[LINK] "There Will Never Be Another American Revolution"

[rfmcdonald]

Ben Schreckinger's Slate article, subtitled "Our bars are too loud, our cafés too quiet", seems to me to oversimplify matter susbstantially. Are there truly no alternative venues?

Bars have gotten louder at least in part in response to research showing that louder music encourages patrons to talk less and drink more. By rendering conversation obsolete, the loud atmosphere also nudges people towards imbibing past the point where intelligent conversation is possible. It’s not easy to find a large, crowded bar in an American city where conversation isn’t drowned out by music or a sports telecast. In fact, the Saloon, On U St. in Washington, D.C., has made its name by refusing to play loud music and forcing patrons to stay in their seats, making conversation possible.

The cafés, meanwhile, have gotten quieter. For centuries, coffee was used as a conversation stimulant. But in the present-day U.S., it functions primarily as productivity booster. Coffee long ago penetrated the workplace, and now cafés themselves have become workplaces—not just for eccentric writers and artists, but for knowledge workers of all stripes, who are often plugged into headphones that are plugged into laptops.

[. . .]

The shift in both scenes amounts to more than just a loss for conversationalists. For centuries, bars and cafés around the world have fostered dissent and bottom-up political action. Cafés, especially, have bedeviled the authorities as long as they’ve existed. In 1511, worried about loose political talk stimulated by coffee, the governor of Mecca ordered all of the city’s cafés to shut their doors. In 1675, Charles II of England condemned coffee houses as sites where “False, Malitious and Scandalous Reports are devised and spread abroad, to the Defamation of His Majestie's Government, and to the Disturbance of the Peace and Quiet of the Realm.” He ordered all of them disbanded by January. Neither ban proved enforceable.

[. . .]

This isn’t coincidence—a variety of factors have made bars and cafés the spaces where potent political change begins. Alcohol loosens inhibitions and caffeine stimulates conversation. The spaces offer a meeting place for people who don’t have access to private clubs, boardrooms, and the halls of power—people, in other words, who are less invested in the status quo. Crucially, these are also semi-public spaces that can deliver a measure of privacy, a place where it’s easy to congregate yet hard for authorities to monitor.

But that sweet spot can only be achieved at a certain level of din: A bar or café needs to be quiet enough that you can engage in conversation but loud enough to create both the perception and the reality that you won’t be too easily overheard by the wrong people. (Not that the authorities won’t try. Louis XV’s spies haunted the cafés of 18th-century Paris. The NYPD’s controversial 21st-century infiltration of Muslim neighborhoods in New York City and beyond sent plainclothes officers to spy in cafés where they eavesdropped on conversations about politics, cricket, and kebab.) It’s this din, created by a large number of people closely congregated and engaging in regular conversation, which has been increasingly hard to find in our coffee houses and beer halls.