Complaint: From Minor Moans to Principled Protests by Julian Baggini Read Free Book Online

plural goods can give rise to contradictory complaints. Social mobility and increased opportunity are good things, but the better-educated tend to move around more, and so the result is a decline in the sense of community which comes from people living most of their lives in one place. But the same people complain about both lack of educational opportunity and the decline in traditional communities. Likewise, there are complaints about those left behind by increased prosperity, but when greater wealth leadspeople to have more comfortable homes, and then inevitably spend more time in them, there are laments about the increased atomisation of modern existence. Increasingly, people complain both about the hassle and expense of air travel and about the fact that the government isn’t doing enough to combat climate change or to protect travellers from terrorism.
    However, the answer, as usual, is not to stop complaining altogether. Such examples of wrong complaint can be made right ones by a few adjustments after some careful thought.
    One option is simply to renounce one of the pairs of complaints as fundamentally misplaced. For instance, we might just accept that a more atomised, less cohesive society is the price we pay for greater freedom and prosperity.
    However, the insight of pluralism is that, although we can’t have everything, there is something of value in many of the things we do want. It may therefore be more sensible not entirely to renounce one in any given pair of contradictory complaints, and to see how we can make the competing claims between values into less of a zero-sum game and more of an opportunity for win-win.
    To do this requires us to be more specific about what we are and are not complaining about. For example, if we lament the decline in traditional communities, we should not do so because we believe, all things considered, it is better for people to be born, live and die all in the same place. Rather, we might think that the decline in the shared life of a community has gone further than is necessary. We can’t turn back the clock, but with better urban planning, local democracy and individual effort we may be able to make neighbourhoods more neighbourly. Similarly, it may well be the case that air travel should be more comfortable and pleasurable than it is, but that does not mean it should be cheap and frequent.
    Such reframing of our contradictory complaints formally dissolves any actual inconsistency by accepting the impossibility of fully realising plural goods, while seeking to maximise the realisation of both. Hence we stop complaining about the decline of traditional communities and focus instead on the failure to develop a contemporary alternative. We stop complaining about individualism per se and think instead of how it may simply have gone a little too far. And we stop complaining about air travel as a single experience and instead pick on those aspects of it which really can be improved at no cost to the environment or to security.
    Such an approach reflects two virtues of right complaint. One is
specificity
. The trouble with much complaining is that its targets are too broad. Such generalised moans are futile because they end up being directed at something that contains both good and bad, without disentangling them.
    The second virtue is that of
proportionality
. Some of the most boorish complaints are wrong not in their content but in their extent. It is fair enough to complain about the failures of rail travel, for example, but not if you do so to the extent that you forget about the poor bus and coach users, let alone those sick or dying because of preventable diseases, war or famine.
    If our complaints are both specific enough and proportionate to the seriousness of the failure of things to be how they ought to be, instances of contradictory complaint should be much rarer, if not entirely extinct.
Self-defeating complaints
     
    Closely related to the category of contradictory