It’s 12pm. You are sitting at Courtyard waiting for your latte; you really need that cup of coffee. The stack of books in front of you makes you wonder whether you should get a one-way ticket to Argentina. As you’re falling deeper into the trenches of exam stress, someone comes up to you and says “I see you’re reading Rousseau. What are your thoughts on the general will?” You want nothing more than to punch them in the face. But you’ll settle for some sheepishly polite response that makes him go away. Unless he’s kinda cute, in which case you’ll put on your charming smile. This is how we respond to intellectuality in a strangers’ setting; we cringe from it because we think it’s weird. We see it as no-one but our friends’ business. But it hasn’t always been that way. There was a time when going to a coffee shop meant having long conversations with strangers about ideas. That time was, not one bit coincidentally, around the Age of Enlightenment.
Back in the day, when we were still excited about the cool new beverage that had replaced alcohol, coffee, people would gather in cafes and open up their minds, anticipating the next great thought. This environment sparked creative thought, not because of the caffeine, but because of the attitude people had once partaking in it. They wanted to be challenged, they craved argument and debate, they brought every piece of knowledge of thought they had with them and shared it with the rest. And where many good ideas come together, better ideas are born.
When something innovative or different pops up in your head, you need two things to develop it; time and people. Time helps you develop the idea further, it serves as an incubation period. You may be refining it or working out the logistics. It may simply take time to realise how great that thought was. People are a different story. They will try to prove you wrong and doubt you or complement your unfinished project. Either way, they are the key to improvement. It is no accident, that good ideas used to originate from the wealthy. Plato and Pythagoras had the luxury of time to contemplate the big questions of life, and the social life that pushed them to perfection.“But couldn’t the Enlightenment have started from bars?” you ask me. No. Another very significant aspect of the coffee shop was – you guessed it – the coffee. When the divine smell of coffee reached England in the 16th century, people lost their heads over it. By that I mean that they lost their previously insatiable thirst for beer. They switched from a depressant to a stimulant, and their brains lit up. As an MP of the time put it, the drink managed to “expel Giddinesse out of his Head”.
It is no wonder, then, how seven UK universities have decided to promote coffee shop culture in the stead of alcohol culture with the NUS Alcohol Impact scheme. Their aim is to create a “cafe culture that runs into the evening”. Notwithstanding just how ridiculous and impossible this sounds, I am willing to give them a thumbs up for effort. Loughborough, Nottingham, Swansea, Brighton, Manchester Metropolitan, Liverpool John Moores and Royal Holloway are taking part in the scheme. In my opinion, this is a great idea, the kind of idea that must have been born over an espresso. It entails that university life has a chance to go back to what it is supposed to be. No more hangover lectures or drunk study sessions. By substituting alcohol with coffee, we can bring back the connectivity and open conversation that fostered the Enlightenment. To be clear, I am not saying that Voltaire’s will start popping up in Loughborough, simply that we will increase the level and amount of intelligent conversation in a pluralist environment.
If other people are what motivates us and helps us get better, then we are a generation of massive underachievers. We were given the uncontested champion of bringing people together, and we have done little with it; the internet. For the first time in human history, we have the potential to communicate with each other on a massive scale. Of course it is not to be said that the internet hasn’t helped our minds and academic careers, on the contrary. It has been an effective instrument of change and discussion. But on an individual level, we don’t exhaust its potential. YouTube comments are filled with trolls, Instagram with selfies, and Twitter with updates about people’s lives no one ever wants or should be forced to care about.
So, why is it that we have not taken advantage of the greatest tool for dialogue our species has ever encountered? What the internet lacks – and Costa is full of – is human contact. The feeling of having a real person across the table. In this way, you are accountable for what you say. You are neither anonymous nor distanced. When people had those great conversations in coffee shops, they were looking at each other. Once challenged, they had to respond, and a simple “yo momma” wouldn’t cut it. We need more places where it is OK to be the weird person who listens to a friendly chat, jumps in and turns it into a full-on debate. We have been given a great tool to do this, but it falls short in motivating us to be our best intellectual selves.
At the end of the day, we would like to come up with the next big thing. It would, after all, make for an awesome status update. So why not head down to the place with the espresso machines, grab a cup of Ethiopian brain medicine, and be a bit creepy?