Right complaint requires considering the possibility of change. Reinhold Niebuhr’s serenity prayer captures the heart of it:
God grant me the serenity
To accept the things I cannot change;
Courage to change the things I can;
And wisdom to know the difference.
The wisdom required, however, is the knowledge not just of the difference between what can and can’t be changed, but of what ought to be changed. Mention of God aside, agreeing with the serenity prayer is easy, since in abstract terms it’s platitudinous. It’s how you put the flesh on its bones which counts. My contention is that religion has tended to overestimate the extent to which things cannot or should not be changed. But to underestimate it would be just as much of an error.
Wrong complaints can take one of three forms: they can be about things that can’t be changed, about those that shouldn’t, or about those which neither can nor should be changed. Right complaints are simply those about things which can and should be changed.
However, there are always many more ways of being wrong than there are of being right. So it is with complaint. Hence to understand right complaint it serves us well to contrast it with numerous wrong complaints. If we want to reclaim complaint as a progressive, positive force, it is necessary to identify why it is that complaint so often fails to meet up to this high expectation. To do this, we need a taxonomy of wrong complaint.
In this chapter I’m going to look at complaints which are wrong because they concern things that cannot be changed, while in the next I’ll turn to things we should not try to change.
On inspirational posters, tea towels and web sites we are assured that the only thing that stands between us and our goals is negative thinking. ‘With love and patience, nothing is impossible’, said the Japanese Buddhist Daisaku Ikeda. ‘It is often merely for an excuse that we say things are impossible’, agreed the seventeenth-century French writer François de la Rochefoucauld. ‘The only way to discover the limits of the possible is to go beyond them into the impossible’, inspired Arthur C. Clarke. ‘To the timid and hesitating everything is impossible because it seems so’, chided Sir Walter Scott. ‘The Difficult is that which can be done immediately; the Impossible that which takes a little longer’, said George Santayana. You get the picture.
To respond to this barrage of positive thinking and unlimited aspiration with the suggestion that some things just can’t be done sounds heretically negative. Who could be so cold and pessimistic as to suggest that, actually, sometimes you have to put up with imperfection and get on with it? Well, me. And William Faulkner, who wrote, ‘All of us failed to match our dreams of perfection. So I rate us on the basis of our splendid failure to do the impossible.’
Unless the authors of the inspirational quotes I cited were actually just stupid, Faulkner’s comparative cynicism must be very close in essence to what they really meant. No one literally believes that nothing is impossible. If Daisaku Ikeda believes that it is only because of a lack of love and patience that I can’t kick a football like David Beckham, then he’s not wise but delusional. Although Scott believed the timid and hesitating found everything impossible, he’d surely agree that only the arrogant and foolish believe nothing is.
Fighting against the impossible makes sense in two ways. First, in order to know the difference between what is impossible and what merely seems so, you have to try to do things which apparently can’t be done. Sometimes the attempt will confirm the real impossibility of the ambition, as was the case with alchemists who tried to turn base metals into gold. On other occasions we will be pleasantly surprised.
Second, the impossible can sometimes be used as a target to aim at, even though we should not kid ourselves that we will ever reach it. This is most evidently useful when the impossibility in question is perfection. Artists, artisans, cooks and sportspeople all aim for perfection, even though they know that at best it can be achieved only in part or fleetingly.
It is often said that it is better to aim for perfection and miss than it is to aim for something less, because it is better to fall short of a higher standard than a lower one. I’m not so sure. The rule seems to hold fine when the outcome is merely the difference between doing well and doing better. But when the stakes are winning or losing, or life and death, it seems to me that pragmatism – that most loathed but necessary of concepts – has to come into it. In sport, for instance, you can find plenty of examples of teams or individuals who tried to play the perfect game and were undone by opponents who took a more practical approach. The victorious Greek European Championship football team of 2004, which beat Portugal to lift the trophy, is one of the most striking examples of how a well-drilled team of generally mediocre talents can overcome more gifted opposition.
I am also somewhat concerned by the psychological weakness that the lust for perfection entails. There is no logical reason why we must temporarily convince ourselves we can do the impossible in order to do our best, but psychologically, this seems to be an almost universal truth. My own personal motto is ‘less than perfect, more than good enough’. I accept from the start that I’m not going to be perfect, but I push myself by trying not to settle for the merely adequate. I find this more motivating than trying to convince myself I can be the greatest, because I don’t think I could hold on to that illusion for too long. If I make it my goal, therefore, I’m going to be frequently downhearted, dejected and discouraged. As it is, when I see faults in myself, or others point them out, I can accept them and try to learn from them more easily than if awareness of these failings had shattered an over-inflated self-image.
The idea that we should not accept anything as impossible is therefore true only insofar as it does not mean what it literally says. Realism does have to enter the picture at some stage, and realism involves accepting that there are limits on what we can do, as individuals and as a species. Right complaint needs to take this on board too: there is no point in protesting that things are not as they ought to be if they can’t be any different.
That is why complaining about the inevitable or unchangeable is a species of wrong complaint. Perhaps the most common form of this is complaint directed against the fallibility and unpredictability of human nature. This has a significant political import. Historically, many on the left have complained about greed, corruption and inequality in society, and justifiably so. However, you have to be very careful how precisely you direct that complaint. If you think that things could be organised better so as to reduce inequality and to provide checks and balances against the darker side of human nature, then it seems to me that nothing you are protesting about is impossible to change. But if you blame the system as the root cause of all base motives among people, then your complaint is misguided, for what you are saying needs to change is not just the system but human nature itself. Get the politics right, the theory goes, and you just won’t see people behaving badly. As people optimistically believed in the throes of almost every socialist revolution, individuals will gladly work for the common good with no thought for self-interest because they will realise that the common good is their good too. In such a society cheating and greed would be pointless.
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.
On a day-to-day level most complaints serve no higher goal than that of reaffirming our sense of how things should really be. ‘Isn’t the weather awful?’ we ask, knowing that agreement confirms that we are not mistaken to find it somewhat disheartening. ‘Politicians are all a bunch of lying bastards!’ we say, which, while not entirely true, affirms the perfectly laudable belief that honesty in politics should be our goal. ‘There’s nothing on the television’, and so we are right to be bored by it. These are hardly the noblest forms of complaint, but in moderation they are at least reasonable.
The danger lies in using complaint for this purpose so frequently that it becomes a substitute for actually doing something. All specific complaints then lead to the point of resignation: ‘What’s the point?’ Complaint ceases to be constructively cathartic and simply becomes an excuse to do nothing. ‘Isn’t the weather awful?’ we ask, justifying a wasted afternoon sitting idly inside. ‘Politicians are all a bunch of lying bastards!’ we say, vindicating our own apathy. ‘There’s nothing on the television’, but we don’t turn it off. Complaint is genuinely cathartic only in those situations where change is not a possibility or a priority. Otherwise it can become part of the problem, not a helpful way to soothe it.
Recognising that there is a large class of cathartic complaints is a reminder that much of what we say is not about communicating information or making truth claims, which is what linguists and philosophers of language tend to focus on. Words are our most important social lubricants, and it is often more revealing to ask what someone is doing with their words than it is to ask what they mean by them. For instance, ‘Nice day’ is primarily a means of breaking the ice, not an attempt to sum up the prevailing meteorological conditions. People ask after your relatives not because they really want to know but because they want to increase intimacy. In the same way it would be a mistake to see many, if not most, complaints as being primarily about the contents of the sentences which form them. As I said in the introduction, my focus is on what I called sincere complaints, but in this sense of the word insincere ones are not necessarily useless or misguided.
Right complaint helps us to change something, which is why wrong complaint can arise when we fail to see that what we find hard to accept cannot be changed. Such wrong complaint either treats the impossible as possible or makes the possible seem impossible. In that sense wrong complaint is unrealistic and untruthful.
However, I have argued that it would be too simplistic to say that it is never right to complain about things we cannot change. First, we can at least change how we view the unchangeable. Second, as long as it is not used as a substitute for action we could take, complaint can at least be cathartic, reaffirming our sense that we are right to see that things are not ideal, even if we cannot do anything about them. But we do not achieve a genuine catharsis if our complaints actively promote inertia when what we really need to do is build momentum.
I do not draw these distinctions for their own sake, as a mere intellectual exercise. I believe that becoming aware of them may help us do some important psychological de-cluttering. Complaints easily fill our heads and use up emotional resources. Avoiding the wrong sort and focusing on the right kind is one way to stop our heads filling with distracting, unhelpful noise. The practice of right complaint and the avoidance of wrong complaint are thus parts, however small, of the practice of right living as a whole.