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

cultural purity and diversity, and having more of one can result in having less of the other. But self-defeating complaints can also spring from problems of accepting finitude. There are, for example, too many people chasing too few remote places. This is an unalterable fact. So if we do want to complain about there being too many visitors to such places, we need to do so in good faith, accepting the consequence that we ourselves should be able to experience less. The price we might have to pay for an unspoilt view of Macchu Pichu is that we never get to see the Galapagos Islands at all.
    We find this hard to accept because, in the West, we have become experience junkies, reading lists in magazines and books of the hundred places we must visit or things we must do before we die and getting paranoid that we’ve only ticked off ten so far. Accepting we may have to settle for much less than everything is disquieting because it requires acknowledging how the finitude of our existence means many doors will never open for us.
    Yet if we cannot accept this, we are doomed to utter more and more self-defeating complaints about how too many people want to do what we want, while failing to see that we are one of the people we are complaining about. Either that or our complaints lack any moral weight and become mere self-serving moans.
Self-serving complaints
     
    I have a great deal of sympathy with anyone living near an airport who tries to halt its expansion. Trying to sleep under the flight path of a low-flying 747 is nobody’s idea of fun. However,I am very suspicious of any claims made on behalf of these local protesters (as opposed to peripatetic activists) that they spring from no more than a concern for justice and fairness. I am not aware of any research which would prove this, but I would be very surprised if the average protester against local airport expansion took fewer flights than someone of the same socioeconomic group living somewhere completely different. Their concern is not with how airports interfere with sleep, but with how one
particular
airport may interfere with
their
sleep.
     
    Fortunately, however, anti-airport protesters do not need to make their pursuit of self-interest naked, because there are now many environmentalist arguments doing the rounds which enable them to present their self-concern as concern for others. It may be true that the new runway will destroy sleep, but why rest my case on this if I can say instead that it will destroy the planet? If I am willing to fly from somewhere else, making such a green case would be profoundly dishonest. Honesty, however, is probably not the best policy, since though many may sympathise with your need for nocturnal rest, most will think a decent offer of compensation will more than make up for your loss.
    Most anti-airport campaigns now run on a twin track. Green protesters take the moral high ground, arguing against all airport expansion, while other local residents argue for a more pragmatic case that further expansion is OK in principle but not here. Consistency is more readily available to the greens, just as long as they don’t criss-cross the planet to make their protests, like the hundreds of people from all over the planet who descended on Puerto Alegre or Seattle to complain about globalisation, without any trace of irony. However, for the ‘OK but not here brigade’ double standards are hard to avoid, since everywhere is ‘here’ for someone.
    Nevertheless, it is not difficult to find persuasive reasons why your area is the wrong one if you want to. For instance, as I write, Lydd airport in Kent is trying to get planning permission for expansion. Lydd is in one of the least built-up areas of the south-east and is close to the coast, and therefore expansion of flights there would probably cause less disruption to fewer people than probably any other airport proposal on the boards. Yet the Lydd Airport Action Group (LAAG) is not short of reasons