Complaint: From Minor Moans to Principled Protests (10 page)

All sorts of other complaints about how people are today are likewise unjustified complaints that they are not as we would like them to be, for no better reason than that their
tastes and preferences are not ones we feel able to embrace. People who watch television are looked down on by people who read books, even though many TV shows are more enriching than most contemporary fiction. Liking burgers and fries is likely to get you looked down on, but since when has culinary taste been a marker of moral or intellectual character? Most ridiculously, we often tend to think people ought to take more interest in what we ourselves think important: philosophers decry the lack of philosophy in the culture; historians the decline of interest in history; economists the naïvety of politics not steeped in economic theory; and so on. From the inside it really seems to these people that their specialist subject is more important, but if you take a more objective view, the only way to sum this systematic bias towards one’s own area of expertise is with the absurd injunction: people ought to take more interest in what I am interested in. This is the brute desire for people to conform to your own conception of the good life, disguised as moral outrage. And when you broaden out the frame of reference from my personal preferences to those of my social group, you get snobbery: other people should be like our people.

The irony is that received wisdom says that we all now believe in ‘each to his own’, and that the problem of contemporary society is supposedly that we’ve gone too far in embracing a laissez-faire relativism. I think this is often just skin-deep. When it comes to the crunch, we often have a remarkably fixed and narrow idea about how people should live. In general terms we are all pro-difference. Get down to specifics, and toleration is often as far as we can go, and our disapproval can’t wait to find an outlet in the form of a complaint about how the way people live today really is appalling.

There is one final category of wrong complaint which is simple to identify but hard to avoid: complaining about things that just aren’t the case. A trivial but telling example of this is of the UK restaurant chain PizzaExpress. In the late 1990s and early 2000s it became a common complaint that their pizzas were not as large as they used to be. However, this was just not true. It was simply the case that more competitors had sprung up, and their pizzas were bigger.

Eventually, in 2002 the company bowed to the inevitable and added 50 per cent to the area of their pizza bases. Although they explicitly denied having previously shrunk them, for many this was the smoking gun. Even today people will swear blind that they know for a fact they had indeed got smaller. We trust our memories, even though psychologists have proved that our recall is far less accurate than we think it is.

This is a sobering example of how, when it comes to a battle between objective fact and subjective perception, the truth rarely wins. Once we get a fixed idea in our heads about the way things are, we start processing the data from our senses in a different way, placing too much emphasis on that which confirms our perception and disregarding that which denies it. Psychologists call it ‘confirmation bias’, and it is very hard to avoid.

When you write for newspapers and magazines, you get used to people complaining about things you simply have not said, and attributing motivations to you that they lack any evidence for. If, for example, I criticise something Michael Moore has said, I get accused of a right-wing bias, even though the week before I was having a go at George W. Bush. Criticism of Noam Chomsky is even more likely to get you blacklisted by his many acolytes, who seem determined to prove the
accusation of paranoia with their disproportionate indignation at any negative representation of their hero. In a mirror image of Bush logic, it seems that you are either for Chomsky or you are for state terror. (It is a further irony that Chomsky writes about how the powers that be manufacture consent, yet many Chomskyites brook no dissent.)

We make too many assumptions on the basis of too little information, and although I am sure this is a universal human flaw, Freud has not helped us here. In albeit bastardised forms many ideas that emerged in Freud have got a grip on the Western imagination and have become truths universally acknowledged outside psychoanalysis, even if they are false.

One of the most pernicious such ideas relates to the Freudian slip. While it is no doubt true that unintentional gaffes and malapropisms can reveal the actual state of our minds, we have tended to take this too far, so that we now trust too much in the power of tell-tale small signs to reveal what we really think.

A good example of the consequences of this overconfidence concerns the inferences that practitioners of Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) claim they can make about a person on a basis of their eye movements. This is not the place to discuss whether these claims are valid or not: the theory is, at the very least, controversial. What interests me more is how well disposed people are to accept that the NLP model is right. It now seems like perfect common sense to believe that unintentional movements will expose the real self within, so when someone comes along with a particular example of how this works, people readily believe it. Instead of saying, ‘That sounds like a rather big claim: can you substantiate it?’, too many simply say ‘Is that so? How fascinating!’

Our overconfidence in our ability to judge people on the
basis of tell-tale giveaways has been made worse by the cod-psychoanalytic way of thinking which so many of us have adopted. This leads us to make complaints on the basis of little more than our own biased perception.

How well are you able to control this reflex? Here’s a little test. Below are ten complaints which I suspect many readers will be tempted to make on the basis of what they have read so far.

1. You say that the Bible is read by believers as literal truth.

2. Christianity
has
often encouraged people to complain against worldly injustice, as has Buddhism.

3. Positive thinking can be very useful.

4. Contrary to your claims, there are sound reasons for favouring many pro-environment measures.

5. If we followed your advice, we would ignore anti-airport protests, because they are simply rooted in selfishness.

6. Diet
is
an important public health issue.

7. You’re an apologist for American neo-cons.

8. You have denied that there are any meaningful ways of making aesthetic judgements.

9. You have dismissed NLP without evidence.

10. You accuse Noam Chomsky, a far greater intellect than you, of paranoia.

None of them, however, accurately describes what I have actually said. Such complaints would be empty because they are directed at things that just aren’t there. Yet I know from experience that many will make these and similar complaints nonetheless, because they trust in their ability to glean, from the examples I use and the targets I hold up, the real truth about what lies behind my arguments.

That’s why, although I have detailed several varieties of wrong complaint here, the most efficient way of reducing the number of wrong complaints you make is simple: just check whether what you are complaining about is actually the case. If everyone followed this simple injunction, I predict that the background noise of pointless complaint would almost disappear, and we would then either focus on the complaints that really count, enjoy life a bit more, or perhaps a bit of both.

There’s an old Jewish joke about two women having lunch in a restaurant. ‘I don’t know why we come here, the food here is lousy’, says one, to which the other replies, ‘Yes, and the portions are so small.’ Jokes about complaining are not rare. The ‘waiter, waiter’ joke is an entire genre based on complaints, but the set-up is just an excuse for some absurdism and wordplay: we’re not laughing at things that we actually complain about. Even the joke about the people in the restaurant turns on the ridiculousness of the way we sometimes complain, not a serious complaint in itself.

In order to be funny, joking about the things we complain about has to avoid getting too close to the things which really make us angry. The limiting case of this is found in much contemporary stand-up comedy. This often touches on serious issues that really do bother people. For example, in one of his routines Chris Tucker was going through a skit in which he imagined Michael Jackson as a pimp, and the mainly black audience was screaming with laughter. Then he segued into more serious territory. ‘White people don’t trust black people.’ Laughter still, but less raucous, as though Tucker was still riding the wave of his previous tour de force. ‘That’s why they won’t vote for no black president.’ The audience is almost silent. ‘Like, a black brother will fuck up the White House.’ A few chuckles. Tucker is talking about something that generates serious complaints and it’s just not funny.

However, he soon gets laughs from the idea, but only by taking us back away from the unpleasant reality to the realms
of the absurd. ‘Like the grass won’t be cut’, he continues. The loud laughter is back, and so is the applause. The crazy list goes on: ‘Dishes piled up … basketball in the hallway … broken down cars on the driveway.’ He’s back with what’s funny, and though it is rooted in a serious complaint, it can’t be too close to it, because the things that we really think are not how they ought to be just aren’t funny.

Slavoj Žižek illustrates this point very powerfully with his observations about humour based on ethnic stereotypes in the former Yugoslavia. ‘There were obscene, vulgar jokes about how each nation was identified in Yugoslavia with a certain characteristic’, he says. ‘We Slovenes were misers, the Croats nationalists, the Bosnians sexually obsessed but stupid, Montenegrins lazy, Macedonians thieves.’ Žižek’s claim is that this showed, not that people really hated each other, but that they were comfortable enough with their differences to joke about them. ‘My ultimate negative proof’, he says, ‘is that with the rise of true tensions in the early ’80s, these jokes disappeared. This was the best signal that something was really wrong.’
¹⁹
Jokes may have the surface appearance of a genuine complaint, but when we’re really bothered by something, we can’t laugh about it.

So most of the comedy of complaint is concerned with exaggerations or caricatures of serious complaints, such as Turner’s riff on how white people don’t trust black people, or complaints we don’t actually care too much about. Consider, for example, the endless comedy routines about the differences between men and women. These are based on such witty ‘observations’ as the fact that women take a long time to get ready to go out, that male genitalia are ugly, that men don’t like asking strangers for help and so on. If any of these things really, deeply annoyed you, you wouldn’t laugh at them.
(In a similar way, we may laugh at what we fear, as Freud suggested, but the joke can’t simply be the presentation of what is truly terrifying.) That’s why it’s depressing to be a feminist at a comedy club when everyone finds the ‘observation’ that men will fuck anything that moves absolutely hilarious. The fact that most people are in stitches shows that they don’t really mind the things the comic is ostensibly complaining about. More than this, the routines provide a kind of affirmation: ‘Yes, this is normal, aren’t we funny with our foibles!’ It’s also the reassurance that ‘men are men and women are women’.

The popularity of such routines illustrates the fact that although, at its noblest, complaining is one of the most important things we can do, most of the time it’s not much more than a leisure activity. We like complaining. Indeed, sometimes it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that we actively seek safe things to complain about. I had a wonderful example of this in the form of an appreciative email about a newspaper article I had written, which began ‘Once again you stop my daily rant at
The Guardian
in its tracks …’ I’ve had a few others that say similar things, which invites the question, why read
The Guardian
every day if you know that reading its contents is going to irritate you?

This kind of relationship with news media seems to be very widespread. I noticed it in myself when I started to keep a diary, cataloguing all the complaints I made, heard and read. My little list was greatly extended by an hour with the Sunday paper. I complained about the infantilisation of the paper; about comments by Norman Mailer, reported on the occasion of his death; about the filling of pages with things which just weren’t news, about the rehashing of old stories as though they were new; and about the smug superiority of the film reviewer. It seemed that part of the ritual of reading the paper was to
moan about it, just as for many people watching television becomes primarily an opportunity to lament the poor choice of programmes available.

I was a little embarrassed to discover just how much I was complaining. We may all believe that ‘everyone likes a good moan’, but it’s a generalisation we apply more readily to others than to ourselves. Or so I thought: I now suspect that being seen as someone who doesn’t complain is judged by most people to be as undesirable as being perceived as someone who complains too much. This hypothesis emerged from the experience of running an online survey, as I was writing this book. Nine hundred and twenty people took part, answering questions about how much they thought others in their country complained, and about how much they thought they complained themselves. The list of complaints they were asked to rate for frequency and intensity were very ordinary, quotidian complaints, the kind you hear in pubs, on trains, in homes and offices every day: about the cost of living, politicians, public transport, how things have generally got worse, bad luck and so on.