So I passed my Masters! I can’t believe it! I’ll be graduating for the third time at the end of the month….and for the first time I feel able to read, for pleasure, all those books I thought I wasn’t smart enough to read before. Maybe it’s my working class roots…but I always felt like a bit of a fraud before, reading Plato, Aristotle, Horace and Juvenal for the craic….but at the end of the day, Classics is just a bunch of fellas getting drunk, killing and shagging each other and discussing the meaning of life…which from my recollection is simply an average Friday night out at the Archway Tavern. An old friend of mine, who passed away in his early twenties , always said that the pub is the poor man’s University…and in my opinion, he was right. All facets life and ethical discussion are echod within those hallowed walls. A simple discussion about whether someone should buy you a pint if they bumped into you and knocked yours to the floor, is reflective of Socrates argument with Thrasemachus in the second book of the Republic; the argument about the nature of goodness. Of course the ’good’ thing to do is buy a pint to replace the one you spilt. But what is the reason for this decision? Is it because you truely are good?….or is it because this response has been conditioned into you..by your moral or religious upbringing?..or, on a purely Darwinistic level, are you buying the pint for your own survival, to ensure that you don’t get beaten up by the ‘victim’s’ friends? Even more importantly, are you buying the pint to ensure your acceptance into a community or tribe, thus ensuring your survival? Richard Dawkins discussed the selfish gene which reflects the idea that we only do ‘good’ for our own survival. Socrates questioned Thrasemacus’ predisposed views of goodness….and the same thing happens everytime I walk into a pub. It echos with moral and ethichal questions and gossip about who ‘shifted’ who, the parish priest who ran off with his housekeeper the and the line dancing scaffolder. Sure, the ethical debates take place on a more basic level, but it is still an integral part of humanity that hasn’t changed since the time of Socrates. The things that make us human still remain the same. The issues and the ethics still remain the same, it’s just that people in acadmic circles have more time to sit on their behinds and discuss such issues. I have far more respect for anyone who goes out onto a building site and works his fingers to the bone for his family. That is real hard work, real genius and determination. Some discussions that I have heard in pubs after a hard day’s work are far more profound than any I have heard in a lecture hall or seminar. Real life= real lessons.
The one thing that academia has given me, however is the freedom to read books that I never felt clever enough to read before, I am devouring books like a starving marvin. I always thought that there was a glass ceiling for me when it came to literature, but getting this Masters has made me realise that even the working class amongst us can savour the the true wonder of words.
