In England, a case made for social capital and democratic backbone provided by the pub:
Charlotte Leslie, the MP for Bristol North West, said pubs resembled a “real world” version of the House of Commons “where there are proper debates about real things”.
…
“All of us probably enjoy a pint, but why is this debate so important?” she asked. “It is about a bit more than a pint in the pub, although of course that is very important to a lot of us.
“I am sure that I am not the only member present who, wanting to find out what is happening in the constituency, goes first of all to the pub and enjoys a nice pint at the same time,” she said.
“If we are to talk about the big society, we should recognise that the pub is at the heart of it. It is a little-known fact that pubs donate more than £120 million a year to charitable causes.
I’ve mentioned that I’m reading Christopher Lasch. In The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy, Lasch has a section on these “third places”. Riffing off of Ray Oldenburg’s The Great Good Places, Lasch writes of the informal society of the pub:
The inner voice that asks what the guys would think can serve as a powerful agency of what used to be called social control (when this term referred to self-imposed community sanctions rather than to the authority imposed by experts in behavior modification and other alien specialists). For this reason it is no exaggeration, Oldenburg thinks, to say that informal gathering places promote “more decency without proclaiming it than many organizations that publicly claim to be the embodiment of the virtues.”
Lasch, like me, probably over-romanticizes pubs and beer gardens. He mentions that they are mostly “all-male institutions” which does not help them maintain their standing in our modern society. But they certainly provide a social function. I think of my dad who has always been the type of guy who purposely makes himself a stranger in whatever city or town he lives in. He’d always been very critical of the town he eventually settled in (to live with me, my brother, and my mom; long story) until about six years ago when he made friends at an Irish pub in the larger town near my hometown. That pub has live music and it also has what is semi-mockingly deemed “The Table of Knowledge” where plumbers and mechanics and lawyers and real estate agents gather to talk bullshit, gossip, and discuss political issues. None of it is sophisticated. It’s all real talk, but it is an honest dialogue that greases the wheels of civic-minded exchange. Though still cynical by disposition, my dad has “bought in” to this social arrangement.
Lasch continues:
[It] is double appropriate to emphasize the protopolitical character of the third place and to speculate – even if Oldenburg doesn’t – that the decline of participatory democracy may be directly related to the disappearance of third places. As neighborhood hangouts give way to suburban shopping malls, or, on the other hand, to private cocktail parties, the essentially political art of conversation is replaced by shoptalk or personal gossip. Increasingly, conversation literally has no place in American society. In its absence, how – or, better, where – can political habits be acquired and polished?
The people in this online sphere are very cynical of voting and democracy. This is a function of a lot of factors including our various examples of social alienation.
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Is it still a bleg if it’s in the comments of someone else’s blog? Anyway, here goes: When it comes to third places, I’d really like one but I don’t like beer or burnt coffee.
How affordable are non-elite country clubs out in the provinces, especially non-golf memberships?
I’d love to argue that the online realm has created a new public sphere, but in reality, it’s mostly echo chambers sorted by beliefs. The 3rd places that Lasch writes about are local in character. Lasch’s books CofN and RoE are fantastic in their social and political commentary of the 70s and early 90s as well as what has developed today. I wonder if Lasch had survived if he had been horrified by today or happier. Neil Postman is the 2nd writer and critic that I wonder the same things.
Such local gathering places only work when politics are local, the centralization of power makes such discourse irrelevant. You’re an ant without the ability to affect politics in a system where all real decisions are made by the Feds. That’s the optimistic view, the reality is that the elite don’t give a damn about what you think, and have almost unlimited power to thwart anything that is against their best wishes or interests. Take immigration law for instance. We have immigration laws on the books which, if they had been enforced, would have pushed back for decades the circling of the drain we see going on now. Nothing radical, just enforce the law. You got to talk about it in your pub, you got to vote for candidates who promised to address the issue, they duly debated it and passed laws but once the ink had dried they simply declared “fuck it, we’re not enforcing those laws, even though we passed them.” The decline of pub talk is the least problem in such a system. It’s the Promise Keepers Fallacy – if only we little people reformed ourselves the system would right itself. As if the wolves and vampires who make and enforce policy would lay down and go out of business.
This Conservative MP, who has only sat in Parliament for a little over two and one half years, voted in favour of the 20% sales tax added to every pint of beer, or other alcoholic beverage (wine, cider, spirits), sold in a pub (or any other venue). It is applied on top of the large duty (another tax) added to the price of every pint of beer or other alcoholic drink. MPs can consume alcohol served at the Palace of Westminster in London at a price subsidized by the tax payer which probably explains her comparison of a pub conversation with the activities of politicians at the legislative assembly. Her government has also considered (and not categorically ruled out despite pretensions of supporting the free market) introducing a minimum price per unit of alcohol on all such beverages sold within the United Kingdom in addition to the aforementioned duty and sales tax. She supports this policy wholeheartedly on the ludicrous basis that making alcohol more expensive for everyone will stimulate consumption at pubs. I find her crocodile tears shed at the very visible demise of this great British institution highly suspect.
The reason pubs have declined in use is booze taxes. It just costs so damn much to drink out.
This is something I’ve noticed over the years, starting in the mid-1980s, returning to the US from England, and back-and-forth again, a number of times.
English pubs function as a sort of commons, or social meeting space, in which to interact with others. And, of course, in which to drink heavily. The lay-out and design of English pubs reflect this purpose.
In the US, pubs are replaced by bars–dark, private, seedy, neighbourhood places, sometimes lit by gaudy neon signs, or brightly-lit sports bars filled with hordes of ball-obsessed fatheads (and their chubby female hangers-on) glued to the screens.
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I’d love to argue that the online realm has created a new public sphere, but in reality, it’s mostly echo chambers sorted by beliefs.
I don’t know. You’re correct to an extent, of course, but on the blogs I frequent, there’s plenty of micro-disagreement and debate amongst people who broadly share the same label. I can’t see that in a pub you’d spend time socializing with a much more diverse group than what you find here, e.g. Or maybe you would, I don’t know. I don’t do politics on Facebook, because I don’t enjoy bickering with people I have nothing in common with, but it seems from recent readings that an awful lot of you out there *are* on Facebook debating the issues.
Anyway, I’d love to have more of a pub culture! Ever since growing up on British literature, I have always loved the idea of being able to “go down to the pub” and have one with some mates.