LATE on a London evening about 20 people gel off the Underground together at Queensway station in the west of the city. Each of us intent upon some private reverie, we climb the stairs in what has the appearance of a group and walk the 30 yards or so up the tunnel to the lifts. Both lifts have gone up to the street, so we wait in a huddle, our eyes fixed on the digital arrows indicating the position of each lift.
Those who reach the lifts first take up positions next to the door of the one which the digital light indicates will be first to come back down. The rest of us, in a manner intimate yet detached, snuggle in behind them in a chunky kind of queue, each of us covetous of the space we have gained and its proximity to the lift. Nobody speaks. We watch the arrows as though they were aimed at our brows.
Then comes the sound of voices from somewhere back in the tunnel. We turn to see two young black men, smiling, swaggering and jiving as they approach. Both have Walkmans, and the thsssihsss-thsss of two different drumbeats cuts through the space.
"Excuse me," says one of the young men to the people at the outer edge of the makeshift queue. His accent is mock toff. The group yields before them. "Thank you," says the young man who has become spokesman for the pair. They stroll through the group, smiling and grooving, meeting - little or no resistance. "Excuse me. Thank you. Excuse me. Thank you. Excuse me. Thank you." In a few moments the two young men have taken up positions beside the door of the lift. They turn and - smile back at us.
All of us pan the two black faces as though they were not there, as though nothing has happened, as though we have lots of other things on our minds besides two young pups jumping a silly queue. Nobody speaks. Nobody's gaze rests on anybody else. But the anger in the group is palpable, expressing itself as silence. The two youths look at one another. "Thank you so much," says the spokesman in his pretend accent. His companion reads his lips and laughs merrily. The lift arrives and we go up to the street, the two black men smiling at us all the way to the surface.
There is, as this experience suggests, another side to the benign alienation of London that I described some weeks back. Beneath the serene surface is a volatile cocktail of emotion, ready to explode the moment a boundary is breached. Then, in a moment of startling clarity, the truth emerges.
A child breaks away from her mother and runs across a junction. The lights are changing from red to green. The mother follows. A car, stopped at the junction, moves and then brakes. A horn blares, and then again. The mother gathers up her child and the car moves forward. A flurry of angry fingers pierces the air. The driver mouths something, the mother responds in kind.
In a moment, the car is stopped in the middle of the junction, its two occupants, one male, one female, are out screaming at the mother and her child. The incident lasts for a minute or so and then is gone without trace, and everything is peaceful again.
What we know as "road rage" is a reaction to the puncturing of the cocoon of individual existence, an outrage at the disruption of the inner space of the car by the lives of people who, in a sense, have no right to exist. But this is just a small part of the story of modern London, where the combination of individual alienation and street drugs make for a potent cocktail.
A couple of weeks ago, a friend told me of a young woman being pursued one evening in west London by a man brandishing a knife, clearly out of his head on something. But the most disturbing aspect of the incident was that when the woman attempted to flag down passing cars, the drivers ignored her and drove on. She persuaded one man to stop, but he would not allow her to get into his car. She climbed in the window and refused to get out until he drove her for safety.
A central element of the human condition to which little or no witness is borne in the modern world is the fact that humans are twin engine beings. One engine drives our selfishness, self interest and individuality; the other drives us in our capacity as social beings. Unless both engines are tuned in harmony, they will pull in different directions, and eventually one or other will bum out. Since the social engine is the more fragile machine, being based more on culture than on nature, this is almost invariably the one that gives.
That a human being ceases to be a citizen as soon as the car door bangs behind him or her is a symptom of the collapse of culture. I don't mean "culture" in the sense of what you read about in the arts pages of quality newspapers, but in the wider sense of things people do when the alternative is doing nothing.
One of the great paradoxes of a mass media society is that the more communication is possible, the less actually occurs. Real culture is replaced by knowing nonsense. The fragmentation of people by age, taste, class and education removes the invisible radiation which previously strung people's lives together.
Everyone is in a different orbit. As the Mexican poet Octavio Paz observes in his contribution to a new book of essays, At Century's End (Wolfhound Press, £18.99), "we only tolerate difference because we are equally indifferent to everything and everyone".
WHEN I wrote about the phenomenon of benign alienation some weeks ago, I was thinking specifically of London, but it is a condition that affects, increasingly, all modern societies, and always hides a seething, darker ferment. In this world, positive exchanges occur only in the context of private relationships; more and more, public displays of feeling are selfish, violent and negative. Communication between people who don't "know" one another is, increasingly, of a dark and squalid kind.
A few weeks ago, for example, again on the London Underground, a man got on the train who was clearly a migrant. He was white, in the sense that he was a Caucasian, but black from head to toe as a consequence of a long time unfamiliarity with soapy water. His hair carried a strange echo of having once been carefully groomed, but it had grown upwards so much that it resembled a neatly combed toupee on top of a bird's nest. In his hand he clutched his train ticket, white as a cigarette. But it was his effect on the other occupants of the carriage that caught my attention.
Normally on London trains, people try to avoid one another's eyes. They look at their shoes, their newspapers, at the maps or adverts on the wall overhead, at anything to avoid making visual contact with one another. Now, in the presence of this odd little man, a change was visible. People who did not know one another from Adam or Eve made eye contact across the crowded carriage and smiled. A young man winked at a couple of young women, who tittered and giggled. It was a remarkable moment, because it vividly illustrated how, in an individualist culture, the only codes of connection are the darker ones.
In an instant was visible the legacy of two decades of political brutalisation.