Was Socrates into shit-posting and over-sharing?

I think it was Socrates who compared the human experience to dust in the wind, just as insubstantial and forgettable. Of course, we don’t 100% know it was him, there having been a number of years since he knocking out world shattering quips like a philosophical fruit machine, he is very much dust in the wind, but we get the point. (Actually, I think I only know it was supposed to be Socrates because of watching Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure, but that still counts.) To have your name pass down through history is quite a feet and certainly relies a great deal on luck, especially if you come from a society like the Ancient Greeks, where very little was written down, none of it verbatim and a lot of it by Romans sure that was what they’d said, those crazy Greeks, and anyway, wouldn’t it just be great if that was what they said, as it backs up exactly what we all think. The phrase ‘written in stone’ exists because things being written in stone have probably the best chance of surviving the generations, though not necessarily the attentions of graffiti artists with a sharp nail. 

Thinking about graffiti, what I love about it, is how it shows how much we haven’t changed. In 2010 I got married and we took a honeymoon in Sri Lanka, where among many other places, we visited Sigrirya Rock.

You may not have heard of it, we hadn’t, but it’s a huge rock - and rock is really underselling it - a vast mountain like rock, through which are carved steps that trace the skyward journey between a vast palace complex at its foot and temples at its top. Its water gardens and swimming pool system are so well built, that even today in heavy rain the fountains play and pools fill; it really is an astounding place. It is thought that one on the 4th century rulers who enjoyed life there, liked to sit on a throne at the edge of his swimming pools and watch as his several dozen wives and concubines frolicked in the waters wearing a lot of jewellery and not much else - and I cannot imagine that the word ‘frolic' has ever had a more appropriate scene to be appended to. 

This display was very much public; and tourists came daily to watch the proceedings and view the countless painting of beautiful women in the halls around the palace. The often commented on their favourite WAC (Wives and concubines) and argued about who was best and why. This fascinating record shows that not only were these women pretty diverse, but that the level of public discourse at the time, was really no different from the endless sniping and negging you see on posts about celebrity facelifts and bikini photos - though they were a bit more artistic about it that we are -

“The girl with the golden skin enticed the mind and eyes
Ladies like you make men pour out their hearts
And you also have thrilled the body
Making it stiffen with desire.”

Sadly, most of the images have been destroyed by the passage of time.

For more words written in stone, do check out Pompeii, which is full of fantastically crude and petty scrawling, from love sonnets about sex workers and endless knob drawings, to warnings about local lone sharks and where to get good wine and who watered their down -  we really haven’t changed that much. 

When scrolling through comments and wishing I hadn’t, I am often slightly amazed at the level of anger and cruelty displayed in them, though really I shouldn’t be. It’s much easier to wish someone an appalling fate from behind your phone screen than it is to chisel it into a brick wall, or even scratch it into the wall of a toilet cubical, though admittedly the audience is much smaller, so of course people’s worst nature spills out. These same people often seem to assume their angry words will never find them out - a friend of mine who was stuck in a dead end job he hated and finally got himself out of it by getting a place at university as a mature student, wrote on the wall of the staff toilets ‘I hate all of you,’  only to have someone write underneath the next day ‘Don’t worry, XXXXX, we hate you too!’ So be sure your words may find you out. There is nothing sweeter in revenge stakes when people screen shot the sexualised abuse they received and send it to the relatives and friends of the poster. No one likes it when their cover is blown.

I wonder of Socrates always said amazingly intelligent things that speak to us through the ages? Did he perhaps also make disparaging comments about other philosopher’s beards, or snigger that So-and-so was fooling no one with that hair piece? Did he slag off the Vestal Virgins, or dedicate years of his life to arguing with a neighbour over who should cut the hedge between their villas?

We will of course never know, perhaps because Socrates was wise enough not to carve such things in stone, or because the scribe tasked with capturing the great man’s words rubbed that bit out - perhaps because he never said such things. Whatever the reason, the sieve of history has allowed only his finest pronouncements to trickle down to us, along with fragments of Greek sculpture, art and culture we get to argue about today, which although probably good for him, is less fun for us. 

What I do think about, is how weirdly fragile our cultural record actually is, compared to the Ancient Greeks and the wall scratchers of Pompeii. I know I bang on a lot about AI Art, fundamentally because it annoys me by being such poor quality, the ultra processed version of art with little nutritional value, but the other thing I think about all of this is, it’s as insubstantial as dust waiting for the storm. 

This may of course be a good thing, because casting myself forwards a few millennia, assuming our society crashes and burns in a fiery storm of whatever, whoever makes it through will be spared the opinions of some basement dwelling keyboard warrior about whether or not Dua Lipa has great tits or not, and billions of AI images of sad faced characters with six fingers - but the flip side of this is that they won’t understand that we were trash as well. If only great works of art written in stone make it through, they will have a wholly inaccurate idea of who we were, in all our petty, self destructive glory, and they might come to believe the lies they tell themselves about us. We might become as revered as Socrates, our words taken as having some innate wisdom without question, incorrectly used to justify destructive and appalling behaviour such as colonialism and ideas of racial supremacy and legacy. 

Weirdly, I’d rather we don’t forget what a bunch of evil minded, petty natured, nasty little assholes we can be, because otherwise how will we try and make ourselves behave better?

Perhaps we should all take a moment to scratch something real into the rock around us, or how else will the history know who we really were?