Complaint: From Minor Moans to Principled Protests (12 page)

These differences were reflected in the speeches made by George Bush and Tony Blair as war got closer. On 23 February 2003 Bush made his vision of post-Saddam Iraq central to his speech. ‘The nation of Iraq, with its proud heritage, abundant resources and skilled and educated people, is fully capable of moving toward democracy and living in freedom’, he said.
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Two days later Blair addressed the British parliament and talked almost exclusively about disarming Saddam, removing the threat he posed and enforcing UN resolutions.
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Making regime change a primary objective was politically
unacceptable in the UK. For the British, polls showed that the invasion was initially supported by a small majority (no matter what impression was given by the famous mass marches barely a month earlier), but only as a dirty job that had to be done. America, it seems, genuinely had higher hopes than this.

The role of Tony Blair in all this is also instructive. He was often portrayed as Bush’s poodle, an impression bolstered by the famous ‘Yo, Blair!’ video, which showed him weakly trying to offer his help to a visibly nonplussed George W. Bush. But the facts show that Blair described Saddam as ‘probably the most dangerous ruler at the present time anywhere in the world’ and claimed he was trying to develop weapons of mass destruction even before his first meeting with Bush.
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Blair’s apparent distance from the British people and closeness to America was largely a result of his belief in the possibility of building a better world, which was alien to most of his fellow countrymen but very familiar to Americans.

The old and new countries can learn from each other in this respect. The apparent pessimism of the British is in many cases no more than a hard realism. But the can-do attitude of the Americans is not always excessive optimism. The Brits should learn that the point of complaint can and should often be actually to change things; Americans that you can complain all you want, but some things can’t be put right.

The most extreme variation between the two countries, however, concerned perceptions of politeness. Whereas Britons were split 50–50 on whether or not their compatriots tried to be polite when they complained, an overwhelming majority of Americans (85 per cent) chose the other option available, that they tended to show their anger or irritation. This was a massive difference. Since different cultures have different baselines for what behaviour is considered rude or
polite, could this just be a result of different expectations? Probably not, because respondents would still have answered relative to these baselines.

In any case, we don’t need to rely on the results of the survey, since observation backs up the numbers. Americans are much more direct in their complaints than the British, who are still learning that it’s OK to complain in the first place. However, it is not simply a matter of directness: if even Americans think that people complain rudely, then there is more to it than just an absence of obfuscation.

I suspect that the difference has to do with entitlement. America is a much more profoundly individualistic culture than the UK. I’m not talking here of the individualism which rejects community. Indeed if anything, outside the big cities, Americans appear to be more community-minded than the British. American individualism is deeper than this, in that everything is based on the sovereignty of the individual over herself, her property and her possessions. This means that, if you pay for something, you’re entitled to get exactly what you expected. The burden of proof lies with the government to justify its taxes, not with you to say why they shouldn’t take them. However, this does not mean Americans are selfish: there is a greater expectancy in the USA than in the UK that people should do voluntary work and make charitable donations.

The British, in contrast, have a more communitarian outlook. Certainly, the mythology of Britain says that it is the ‘mother of the free’. But in practice Brits tacitly accept that the general will has some authority over them. They grumble about taxation but do not see it as the great evil in the way Americans do. They also put up with bad service because they do not make the simple inference that, since they’ve paid for it, they are entitled to demand it as a right. There are several
reasons why this may be the case. There is the old deference to authority, which demands that we should be grateful to our betters for what they deign to give us. This has weakened, but its decline was matched by the growth of the welfare state, in which many services were either paid for, or subsidised by, general taxation. This made the link between what we pay and what we get much less transparent and thus made people feel less like consumers and more like grateful recipients of state beneficence.

Translated into the manner of complaint, it is clear why Americans should demand what they see as rightfully theirs without standing on ceremony and why the British should be slightly apologetic about pointing out that things are not quite ideal. We are often told that things are changing and that Britain is becoming more of a service culture, like America. But as is so often the case, the existence of a trend is too often misinterpreted as a sign that we are closer to where that trend is leading than we really are. If Britain is a chaste maid to America’s strumpet, she has barely learned to loosen her corset.

There are probably more preconceptions about the importance of gender for complaint than there are for any other demographic indicator. However, the striking thing about my survey was how comparatively slight the differences between the sexes was. Nor can this be easily dismissed as an artefact of the survey design, since other variables, such as nationality, did reveal large differences.

The overall levels of self-reported complaint were more or less identical for the two genders, a finding that fits those
of one of the few psychologists to do serious work on complaining, Robin M. Kowalski.
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It could be argued that this is uninteresting, because people determine what they perceive as complaining a lot or a little by different yardsticks. So the almost identical results would show that the sexes complain equally only relative to the norms for their respective genders. If these norms were different – if men complained much more than women, for example – then the survey results wouldn’t reveal this.

However, we have a check against this theory: people’s perceptions of how others complain. Again the sexes are more or less in agreement here, with men estimating the amount others complain slightly higher than women. But if it is the case that the two sexes more or less agree about how much people in general complain, then their assessments of how they themselves complain are being measured against the same yardstick.

The only explanation that remains which is consistent with actual differences between the sexes is that either men or women are more accurate or honest about assessing how much they complain. If this were the case, then both stereotypes and psychological research would lead you to expect that women would be the more accurate judgers, since their ‘emotional intelligence’ is reputedly higher than that of men. But the small difference that there was in the survey actually showed men thinking they complained more than women. Differences in degrees of self-knowledge do not therefore seem to explain similarities in reported levels of complaint.

So although the survey is itself not a rigorous piece of evidence, it does strongly suggest that men and women complain more or less equally. But are there any differences in patterns of complaint? Again, not very many, and
these were much less marked than those between nationalities. If you looked at the complaint factors for British men, British women, American men and American women, the scores closest to that of any given group were not generally those which shared gender. So, for example, British men’s scores were closest to those of British women five times, American women four times, and American men a further four times. More often than not, the complaint factors for British women were closest to that of British men rather than American women (or men). All this suggests that nurture may often be more important than nurture in fashioning our patterns of complaint: our biology may have less effect than our culture on how we complain. The only two forms of complaint where gender was much more important than nationality were those about spouses, partners and friends, and those about personal ill health. These are both things which men were much more likely to complain about than women. If any propensity to complain is determined by gender, it is likely to be these. If this could be confirmed, it would raise a number of important questions about why it is that married women, in particular, are more likely to be called nags than their husbands. Despite advances made in the cause of female emancipation, it does seem still to be the case that society is less tolerant of complaining women than it is of complaining men.

Setting aside nationality and looking at where the difference in levels of self-reported complaint were most marked, women complained more than men about ineffective politicians (8 per cent difference), television (10 per cent) and religious leaders (13 per cent). This defies the stereotype that the big issues of politics and religion are the domain of men. Feminists may not be surprised by these results, however: the
hierarchies of most religions are solidly male, and women have less representation in almost all (if not all) governments than men. No surprise, then, that they might feel annoyed about being messed about by a load of men. As to why they should complain more about television, perhaps the tendency of the major channels to devote huge amounts of prime time to sports played by men and watched mainly by them has something to do with it.

The only other significant result concerning gender related to perceptions of whether people complain to others when they are not happy or keep their complaints to themselves: 11 per cent more women than men thought that people complained to others. Perhaps this is a case of automorphism: projecting characteristics of ourselves on to others. The question’s inclusion of the phrase ‘if they are not happy’ suggested a strong emotional component, and men almost certainly are, on average, less inclined to talk about problematic emotions than women. From this they are therefore more likely to generalise that this is what is normal for others.

However, the main conclusion from the survey is one not of difference but of sameness. Perhaps this does support one of my main claims: that the desire to complain is an essential part of human nature. If this is so, unless you thought women were less human than men, or vice versa, you would expect both sexes to complain about as much as each other, even if about slightly different things.

As might be expected, overall levels of complaint rose with age, by a steady 1 per cent each decade. But this is a very gentle
statistical incline indeed, which does not point to major differences in average rates of complaining across the generations.

More surprising was that people claimed to complain
less
about how things have generally got worse as they grow older. These complaints peaked in people’s thirties (78 per cent), but even twenty-somethings thought things had got worse more than the over-forties, with the over-sixties least inclined (67 per cent) to protest that things aren’t what they used to be.

Of course, because this is all based on self-reporting, it is possible that people are just wrong about this. But remember that, in general, people rated their own levels of complaint
higher
than those of others. This gives us some reason to believe that people are not in denial about how much they protest themselves and have a reasonable grasp of their own tendency to complain.

On reflection, it would perhaps not be surprising if it is indeed the case that Luddism peaks in people’s thirties. At this stage in life many are still coming to terms with the loss of youth. In many ways things really were better not so long ago: you had fewer responsibilities, more energy, and the world was newer and more exciting than it has now turned out to be. Furthermore, you have not really seen that much change: there is only now and the last few decades.

Once you are older, however, it becomes less easy to make blanket generalisations about the superiority of the past. In the UK, for example, people over forty remember periods in the nation’s history when life was quite evidently worse in many ways. Standards of living are much improved from those in the post-war decades, while more people now enjoy better cars, foreign holidays and better, more varied food. Also, older people have seen more change and thus are no longer comparing just the imperfect present with one, romanticised, past.

It may still be the case that older people make more specific complaints about how particular things were better in the past: the question in my survey was about whether life has
generally
got worse. Anecdotally, this would seem to be the case. Older people are often not shy about telling you how the streets used to be safe and there was more respect when they were young. Overall, however, fewer say that they’d rather live as they did back then than the way they do now.

Not that old age seems to give people the wisdom and tranquillity to accept life’s vicissitudes more easily. The over-sixties complained more about bad luck or fate than any other age group: a staggering 90 per cent of them claimed to complain about it regularly. The image of the elderly curmudgeon is also somewhat supported by the fact that complaints about spouses, partners and friends rise steadily with age, dropping off only slightly in the over-sixties, who have perhaps lost too many to maintain their earlier levels of cynicism.

The stereotype that age jades was borne out in other ways too. People were less inclined to complain about religious leaders and politicians as they got older: more, I’d guess, because they see no point, rather than because they grow to respect them. The idealism of youth turns into either a realism or cynicism of age, depending on how you view it.