Sunday morning, I retrieved the New York Times from the end of the driveway.  Sorting the sections of the paper, after discarding the advertising inserts I brought the Magazine section to my desk.  The first article, entitled After Math is about the musing of a teenager (while applying makeup) about whether math is real or not.  The posting on TikTok, according to writer Sophie Haigney, became viral, prompting many types of responses.  The musings of a teenager became the vessel for whatever was believed, a symbol for the foundational assumptions/prejudices of viewers.  Over two weeks of time the video was viewed 1.3 million times.  The teenager became the “Math Isn’t Real Girl.”

To read the entire article, CLICK HERE.

The story of this teenage girl strikes me as emblematic of the time in which we live.  We are casting about for rescue, for some stability in the maelstrom surrounding us: the uncontrolled pandemic, wildfires in the West enveloping swaths of forests and many homes, climate warming with increasing severe weather events, a President that cares only about himself, and international disorder in the form of antipathy between former allies and trading partners.  The list could be longer and more finely detailed.  Certainly the remembered old world, the post WWII, Eisenhower era of middle class stability,  and hope of upward mobility for many has come to an end,…

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The words of Nietzsche seemed worth considering, at least his commentary on the work of Socrates among his fellow citizens of Athens in the years following the Peloponnesian war.  The war ended in 404 BC with Athens the “loser” and power shifting to Sparta.  As usual with war, both parties suffer deeply, and tragically.  The treasury of Athens was depleted, and the population significantly reduced by a plague within the city.  The war ended the golden age of Greece, a time of instability by any definition.  We have Plato’s account of Socrates, the disciple and promoter of “reason” going about his work, questioning the presuppositions of Athenian democracy.

This is what Nietzsche wrote about Socrates:

11.
I have explained how Socrates fascinated his audience:
he seemed to be a physician, a savior.
Is it necessary to go on
to demonstrate the error in his faith
in “rationality at any price”?

It is a self-deception on the part of philosophers and moralists if they believe that they are extricating themselves from decadence by waging war against it.

Extrication lies beyond their strength:

what they choose as a means, as salvation, is itself but another expression of decadence; they change the form of decadence, but they do not get rid of decadence itself.

Socrates was a misunderstanding;

any improvement morality, including Christianity, is a misunderstanding. The most blinding daylight; rationality at any price; life, bright, cold, cautious, conscious, without instinct, in opposition to the instincts

— all this was a kind of disease, merely a disease, and by no means a return to “virtue,” to “health,” to happiness.

To have to fight the instincts — that is the definition of decadence:

                  as long as life is ascending, happiness equals instinct.

— excerpt, Twilight of the Idols, by Friedrich Nietzsche, The Problem of Socrates, page 44