Starbucks Personalities, Law, and Worldviews

I am in the midst of a Starbucks craze, which means that I spend a few evenings a week working at Starbucks instead of at home. This happens about twice a year; the coffeeshop ambiance calls to me, siren-like, and for the duration I am more likely to be productive if I answer the Call of the Bean. Fortunately for my pocketbook, sanity, and home life, this Call never continues for more than a few weeks.

So to Starbucks I hie me after dinner and work hard for several hours, until, like an alarm clock, something goes off in my head and I begin to notice people instead of whatever it is that I am studying. Then I ponder, and write, and finally go home happy, having had a thoroughly eclectic experience.

Tonight there are two middle-aged men in the armchairs across the room, who sit still and stare at nothing. Absolutely nothing. They have no books, no computers, not even a cell phone as far as I can tell. What are they thinking about? Why do they sit there, legs crossed, stirring the air with a single foot, in a state of quiet and watchful agitation? Do they wish that someone would talk to them? Or are they lost in memories? Will my eyes ever be as wise and experienced as theirs? They inspire in me a sort of reverent compassion.

That is the view ahead and to my left; to my right, against the plate-glass windows, sit three members of the opposite end of the spectrum: young friends who alternately go outside to smoke and then come inside to gossip. They are vivacious and comfortable with each other. One reads aloud from another's textbook... something about self-esteem that sounds like psychobabble. They seem tired but happy, kicking down the cobbled streets of well-worn conversation.

Directly across, under a foursquare of poster/plaques, sits a representative of a species that I know quite well. It is a student, complete with laptop and headphones and notebooks, working away at who-knows-what. We are comrades, and there is a certain unspoken familiarity between us. Behind and to the left, beneath the slate-colored plaques covered with mildly incoherent writing (I call them the Tablets of the Worship of the Bean), sit a young couple talking. Her knees are drawn up to her chest; he is leaning across and listening intently. I smile at them---why not? The world is full of lovers, and the world loves them.

Finally, in front of the coffee table (the only real coffee table in this Starbucks) sit two women chatting. I have seldom seen an odder pair. Though clearly friends, one looks like an academic and the other is a... a study in contrasts. The academic's long brown hair is pulled straight and a little untidily back. She wears glasses and a thick grey shirt. The other woman's haircut is sharp, short, and slanted. The platinum blondeness of it is clearly a dye, and her eyes are so thickly, blackly made up that they look like two holes in her head. She seems vaguely self-conscious. Her friend the academic looks thoughtful.

And then, I suppose, I am here too. I sit with my feet propped up on a chair, in "studying sweats," at a table scattered with an assortment of books from various time periods and on different subjects (The Universe Next Door, The Knowledge of the Holy, Pride and Prejudice, The Romance of the Rose, and the Bible), a pocket watch (English), pens (blue), an ipod (nano), a leatherbound portfolio for notes, altoids, and my tiny laptop.

(Amusing Interjection: This laptop is called "The Companion of My Future Life II," successor to another of that name, which causes me to chuckle every day with the shutting-down question "Do you want to turn off 'the Companion of My Future Life'?" This name or phrase is also particularly appropriate to the study of Pride and Prejudice, since it originally belonged to Mr. Collins.)

I am in the middle of making notes on Pride and Prejudice when I notice the quote on my Starbucks cup. (Hazelnut caramel, by the way. The barista helped me to invent it a few days ago, and I heartily recommend it.) The quote goes like this:

"The Way I See It #271"

"The law, for all its failings, has a noble goal -- to make the little bit of life that people can actually control more just. We can'd end disease or natural disasters, but we can devise rules for our dealings with one another that fairly weigh the rights and needs of everyone, and which, therefore, reflect our best vision of ourselves." - Scott Turow, Author of Presumed Innocent and Limitations.

Hm.

That's all it takes. My mind is off and running, fueled by the teachings of my father (a constitutional lawyer) and my last few days of studying worldviews (The Universe Next Door is a worldviews catelogue which I have been using for literary studies).

"First," I remark to myself, "that is not how I would define the goal of the law. The first precept of the law, if memory of Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, and Calvin serves, is to cherish good and punish evil. Or am I mixing up my philosophers? Well, I THINK that's what they said. Suppose it is; and if it is, then that goal is subtly different from "make our lives more just," though justice is, I suppose, a noble goal."

"Second, the assumption about how much we can or cannot control seems post-Renaissance and post-modern. It assumes that we can control something, but also that what we can control is severely limited. Interesting. What would change about this gentleman's goal of law if he had a theistic view of human capacity to control?"

"Third, I wonder why he set up 'needs' beside 'rights.' Perhaps the elevation of 'needs' is due to a 'state of nature' view of law?"

"Fourthly, to 'reflect our best vision of ourselves' is an exercise in futility, from a Christian perspective, but is also curiously postmodern, since postmodernism seems to be, on one level at least, all about perception. If the gentlemen took a more objective view of both truth and humanity, would he alter his statement?"

All this train of thought, I now consider, is derived quite without intention from the side of a Starbucks cup and the miscellanious impressions of law, political theory, philosophy, and worldviews, left in my brain after sixteen years of education.And then I began to laugh at myself, for after all I do sometimes feel ridiculously overeducated and like a pompous armchair commentator; and not only that, but as if the knowledge in my brain is disorganized and riddled with holes and flawed memories.

Then, however, I sober... and this is my final thought: "If people really believe the sort of thing that that quote says, then what will be the result of it? Where will we end, if we base our political decisions on such precepts?"

It made me want to pay better attention to the political races now going on around us, not out of anxiety or a belief that God won't direct America as He sees fit, but because I have a responsibility as a citizen to think about these things, and to vote with intelligence, humility, and a biblical perspective.

For the price of ten minutes or so of thinking, I believe that such a reminder is a worthwhile acquisition. And the opportunity to observe and spin mental stories about Starbucks personalities is always worth its weight in beans.