Free Complaint: From Minor Moans to Principled Protests by Julian Baggini

worse, and that weeat well. There may be too much emphasis put on this, but in reacting against it we have to be careful not to overcompensate. Being lectured by a politician on how many vegetables I should be eating a day may make me want to go out and devour a box of Krispy Kreme doughnuts, but I would be foolish to interpret this desire as an act of rational resistance against the hegemonic oppression of a paternalist state.
    Once again, complaints against Oliver were disproportionate. Oliver was just one man doing his best to help the kids and raise his ratings (there is no contradiction between the two). Even if his programme was symptomatic of a wrong turn we have taken in the UK on health and diet, in itself it was largely benign and possibly even beneficial. To complain too much about it is to get things out of proportion, even if there is some substance to the complaint.
    Such disproportionate complaints matter because they divert finite energy towards the wrong ends. It is not just that there are more important issues than children’s right to eat Turkey Twizzlers. It’s also that if you want to counter the excessive rigidity and zeal of nutritional advice, you shouldn’t pick on the one target who may actually have a point.
    Perhaps even worse is that people are repelled by over-the-top complainants. As an atheist, I face this problem with my more militant peers, who are so vociferously against religion that people who might otherwise be sympathetic to secular humanism end up being put off. Richard Dawkins is the most famous example of this, although, as a matter of fact, in the substance of what he says he tends to be much more thoughtful and careful than his public image suggests. But people do judge books by their covers, and Dawkins presents his anti-theistic arguments in very strident, confrontational terms. His best-selling book was called
The God Delusion
and histelevision series
The Root of All Evil
(a title which he now says he regrets).
    If there’s a queue to complain about the falsity and perniciousness of religion, I’m in it with Dawkins. But if, when my turn comes, I make it sound as though religion is nothing but a delusion and lies at the root of all evil, I think I’d be guilty of getting things out of proportion. And so I would have lost the chance to persuade some people who might otherwise see the light (or perhaps I should say, turn it off).
    Not only can complaints be misdirected by being disproportionate or displaced; they can also be both. The clearest example of this is what might be termed environmental anality. I have to confess to being prone to this myself. After a train journey I will take my newspaper and empty plastic bottle home to be recycled, even though when I see the sack-loads of trash being offloaded at the terminus I have to accept my meagre effort is a droplet of mist in a vast ocean.
    Making this extra effort oneself is, at worst, harmless. What is worse is to complain about other people’s tiny wastes of energy and resources. It is true that if ‘everyone did their bit’ together we would make a difference, but this is irrelevant because everybody is not going to do it unless they are forced to. Recycling rates in the UK shot up only because local councils were set targets and so acted to make people separate their trash. In a similar way, the kinds of mass waste of energy stand-by buttons represent is going to be avoided only when manufacturers are forced to stop putting them on appliances; and aviation growth is not going to be significantly halted by a few idealistic people taking their holidays in Lyme Regis instead.
    So when we complain about relatively small wastes of energy, we are guilty of both displacement and lack ofproportionality. We haven’t got things in perspective, because throwing a newspaper into a bin is too small an act to make any difference to the environment. But we’re also displacing, because the scale at which these problems have to be