Public Enemy

Ben Wildsmith

I was on the late train last night from Cardiff back to the Rhondda. It’s a cheerful ride, as slightly inebriated strangers chat happily to each other after a night on the town.

For all the incessant complaints on social media about disrespectful teenagers, here were dozens of them happily getting along with each other and older revellers like Mrs W and her decrepit husband.

For well over a year trains weren’t running on this line, and the journey still has the excitement of novelty. You don’t know what you’ve got ‘til it’s gone, as Joni Mitchell sang. That said, she’s never had to find a parking space in Ponty on a Saturday morning, has she?

Earlier in the day, we’d been to the library. At the entrance there’s a device measuring footfall. That seems like it might be ominous. What happens if fewer people are visiting the library; will we lose it?

Let’s hope not, because the erosion of welcoming public spaces is one of the saddest aspects of life these days.

In Cardiff we’d passed a former youth club in Roath that was being converted into a residential property. Somebody will be making a few quid, no doubt, but at what cost?

Community life

Adolescence and old age are the times when structured, community life is most essential to us. As youngsters, we must learn how to socialise outside of our immediate environment; to make adjustments for the needs of others; to discover what we can offer to society.

In our later years, many of us find ways out of loneliness and bereavement by participating in community life. There are people to notice if you don’t turn up, to see you, to care.

The stresses that neoliberal economics have put on everything that isn’t directly profitable are obvious and often stated.

If individualism offered a thrilling escape from the conformity of a 1970s life of collective bargaining, limited choice, and rigid social hierarchy, its untrammelled progress into the mid-21st century has seen it mutate into a harmful dogma.

The running sore of the two-child cap on benefits is back in the news as Labour considers abolishing it because being to the right of Nigel Farage apparently doesn’t poll well with people who usually vote for it.

The social media debate around this issue illustrates how extreme the cult of individualism has become for many of its adherents. The gist of the most common argument is, ‘Why should I pay for other people’s kids?’ The sane answer to this is, ‘Because some of them are hungry and you are a human being.’

That cuts no ice, however, so a utilitarian argument must be employed. ‘Because otherwise there will be nobody to pay your pension, you miserable sod, and we’ll have to feed you into a woodchipper when you reach 67.’ That doesn’t work either but it’s satisfying to type.

Idiocy

Arguing on the internet is, of course, the supreme idiocy of our age. I’m at it all the time.

As public spaces have been closed down, the pseudo-public arena online mimics their function, but in an entirely unsatisfactory and harmful way.

Anonymity and isolation create a social situation that is inevitably antisocial in character. The facility to breach societal mores without detection is a temptation to a great many people, I know I’ve said things online that I’d definitely think twice about elsewhere.

The ever-present possibility of a smack round the chops when sounding off in the pub was a powerful regulator of the social experience. Andrew Tate, for instance, would emerge from a Valleys boozer with a new appreciation of women’s role in society if he started with his nonsense in front of them there.

With so many pubs gone, police stations no longer open to the public, libraries scarcer, and youth clubs largely consigned to history, we are being individualised into vulnerability. Where will people form the connections that we all rely on when times are tough?

More fundamentally, where will the sweetness and joy of shared experience play out in our lives? If a yearning for freedom defined the social mechanics of the last 50 years, then restoring connection might be the driving priority of the next.