Five Reasons to Drink at the Bar
"The pub was the place where friendship was fostered over a shared drink and the shared cost of an evening conversation." Carl Trueman
In the twilight of Western civilization, where the sterile grip of the left hemisphere has throttled the soul out of our culture, the pub stands as a defiant outpost of human connection against the gnostic tide.
The churches once held the line too, but many—mainline Protestants, Jesuits, and their ilk—capitulated long ago, seduced by the siren song of abstraction and control. The pub, though, still holds out, a place where the world’s messiness is not just tolerated but celebrated.
Here are five reasons you ought to drag your besotted self to this last bastion of the real:
It costs more, and that’s the point. Forking over your cash for a pint at the pub ain’t just a transaction; it’s a middle finger to the left hemisphere’s bean-counting, acquisitive mania. Every overpriced ale you buy is a micro-rebellion against the machine that demands you hoard, optimize, and commodify your existence. You’re not just drinking; you’re spitting in the eye of a world obsessed with getting ahead.
It’s a slow, meandering affair. Getting to the pub takes time. You gotta walk, drive, or stumble your way there, then wait for the barkeep to pour your drink while some codger drones on about the weather. Then you gotta get home. It’s inefficient. But gloriously so: a poke in the ribs to the left hemisphere’s fetish for speed and productivity. The pub says, “Take your time. The world ain’t going anywhere.”
It’s a roll of the dice. You never know what you’re walking into. The service might be snappy, or it might crawl like a hungover snail. You might run into a kindred spirit who buys you a round, or some loudmouth who spills his opinionated lager on your shoes. That unpredictability, that lack of control, drives the left hemisphere nuts.
It’s a doorway to the unquantifiable. Why bother with the pub when you can crack a cold one on your couch, Netflix sputtering wittier lines than your friends could ever muster? Hell if I know. There’s something in the clink of glasses, the hum of half-drunk conversation, and the smell of stale beer (and, in those halcyon pre-2000 days, cigarette smoke) that can’t be measured or explained. It’s not data; it’s life. The pub invites you to lean into that mystery, and that alone is worth the trip.
It roots you to the local. The gnostics, those left-hemisphere zealots, despise the local unless they can bend it to serve their grand, abstract schemes.1 The pub, though, is the beating heart of your town (and if your town has a few hearts, so much the better). Every pint and every story weaves another thread into the community’s fraying fabric. It’s a quiet act of defiance against the homogenizing, centralizing forces that want to turn your neighborhood into another cog in the global machine.
So go. Find your pub, your dive bar, your hole-in-the-wall. It’s not just a place to drink; it’s a place to be human, to thumb your nose at the sterile, the controlled, the efficient. In a world hell-bent on flattening everything real, the pub is where you plant your flag and say, “Not here, you bastards.”
Not yet, anyhow.
"Think globally, act locally” is to localism what prostitution is to romance.
Outstanding footnote as well.