Sheila Kennedy has a post entitled, “Today’s Coffee House?” She mentions the contributions to the Enlightenment of the coffee house.
An interesting observation was that the Enlightenment was a product of the coffee house. According to the author, the practice of gathering in coffee houses and exchanging points of view–debating, discussing, considering alternatives–sparked the development of new philosophies, new ways of engaging reality. That diversity of perspective is also what makes cities important generators of new ideas, new inventions–as the author points out, the density of urban life also requires that we encounter people with different ideas, backgrounds and points of view, and it is that “bubbling cauldron” that incubates progress.
I got my sense of the 17th century coffee house from Neal Stephenson’s The Baroque Cycle where a fair amount of the Enlightenment activity in that story was taking place in London coffee houses. These were places where smart people, aided no doubt by a bit of a caffeine jolt, could go and spread news, discuss the events of the day, and debate new ideas.
Places on the Internet no doubt serve as modern day analogs to those Enlightenment-era coffee houses. But, they are perhaps diluted and, it’s likely that the quality of discussion in those coffee houses of old has grown in the telling. Still, I am on the lookout for quality Internet “coffee houses.” One that, in the early days of the Internet, pretty well fit the bill was The Well. That place was a fountainhead of Internet thinking and culture. I’m a participant there, and it still has as good of discussion as any place else I’ve found on the Internet, but to hear the old timers tell it (and there is some objective evidence as well) it is a shadow of its former glory.
I’ve tried, with very limited success, to make this blog a third place for the discussion of current events and new ideas (with a heavy emphasis on Indiana politics.) I just noted a discussion the other day on my Facebook wall that involved some acquaintances of mine who are a) very smart; and b) had differences of opinion on a particular issue. So, that’s another “place” that sort of qualifies. In order to have quality debate, it’s counterproductive to have the debate consist of creative ways of saying “me too.” (“Megadittos Rush!”) Though, I think those old time coffee houses were, themselves, given to factionalism. Loyalists of one political party, for example, preferring one coffee house to another.
Even beyond the coffee houses, I find it interesting that great historical and cultural advances came out of population centers that we would consider too small to make much of a cultural impact today. Golden Age Athens had only a couple hundred thousand people, I think. So, I wonder what it was about those places, times, and people that led to a cultural flowering with resources we’d consider fairly limited today.
But, on a more practical level, if anyone knows of “virtual coffee houses” that are interesting and valuable, I’d love to know about them.
Kennedy mentions ‘that diversity of perspective is also what makes cities important generators of new ideas, new inventions–as the author points out, the density of urban life also requires that we encounter people with different ideas, backgrounds and points of view’. But then she dismisses the idea that the Internet can provide such interaction because of “The Filter Bubble”, though she has built her own bubble…looking at the list of sites she follows, she is very inclusive of the hard left – Kos, Maddow, Sullivan.
In this case I think Kennedy is less concerned with different points of view than with increasing urban density. Everyone at SPEA wants higher urban density. People in single-family dwellings who own cars, drive SPEA crazy cuz they’re too hard to control !