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

complaints are self-defeating ones. These occur when we protest that thingsare not as they ought to be, but when the remedy would totally defeat the purpose of the complaint.
     
    For instance, on arriving at the ruins of the Inca city of Macchu Picchu in Peru, you might marvel at it but also protest about how much better it would be if the crowds weren’t so big. Yet if visitor numbers were strictly controlled, the chances are that you wouldn’t be there to have the improved experience in the first place. Why would you think that you would fall into the, say, half of current visitors still able to get to the site, rather than the half denied the privilege? Unfortunately for anyone but a dictator, no one is ever going to pass a law which prevents
other people
from visiting places, but not
you
.
    The complaint rarely seems self-defeating for us because we adopt all sorts of biases of thought which enable us to think restrictions wouldn’t apply to us. We might believe that erecting obstacles would deter others but not ourselves, which would be to make unwarranted assumptions about the motivations of others. A wealthy tourist might assume that tighter rules would keep the smelly backpackers away, while the backpackers might assume that it would be coach parties who would be banned. Indeed, we could avoid being self-defeating by explicitly complaining in this way, but this would simply transform the protest into another form of wrong complaint, the self-serving kind (which I’ll come to shortly).
    In general, most complaints of the kind ‘This is too popular’ are self-defeating if taken as reflecting genuine beliefs that things are not as they ought to be, rather than as mere expressions of frustration. If it is hard to get a table at your favourite restaurant, that is probably because it is very good, and the only realistic way things would be easier for you would be if the restaurant lacked precisely the qualities that make you love it as you do. Complain if you will, but only as a form of catharsis.
    Perhaps an even better example of a self-defeating complaint is the one often heard by advocates of diversity in culture. I’m a good (or bad) example of someone who likes to enjoy dabbling in cultural difference. As such a person, the heart always sinks a little if I go to a foreign city and find a Starbucks or Pizza Hut defiling an otherwise idlyllic scene of benign difference. If I were to complain about this, what would I really be saying? That cultures should retain their differences, and that we should not end up in a world where there is one big grey sludge of a monoculture, with nothing interesting and ‘other’ to embrace. But why would this be a good thing? Because that way people like me could enjoy the diversity.
    But hang on a minute. The diverse world I want is one in which people like me could not easily thrive. I do not preserve any particular culture in its purity. My culture is a multi-culture, of curry one day, pasta the next, washed down with French wine, to a soundtrack of Brazilian bossa nova. If everyone were like me, everywhere would be culturally mongrel, and there would be no ‘pure or ‘authentic’ national cuisine or music to dip into.
    So it is clearly not true that I really want cultures to retain their purity, since to wish that would be to wish myself out of existence. What I really want, it seems, is for
other people
to be culturally monogamous so I can savour them with cosmopolitan promiscuity. It’s like a libertine who wants his innumerable conquests to be chaste virgins. Once again, the only way to avoid my complaint being self-defeating is to make it self-serving.
    Self-defeating complaints have something very important in common with contradictory ones. Both spring from a lack of acceptance of the limitations of life. In the case of contradictory complaints the problem is that of the plurality of goods.This can also be the case with self-defeating ones. There are goods in both