To know, know, know him, is to love, love, love him ... I do love that song. And it often pops into my mind when I'm swimming; Zen-like rhythmic splashing is a mental magnet for songs with a hypnotic beat of repetition. What I think about most in the pool is how hard it is to know other people. I do believe this: all we can change is all we can love, and all we can love is all we can know. Which begs the question - how do you know someone?
In scientific experiment, I would answer the related epistemological question How can I know something based on this observation? through a(n unpopular) adherence to logical positivism. But I don't think that gets me very far in understanding how to know another human being.
There's a glimpse of an answer to the human problem in a swimming pool. I don't know the name of a single fellow swimmer in the London Fields Lido, though most mornings I see more of their bodies than their close friends ever will. The strange contradiction, once you're immersed, and moving up and down the lane, is that despite the near-naked bodies all around you - the flash of a torso you catch as you turn your head to suck in air, the sliver of water falling from an outstretched arm, the flippering feet five seconds in front of your face - despite all this naked humanity, there's very little of the individual to be discerned. It's quite hard even to tell the difference between the men and the women, until you stop for a breather at one end or the other. In the quasi-religious hush which blankets the splashing lanes we are not Graeme, the introspective statistician who posts on CentreRight, or Mary, the green-voting bookseller with worries about her mortgage, or Dave, the carpet-fitter with his daughter enrolled at QMU - we are just early morning swimmers. All other identities shed, along with our clothing, I know nothing of the others save that we share this early morning passion. And I love them for it. Seriously. I feel a warmth of fellow-feeling which goes quite beyond a desire to discuss how to enact a tumble-turn. And after, when we're dressed and outside, fumbling over bike locks or peering at mobile phones, a residual warmth carries over, we nod and smile in that gentle English way, before parting to get on with the rest of the day (and not much else will be as good as that first hour).
So: the way to know other people is through common action. Common action delivers ties which bind. The person who is 'I' may have a mass of psychology determining his or her actions, but in the absence of windows-into-souls such motivations are lost to other observers. Actions define identities. But actions are plural, and so, therefore, are identities. So a politics which insists that each individual can be mapped to a single, primary, identity-box is doomed to failure. I think this is where the Left has lost its way. It certainly explains the bad-tempered hectoring to which gay people are now being subjected by such titans of politics as Chris Bryant and Ben Bradshaw. Whatever their words, the meaning is clear: we gave you, in the gay 'box', the following set of policies. Therefore you owe us your vote. That at any point in time the state of my municipal baths might tug harder at my vote-string than the provision of IVF for single women, for example, or that, indeed, if asked to think about the latter, I might come to a different opinion than that deemed appropriate for dwellers in my box, is anathema to the Left. Of course, I think of this example because one of my identities is that of a gay man, but I don't think this is just an issue for sexual politics.
Instead of denying the multiple identities exhibited by every human - even in an admirable way (Labour say he's black. We say he's British) - we should seek instead to recognise the multiple, overlapping and - to borrow a phrase from Phillip Blond - horizontal structures which govern our lives, into which we freely plug ourselves as and when the need arises (so 'govern' isn't a good verb). Our poster should have said Labour say he's black. We say he's black and British.
Of course on one level, to most Conservatives, this is a statement of the bleedin' obvious innit. But there are some useful political corollaries.
Firstly, if you respect the legitimacy of any self-ordered community, and understand that they will overlap - whether the users of a swimming pool, or that portion of the population whose primary sexual desire is toward their own gender, or the followers of a religious faith - then you do not require the swathes of thoughtcrime legislation which the politics of the Single Identity entails. I say 'entails' deliberately, because identity politics leads inexorably to conflict between the boxes (the 'grievance' ratchet, the game where you seek to draw as much offence as possible). Such conflict requires to be resolved through legislation, because it cannot, by definition, be resolved in any other way. I don't agree with the Catholic church's view on contraception (to put it mildly). The church will never agree with my view. We can both be 'right' at the same time, if we agree to not shut down the public space where the opposite point of view can be expressed. I can ask the Church to change, it can ask me to worship elsewhere. There is space for the difference between us to exist.
Secondly, there are more concrete political consequences of accepting that local, multiple power structures have rights - it is this which we have come to call localism. Let estates determine their own planning policies, let residents determine which shops can buy vacant premises on their High Street, let schools determine their own teaching policies, let clinicians set their own treatment priorities.
Thirdly - and I think this is Phillip Blond's most important point, which seems to get lost in the debate about the redness of his Toryism - is that the best defence for individual liberty comes directly from empowering these multiple, horizontal, overlapping, mutualist power structures. This might seem a contradiction at first glance. Surely individual liberty is best protected by, well, giving primacy to the individual's rights? Be who you are and do as you will, so long as you do others no harm, sort of thing. I don't agree. Atomised societies ultimately cause harm to many individuals. Remember my first thought: without joint community action, you have no identity other than that found inside your own head. Only through your actions can you be known. The civility of the swimming pool depends on the unspoken assumption that no one individual will seek to dominate any lane. By looking out for the swimmer in front of me, if he or she does the same, the whole pool benefits and my own interests prosper more than they would in a more selfish pool. I have donated some of my autonomy to the pool, yes, but because all swimmers are also the pool's lawmakers, my individual liberty has not been compromised. And if ultimately I'm not happy in the Lido, if we have a flourishing, pluralist, civic society, then I can choose somewhere else for the morning dip.
Multiple, overlapping, horizontal identities maximise freedom of choice for individuals, who define themselves by the actions they choose for themselves. I'll remember that later today, when I smile fondly at the pictures of the Pride parade. Not my cup of tea. But I'm very glad it's there.
