3 April

Passing the pub test says a lot about thinking. One of the great fallacies about thought for me is that ordinary life is somehow practical and grounded, and 'intellectual' things are abstract and removed from ordinary life. I think it's the other way around. Ordinary life deals in flabby generalities, prejudices, cliched opinions. Get in a debate in a pub and 9.5 times out of 10 you'll get a turgid half-hour rehearsed lecture from somebody on some opinion they picked up on talk radio, or from another drunk at the pub. Scholars and artists on the other hand try to return to the specific details of what's actually happening in our ordinary lives. They strip away the bloated opinions, forcing us to confront the actual realities we're living.