UK some of the most informed criticism of Oliver has nonetheless fallen foul of this error. The entire healthy eating agenda has been rubbished by people who make too much of the kind of sceptical analysis of Oliver I outlined above. Despite the doubts, it is surely true that it is preferable that schools feed children better, not worse, and that we
eat well. There may be too much emphasis put on this, but in reacting against it we have to be careful not to overcompensate. Being lectured by a politician on how many vegetables I should be eating a day may make me want to go out and devour a box of Krispy Kreme doughnuts, but I would be foolish to interpret this desire as an act of rational resistance against the hegemonic oppression of a paternalist state.

Once again, complaints against Oliver were disproportionate. Oliver was just one man doing his best to help the kids and raise his ratings (there is no contradiction between the two). Even if his programme was symptomatic of a wrong turn we have taken in the UK on health and diet, in itself it was largely benign and possibly even beneficial. To complain too much about it is to get things out of proportion, even if there is some substance to the complaint.

Such disproportionate complaints matter because they divert finite energy towards the wrong ends. It is not just that there are more important issues than children’s right to eat Turkey Twizzlers. It’s also that if you want to counter the excessive rigidity and zeal of nutritional advice, you shouldn’t pick on the one target who may actually have a point.

Perhaps even worse is that people are repelled by over-the-top complainants. As an atheist, I face this problem with my more militant peers, who are so vociferously against religion that people who might otherwise be sympathetic to secular humanism end up being put off. Richard Dawkins is the most famous example of this, although, as a matter of fact, in the substance of what he says he tends to be much more thoughtful and careful than his public image suggests. But people do judge books by their covers, and Dawkins presents his anti-theistic arguments in very strident, confrontational terms. His best-selling book was called
The God Delusion
and his
television series
The Root of All Evil
(a title which he now says he regrets).

If there’s a queue to complain about the falsity and perniciousness of religion, I’m in it with Dawkins. But if, when my turn comes, I make it sound as though religion is nothing but a delusion and lies at the root of all evil, I think I’d be guilty of getting things out of proportion. And so I would have lost the chance to persuade some people who might otherwise see the light (or perhaps I should say, turn it off).

Not only can complaints be misdirected by being disproportionate or displaced; they can also be both. The clearest example of this is what might be termed environmental anality. I have to confess to being prone to this myself. After a train journey I will take my newspaper and empty plastic bottle home to be recycled, even though when I see the sack-loads of trash being offloaded at the terminus I have to accept my meagre effort is a droplet of mist in a vast ocean.

Making this extra effort oneself is, at worst, harmless. What is worse is to complain about other people’s tiny wastes of energy and resources. It is true that if ‘everyone did their bit’ together we would make a difference, but this is irrelevant because everybody is not going to do it unless they are forced to. Recycling rates in the UK shot up only because local councils were set targets and so acted to make people separate their trash. In a similar way, the kinds of mass waste of energy stand-by buttons represent is going to be avoided only when manufacturers are forced to stop putting them on appliances; and aviation growth is not going to be significantly halted by a few idealistic people taking their holidays in Lyme Regis instead.

So when we complain about relatively small wastes of energy, we are guilty of both displacement and lack of
proportionality. We haven’t got things in perspective, because throwing a newspaper into a bin is too small an act to make any difference to the environment. But we’re also displacing, because the scale at which these problems have to be tackled is too large for us to have any direct impact on it. Rather than feel helpless, we will go into psychological distortions to convince ourselves that every little really does help, rather than facing the reality that our personal actions are as useless as collecting our sweat to help put out a forest fire.

This doesn’t mean ‘going green’ is pointless. We should do our bit, mainly because we should practise ourselves what we preach for all others. It’s just that, when it comes to complaint, we should focus on changing policy, not the habits of friends and neighbours.

Green politics, however, is a fertile breeding ground for a third kind of misdirected complaint: the grand but empty gesture. Such complaints tend to occur when people are looking for an opportunity to make a stand. Primed with this incentive to find something to complain about, and do it loudly, they often end up choosing not on the basis of sound facts and good reason but on what would make the biggest splash.

The case in 1995 of the Brent Spar oil storage buoy in the North Sea off Scotland is a good example of this. When the Brent Spar came to the end of its working life, its owner, Shell, needed to dispose of it. It basically had two options: bring it to shore for dismantling or dump it deep out at sea in the Atlantic. Shell undertook its own study of the two options and decided that deep-sea disposal was the safest option, both because it posed a lesser risk of industrial accident and harm to its workforce, and because it would have less impact on the environment. In particular, there was a risk of its breaking up
in shallower waters as it was brought to shore, which would have had a greater impact of marine life than sinking it in deep sea.

For Greenpeace this was an opportunity to make a big public stand against dumping at sea, which it opposed in all circumstances. It sprang into action, with activists occupying the platform and testing the levels of pollutants on board. Greenpeace’s media campaign was highly successful. Most of the public agreed that the platform should not be dumped in deep sea, some boycotted Shell petrol pumps, and the share price of the company fell. Shell eventually bowed to public pressure and abandoned its plans, even though it insisted that these had represented the safest option and the company still had the backing of the UK government.

What is dispiriting about all this is that Shell was probably right, and Greenpeace later had to apologise for grossly overestimating the levels of pollutants on the buoy. Fortunately, nothing did go wrong when the Brent Spar was brought to land for dismantling, but the fact that a risky decision comes off does not mean the risk was worth taking in the first place: I would be a fool to claim that surviving a game of Russian roulette vindicates my decision to play it.

For Greenpeace the complaint did fit its wider purposes, since its campaign was fundamentally based on opposition to dumping at sea, not on any specific claims about the relative merits of doing so on this occasion. Although it may seem bizarre for a green group to care less about the actual environmental impact of a decision than about broader, long-term goals, it is not inconsistent.

More guilty are the ordinary people who were too quick to back Greenpeace and dismiss Shell’s claims as smokescreens for profiteering. Without checking the facts, millions leaped
to make a gesture on behalf of the environment and against big business by backing Greenpeace and shunning Shell. The opportunity arose for an empty gesture, and too many took it.

The similarities with other variants of misdirected complaint are clear, most notably the preference for the easy, quick hit over the harder, more considered option. It’s just easier to fire complaints at a clear, big target than it is to wade through the facts and complications to reach a more considered view. Misdirected complaints are above all a testament to our laziness, our longing for the simple black and white in a world of bewildering grey.

There is an old wisecrack that goes, ‘Just because you’re paranoid, that doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you.’ Like many of the best jokes, however, it has an element of truth, and not just in the obvious point that not everyone who feels persecuted is imagining it. More interestingly, most instances of what we might call non-clinical paranoia build on a vast mass of truth.

Non-clinical paranoia is not a mental illness, though the obsession it often fosters can eventually lead people to the sanatorium. It is, rather, a cooler version of the false belief that there are unrecognised or unacknowledged forces operating against the individual or society. In contrast to the clinical paranoiac, who simply imagines things that are not there, the non-clinical variant makes understandable errors of reasoning.

The world is full of non-clinical paranoiacs, who can be identified by their tendency to make what could be called
second-order complaints. At the first level there is the basic complaint (9/11 was a CIA plot, the BBC is run by leftists, Jews fix US foreign policy etc.); but then at the second level is the complaint shared by all of them: that this terrible truth is being somehow suppressed. To put it in the formulation I have used to define complaint, not enough people know that things are not as they ought to be, because things are not as they ought to be at the level of knowledge transfer either.

Such thinking can be seen as paranoid because of how these two levels of complaint fit together. In order to believe both that things are wrong and that this fact is not acknowledged as the simple truth that it is, it becomes necessary to ascribe to people who have an interest in suppressing the fact incredible powers of knowledge management. For if this weren’t the case, why on earth wouldn’t more people see the truth for what it is? Hence the postulating of the suppressing, powerful agent behind the scenes becomes essential to maintain the coherence of holding a truth that so few are willing to accept.

Non-clinical paranoia is widespread because it is so hard to hit the ‘Aristotelian’ mean when it comes to credulity. Aristotle persuasively argued that right ways of thinking and conduct tended to fall between two extremes. Courage, for example, lies between the excess of rashness and the deficiency of cowardice. Generosity avoids the excess of profligacy and also the deficiency of meanness.

We don’t always have words to describe the mean or its two errant neighbours. Complaint is a good example. A person who complains too much is a moaning minnie or a whinging fool; a person who doesn’t complain enough is a doormat or a pushover. But we lack a word or phrase for the person who complains just enough and in the right way. I might suggest we refer to such a person as a quintessentially Aristotelian
complainant, but for the fact that it is a horrible mouthful and the obvious acronym would make such a person a ‘quac’.

Credulity is another axis of virtue which lacks a suitable word for the mean. Those who accept what they are told too readily are called credulous or gullible; those who go to the other extreme are over-suspicious, cynical or non-clinically paranoid. Those in the middle can be described as persons who proportion belief to evidence and argument in the appropriate way – which, again, is hardly a phrase that’s usable in everyday speech.

As is so often the case, these two vices are not accorded the same degree of seriousness, and how they are viewed varies tremendously according to what social circles you move in. In many intellectual circles, for instance, it is de rigueur to be utterly sceptical about everything that Western politicians do. This is particularly true of people who adhere to what might be called Cod Chomskyism, or its British counterpart, Knee-jerk Pilgerism. Neither of these creeds should be confused with exactly what Noam Chomsky and John Pilger actually say and write. They refer, rather, to a broad set of background assumptions which inform the political analyses of generally middle-class chatterati who pride themselves on how they are able to see through the charade of official political discourse.

Put simply, this world view is based on two claims which are assumed to be true unless proven otherwise. First, the USA acts internationally with the sole motivation of furthering the financial interests of American capitalists in general and the interests of the military–industrial complex in particular. Second, the USA furthers these interests by making sure its allies, client states and any other nation it has some leverage over follow its will.