A Thursday evening, the three lanes are oddly busy, but I notice the unnamed lane is relatively quiet, there are three Turkish girls playing at the shallow end. Because the unnamed lane never uses the ‘clockwise’ or ‘anticlockwise’ signs, swimmers have to negotiate where they do their lengths. In this situation I always prefer swimming up and down as close as possible to the lane divider (meaning I have to negotiate around other swimmers only on one side).
I’m really pleased that my favourite position is free and so I start doing my breaststroke up and down, next to the lane divider. After a dozen lengths I notice a young couple getting into the pool at the deep end, and positioning themselves dangerously close to ‘my’ line. So I keep my line, and when I reach the other end, they have to move slightly as I touch the edge of the pool and start my return length. I’ve made my point, they will now understand that this small area of water (no more than a yard across) is not available and will move to another, unoccupied, part of the wide lane. But no. When I turn at the shallow end I see that the girl is doing her crawl in exactly the line I’ve just swum! This breaks all the unspoken etiquette of the pool – the fact that when you join a lane you respect the swimmers who were there before you. I’m not going to let them get away with this, so I keep swimming along the precise line that I have been for the last few minutes. We’re on collision course. I can see her white swimming cap getting closer and closer, she’s doing her crawl, pretending not to notice. Neither of us are going to give in. We collide. Words are exchanged, but I continue my line. Eventually the couple realise they’ve bitten off more than they can chew and move further over into freer water. A small victory for pool protocol, but an important one.
Such examples, especially when written down, might seem petty or even comical, but such behaviour led to loss of temper and aggravation. I find myself thinking about the nature of the society we live in, and asking what this kind of behaviour says about us as a people. I’m sure we can all think of many other examples of people’s inabilities to share public space, and perhaps this is not only a modern phenomenon. But I have a strong feeling that we are all much more in our own ‘bubbles’ now than we’ve ever been before. An image from Jonathan Franzen’s novel The Corrections, published around the turn of the century, made a lasting impression on me. It was a depiction of an American suburban house, viewed from the outside, with five different windows illuminated. A family, admittedly rather a dysfunctional one – parents and three children – were in five separate rooms, staring into their five individual TVs and computers, all in their bubbles of techno-glow. It struck me as a powerful metaphor for the anomie of modern life, yet at the time I also thought Franzen was exaggerating somewhat.
But today, the reality of such atomised existences is all around us, every day. An enormous amount of this is attributable to the way new technology is being used, which means that people may be on a bus or a Tube but literally will not know what’s going on around them, because they have headphones on so they can’t hear anything (except what they’re listening to). People walk in the street, but they’re not looking at their surroundings or other people, because they’re staring at their little screens, or texting as they walk. What concerns me in all of this is the unspoken, but growing, belief that the only really important thing is that your own needs are satisfied. That you have your techno-toys wherever you go, and if somebody tries to ‘invade your space’ you lose your temper. It’s almost as if our entire societies are now becoming stuck at the developmental level of a self-absorbed four-year-old child having a tantrum.
So, if common understandings about behaviour in shared public space are breaking down, then what are the implications? And is there a relationship between our ability to share public space and our ability to behave democratically? On the second point, the connection is clear, and it rests on whether or not people really believe they have equal rights. And, if you do, your own behaviour must reflect this. This is, of course, easier said than done, because it also goes against so much of our society’s obsessions with unrestricted notions of individualism and the free market. But really believing in equality, as far as I can see, means starting to realise that one of the most significant acts of resistance we can make is to change our own behaviour. Gradually trying to reduce the I and the me, and thinking far more about the you and the they. Reducing the volume when we speak, wanting others to have more voice. Perhaps most of all, we would have to learn how to really listen. Not the listening that we habitually think we’re doing – the nodding, the ‘a-huh’ing (when we’re actually already thinking about what we’re going to say next) – but a real desire to know what the other is saying, thinking or feeling. What the philosopher Simone Weil describes as the quintessence of love – the real belief in the existence of another human being.
And this connects to my fascination with observing behaviour in my local swimming pool in Hackney, because, at a microcosmic level, it is a representation of society in all its challenging and messy reality. It’s where people come together. The swimming pool as the archetypal democratic space. I’ve seen ninety-year-olds swimming there, I’ve seen nine-month-old babies with armbands there. I’ve seen Buddhists and bankers rubbing shoulders with each other. I’ve seen people from every race and background imaginable using this place – it’s probably one of the most ethnically diverse spaces in the whole of the country. And although I have written about examples of selfish behaviour, considering I’ve been coming to swim here for fifteen years, on reflection, it’s pretty remarkable how few such incidents there are.
And if sometimes there are ructions in the pool, if there are occasionally cross words shouted between the lanes, then is that really so serious? Or isn’t this simply the reality of any truly democratic space? Not the idealised Athenian model, but a grittier exchange. The cultural theorist Stuart Hall, interviewed a few years before he died, spoke about his conception of democracy and its relationship to what he termed ‘the multicultural question’:
How can we recognise the true, real, complicated diversity of the planet? … Different histories, different cultures, over long periods of time, have produced a variegated world, but the barriers are now breaking down. People find themselves obliged to make a common life or at least find some common ground of negotiation … The ‘multicultural question’ has now arrived right into the middle of the societies that have lived the last 200 years pretending that they could draw a boundary between themselves and the others … or that they could regulate the lives and the economies of other people because they were, or looked, different, and this provided a legitimate basis for their exploitation. I am interested in the impact on these European societies in particular … of having to live with difference, with people who dress differently, speak differently, have different memories in their heads, know a different way of life, follow a different religion – how are they going to live in greater equality but also with difference? How are these often conflicting objectives – equality and difference – to be reconciled?
… That trade-off is going to be an untidy row. Don’t think it is going to be what is called, these days, ‘social cohesion’ – which is a polite form of assimilation of ‘the other’, and represents in effect the abandonment of the multicultural principle. There is going to be nothing cohesive about it at all. It’s going to be a bloody great row. Any form of democratic life … is a big, staged, continuous row. Because there are real differences, and people are deeply invested in them and so they have to find ways – difficult ways – of negotiating difference, because it’s not going to go away.fn1