Ba-ding dum ding dum doo. Ba-ding dum ding dum doo.
The phone alarm jingled from a corner of the room.
“Already?” said Michala Perreault, who had just spent 90 seconds talking out her thoughts on the evolution of language.
The alarm interrupted her mid-sentence, signaling it was time to let another person in the room speak.
“OK, we’ll put a bookmark there,” Perreault, an Arlington resident, said with a laugh, passing on the 15 seconds she was given to round off her oration. She’d tie up her thoughts when it was her turn to talk again.
Perreault sat with 14 others at a makeshift roundtable of a dozen diner tables sandwiched together. Everyone immediately around her chose to spend Saturday morning at their local Socrates Cafe.
Socrates Cafe isn’t a place. It’s a group of people, mostly above the age of 65, meeting to have intellectually stimulating philosophical discussions in a controlled, comfortable setting.
The cafe follows the model of ancient Greek and Roman salons, which aimed to host respectful, thought-provoking conversations.
The Fort Worth Socrates Cafe meets on the first and third Saturdays of each month in the back room of Rise and Shine cafe in Fort Worth.
To start each meeting, attendees pitch and vote on the morning’s philosophical question. Then, they discuss it over the next 90 minutes, taking timed turns and never interrupting or arguing.
On the morning of March 1, the topic was: What is the relationship between language, culture and society?
The room was full and busy with voices. Dim, incandescent lights further yellowed the tan, smoke-scented walls. The flooring was coffee-stained.
Attendees didn’t come for the aesthetics.
They came to talk about culture, how language shapes thought and if feeling-transmitting microchips could eliminate spoken words within 100 years.
“What’s ironic is we’re discussing what language is with language,” said Len Wheeler, the group’s moderator.
Wheeler Hosted her first Socrates Cafe gatherings in San Antonio about 20 years ago, inspired by author Christopher Phillips, who started salon discussion groups across the world.
She’s run the Fort Worth chapter for around 16 months and launched an Arlington chapter in fall 2024. Attendees mostly have backgrounds in teaching, law and government.
Wheeler admits the Tarrant County groups lack diversity. They tend to attract white, retired, wealthier members.
But she wants change, and she wants to bring in young attendees, blue-collar workers and people of color. She hopes to start another group that meets on a weeknight to diversify the group’s discussions.
Jana Peden was a first-time attendee during the language conversation. The 46-year-old English teacher said she felt welcomed by the group.
“I was worried it would be sort of self-congratulatory, but it was more conversational,” Peden said.
Discussion topics are always decided the morning of a meeting, Wheeler said, so attendees can’t research their thoughts beforehand. She wants people only to express what they can form in their minds at the moment. Mid-conversation googling is discouraged.
The group avoids political and religious arguments, although conversations will occasionally naturally wander into those topics.
Disagreement is welcome, but debates are strictly prohibited. Wheeler said the only requirement to join a Socrates Cafe is “an open, civil mind.”
But, as discussed deeply during Peden’s first salon visit, a way with words also comes in handy.
Drew Shaw is a government accountability reporter for the Fort Worth Report. Contact him at [email protected] or @shawlings601.
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