So what would it mean to ‘swim democratically’? To start with, you’d have to examine your own swimming more critically, and the effect it has on other people. The first thing would be to acknowledge that, just as I have been annoyed or aggravated by others’ ways of swimming, so my swimming must have, at times, wound others up. For example, my swimming ‘for space and not speed’ means that often, although technically I’m a ‘medium-paced’ swimmer, I’m actually swimming in the ‘slow’ lane or the ‘fast’ lane because there are fewer people there. So, for the genuinely slower swimmers, they get overtaken by this serious-looking man doing vigorous breaststroke and causing little waves. And for the faster crawlers, ‘Why is that man doing breaststroke in our “fast” lane?’ We all have a tendency to consider our own actions as ‘normal’; I think it’s exactly the same when we swim. I consider my pace of breaststroke to be appropriate; I get impatient when there’s a slower person doing breaststroke ahead of me, because it means having to alter my position to overtake. I also get crabby if there’s a faster breaststroke swimmer coming up behind me – what’s their problem?! What’s wrong with swimming at a relaxed pace?
Sometimes I wonder if the problems really are ‘out there’ as much as ‘in here’. My father, in his many years of commuting by train (another overcrowded, contested public space) between Manningtree and London, would say that he could realise his mood by noting his attitude to his fellow commuters on any given day. If he was fed up or tired for some reason, he’d survey ‘them’ with a jaundiced, generalised eye, only seeing a mass of avaricious businessmen. If he was in a good mood, he’d get chatting to somebody in the buffet car, and recognise that behind the suit and tie, there was an interesting, complex human being, fascinated by rock climbing or the Greek Orthodox Church or Miles Davis or whatever it might be.
I would like to be able to swim in a similar spirit, and be able to go beyond seeing simply a mass of other swimmers, to really appreciate everybody’s uniqueness. More than this, one day it would be extraordinary to be able to feel another swimmer’s love for what they were doing, as vividly as my own. And to know that their love was equally important, a representation of the rights that we share in this society. And if this might be possible in a London swimming pool, then go beyond the walls of the pool, and the boundaries of the city and consider how transformative such imaginative empathy could be. If we could feel the rights of citizens in Nigeria or Iraq or Afghanistan as keenly as we feel our own. If we could really believe that they love their land and their rivers and their forests no less than we do. The political implications of such a shift in our structures of thinking and feeling – ‘senti-pensando’, as the writer Eduardo Galeano puts it – would be incalculable.
Occasionally I get a tantalising taste of such a future in my local pool. On a good day, when my spirit is alive to the world, I glimpse what living democracy means, and am moved intensely by what we share in that faded municipal building in my city – seeing grandparents, who’ve probably been swimming here for seventy years, now bringing their grandchildren; watching a teenage Bangladeshi girl turning at the deep end, with astonishing dolphinesque acceleration; noticing a tattooed East End geezer doing the most elegant backstroke you’ve ever seen. The vast multiplicity of humanity, all making our own different ways through the waters of life.
How People in Organisations Can Kill: The Second Factor
‘Normalisation’ and Peer Conformity
The way that something that shocks or appals at first can later become acceptable if we see those around us going along with it.
Tolstoy makes this statement at the beginning of Chapter Thirteen of Anna Karenina: ‘There are no conditions of life to which a man cannot get accustomed, especially if he sees them accepted by everyone around him.’ Watching Shoah again recently, I was struck to hear the following words spoken by the Polish farmers who worked the fields right next to Treblinka throughout the war – bearing out, precisely, the accuracy of Tolstoy’s assertion:
Farmer 1: It was terrible, you used to hear them crying out.
Farmer 2: Yes, at first it’s hard … then you get used to it.
And this testimony from Richard Baer, one of Auschwitz’s commandants. On leave in Hamburg, he described on one occasion witnessing a little girl ‘flaming like a torch. She had been hit by a phosphorus bomb dropped by British planes.6 She burned to death in front of my eyes. That happened before I came to Auschwitz. You can get used to everything.’
But the people I would like to concentrate on in this section are the doctors who worked at Auschwitz; the following quotations are drawn from interviews conducted by Robert Jay Lifton for his seminal work The Nazi Doctors, and concentrate on the experiences of two doctors – Ernst Bfn2 and Hans Delmotte. First, the testimony of Ernst B:
In discussing patterns of diminished feeling, Ernst B told me that it was the ‘key’ to understanding what happened in Auschwitz. In also pointing out that ‘one could react like a normal human being in Auschwitz only for the first few hours’ he was talking about how anyone entering the place was almost immediately enveloped in a blanket of numbing. Under increasing pressure to select, most SS doctors underwent what he viewed as an extraordinary individual-psychological shift from revulsion to acceptance: ‘In the beginning it was almost impossible. Afterward it became almost routine. That’s the only way to put it.’
This shift involved a socialization to Auschwitz, including the important transition from outsider to insider. Alcohol was crucial to this transition. Drinking together, often quite heavily, on evenings in the officers’ club, doctors ‘spoke very freely’ and ‘expressed the most intimate objections.’ Some would ‘condemn the whole thing’ and insist that ‘this is a filthy business [Schweinerei]!’ Dr B described these outbursts as so insistent as to be ‘like a mania [Sucht], … a sickness … over Auschwitz and … the gassings.’ Such inebriated protest brought about no repercussion – indeed, may even have been encouraged – and was unrelated to commitment or action. Consequently, whether one condemned it or not was not really so much the issue.’ The issue, as Ernst B defined it, was that ‘Auschwitz was an existing fact. One couldn’t … really be against it, you see, one had to go along with it whether it was good or bad.’ Mass killing was the unyielding fact to which everyone was expected to adapt.
Whenever an SS doctor arrived at Auschwitz, the process was repeated as questions raised by the newcomer were answered by his more experienced drinking companions: He would ask, ‘How can these things be done here?’ Then there was something like a general answer … which clarified everything. What is better for him [the prisoner] whether he croaks [verreckt] in shit or goes to heaven in [a cloud of] gas? And that settled the whole matter for the initiates.’ This is Dr B, now describing the selection process the new doctors had to witness:
When you see a selection for the first time – I’m not talking only about myself, I’m talking about even the most hardened SS people … you see … how children and women are selected. Then you are so shocked … that it just cannot be described. And after a few weeks one can be accustomed to it … And that [process] cannot be explained to anybody … And one can … only experience [it to know it]. The expert can record it, but he cannot enter into it – “know it from the inside.” But I think I can give you a kind of impression of it. When you have gone into a slaughterhouse where animals are being slaughtered … the smell is also a part of it … not just the fact that they [the cattle] fall over [dead] and so forth. A steak will probably not taste good to us afterward. And when you do that [stay in the situation] every day for two weeks, then your steak again tastes as good as before.’