Pub Debates and Releasing the Inner Geek
I'm a geek. Even when I'm on holiday, overseeing my kids spank too much money in the amusement arcade at the holiday place, I'm a geek. A chance meeting of another dad allows me to lay out my psychology/philosophy/politics feelers after small talk concerning our children and common ground in sport. I do this a lot because I can't be bothered anymore with wishy-washy smalltalk.
Forward wind many hours later to the next door bar, our kids still running around broadly unsupervised and rammed full of sugar, our other halves chatting about "normal" things, and we are a few too many pints down an in-depth talk.
I get this a lot:
"I've always wanted to talk about this, but none of my mates are interested! I never get the chance!"
And two bar staff talk to us at the end of the night, confirming that people do have a drive to philosophies and discuss, chew the cud in debate:
"We're desperate to know what you guys were talking about! I reckon it was this, he reckons it was that."
As mentioned, this happens often and I find that people don't get enough chance to talk proper shit, in depth, with others. People too often get drawn into the same old sports and predictable guff, or veneer politics rather than those levels beneath that. Although it's been impossible in lockdown (though we have successfully kept up our informal Tippling Philosophers pub group on Zoom), when I'm down the pub, the frequency of drawing randoms into deep conversations has taught me that we humans have a thirst for decent discussions, debating, arguing, learning, listening, informing, bonding, mentally tussling.
As it turns out, we had pretty differing politics, but he was a nice guy and I think I opened his mind to a few things, though the amount of beer consumed will have led to amnesia of any of the main points. I don't think he'd had much experience of a rational lefty who could establish a point by deference to the level below, then the level below that and so on. Thgre was a lot of common ground - atheism, evidence-based policy-making and so on.
And we enjoyed ourselves. I love giving people permission to talk their inner geek.
My next post concerning this will be twofold: the importance of constructing bottom-up worldviews, and the almost contradictory claim that there is no point talking morality (qua politics) at all until you have established your goal - what you think society should look like. I have written posts on both of these points before, but there's always good reason for reminders.
Anywho, I'm back. Did you miss me? Guess I'd better check out the threads... Eek.
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