At Sixes and Sevens – The Dispatch

Math teachers are at the front line of this numerological contagion. “If you’re like, ‘Hey, you need to do questions six, seven,’ they just immediately start yelling, ‘Six Seven!’” a teacher recounts. “It’s like throwing catnip at cats.” 

“Now teachers avoid breaking kids into groups of six or seven, or asking them to turn to page 67, or instructing them to take six or seven minutes for a task,” the Journal’s Ellen Gamerman writes. “Six is a perfect number, and seven is a prime number, but only a glutton for punishment would put them together in front of a bunch of 13-year-olds.”

Gamerman goes on, “The meme’s meaning (and its whole point) is that it has no meaning. Maybe if French philosopher Albert Camus had a TikTok, he could explain it, given how well he understood repetitive cycles of senselessness.”

It’s true—Camus wrote a lot about the absurdity and irrationality of the world and man’s desire to impose coherence and order upon it. “Man stands face to face with the irrational,” Camus observed in The Myth of Sisyphus. “He feels within him his longing for happiness and for reason.”

“The absurd is born,” according to Camus, from the “confrontation between the human need and the unreasonable silence of the world.” But what did Camus say of children? I don’t know. So maybe the kids are not so existentialist as the Journal suggests?

Perhaps the kids are concerned with the president’s abuse of executive power—the exact topic addressed by Alexander Hamilton in Federalist No. 67? Coincidence? You decide. 

Maybe Generation Alpha is despairing of the moral rot and decay of the culture they are inheriting. Why should the youth live in a world where virtue is so corrupted? Isn’t that precisely the question posed by Shakespeare in his Sonnet 67?

Or perhaps it’s a more numerologically rich cri de coeur. Yes, six is a mathematically “perfect” number—it equals the sum of its proper divisors—and seven is a prime number. But 67 is a super-prime number. By which I mean, of course, that 67 is the 19^th prime number, making it a “super-prime” because 19 is also prime. It’s also part of a “sexy prime quadruplet” (61, 67, 73, 79) where the primes differ by six. I don’t have to tell you what happened in the years 1961, 1967, 1973, or 1979.

Nor do I need to remind you that Genesis 24 contains exactly 67 verses. This is part of the Bible where the dying Abraham instructs his servant to ensure that Isaac marries within the tribe and not to the Canaanites so that the covenant may continue. This is the first time in the Bible when the covenant depends on human will and planning—not God’s intervention—to survive. Isaac represents the need for the next generation to continue Abraham’s promise. It is also one of the most important statements on the need for monogamous marriage and female or matriarchal agency to perpetuate the covenant. The sacred is carried forward in the mundane work of faith and prayer. 

Whether this has anything to do with the fact that Paul might have written 2 Timothy in the year 67 or that the Great Jewish Revolt against Rome erupted that year can be reasonably debated.

But it can be simpler than that. Six is the number of creation, labor, toil, while seven is the number of completion: Earth was created in six days, finished on the seventh. After all, this is why there are six letters in the word “sinful” and seven in “correct.”

Perhaps this is just a pithy statement on the cycle of life (implicit in Sonnet 67); from alpha to omega. In other words the youth—Generation Alpha—are offering a reminder to us all that they, like Isaac, are being asked to pick up the generational torch. Of course, the work of mankind is never complete in this world, which might explain that the Protestant Bible only has 66 books. One more would imply man’s work is done. 

Such apocalyptic speculation is buttressed by the fact that six plus seven equals 13, the number of betrayal, much like Loki, the 13^th guest at the Valhalla feast at which he orchestrated the murder of Baldr. Twelve is the number of completeness—12 months in the year—while 13 introduced disorder into the world. 

Thirteen is of course the first year we affix the suffix “-teen” to and the age of manhood and womanhood in Judaism. Perhaps this “six seven” tempest is a protest against the loss of innocence and the burdens of adulthood? 

Obviously, I could be overthinking this. After all, “six seven” is another way of saying “June 7.”  The significance of this date cannot be exaggerated. More than ever before, kids today are monitored by the panopticon of modern technology. Why not allude to the fact that June 7, 1949, was the day before the publication of George Orwell’s 1984, harkening back to a simpler time before we’d been exposed to the terrible burden of his secular prophecy? 

Today’s children crave both a connection to the past, a sense of independence, and a revival of patriotism. What better way to achieve all three than to celebrate the day the Declaration of Independence was formally introduced at the Continental Congress? 

You don’t have to be a mathematical genius and codebreaker like Alan Turing to see the signs. I mean, Turing died on June 7, 1954. Nor do you have to catastrophize about the numerous demographic and environmental crises looming over Generation Alpha to appreciate that Malthus’ essay on population was published on June 7, 1798. 

Surely, some or all of these explanations are true, particularly if we feel that there’s truth to them. As Steve Bannon says, “There are no conspiracies but there are no coincidences.” To believe that children, those fonts of wisdom and innocence, would be celebrating absurdity just to torture their elders is too terrible to contemplate. It was a child who spotted the falsity of the emperor’s new clothes. Children are the great “noticers” in every civilization, and they can see the connections where jaded adults have voluntarily rendered themselves blind. 

To reject the wisdom that comes out of the mouths of babes is to deny the very idea that children are the embodiment of virtue and to reject the idea that feelings are superior to facts. 

What’s next? Are we to reject the way the youth have suddenly “noticed” the Jews? This would be like rejecting the causal connection between Tylenol and autism simply because “science” says there isn’t one. Are we to believe that America put a man on the moon just because our elders say it happened? Are we going to take “Mrs.” Macron’s word for it that “she” is a woman or are we going to go with our feelings? 

“Six seven” must mean something, for to believe otherwise is to believe that the passion of the young can be of no consequence or significance. If youthful passion can have no weight, no meaning, beyond the youthful desire to be part of something fun, regardless of how stupid, silly, or pointless it may be, then we might have to contend with the reality that truth is not simply a fad or feeling, and that “noticing” is not proof of anything other than one’s desire to see what we want to see. Some things have to be believed to be seen. And as we know from those fake moon-landing films, merely seeing doesn’t require believing.

The animals are all doing well, especially Gracie, who got to catch up with Lucy. Christmastime costumery was kept to a tolerable minimum. The beasts always like having a tree in the house and the Dingo enjoys the sparseness of foliage for her investigations. In a somewhat troubling development, Zoë has returned to her habit of expressing jealousy by selecting one leaf to safeguard. Appeasement of Chester continues apace. I do have to call out some vicious subtweeting by the otherwise charming Shoshana Weissman, who suggested that dogs don’t know what day it is. For Pippa, this was like saying to Lassie that dogs don’t alert the authorities when children fall down wells. It is what Pippa does.

Member Name: Janet Colman

Why I’m a Dispatch Member: I love the fact-based content and the podcasts featuring my favorite pundits (Sarah and Jonah … I’m talking about YOU!).

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Pet’s Proudest Moment: When her brother Justin got a job with The Dispatch as social media manager.

A Moment Someone (Wrongly) Accused Pet of Being Bad: A bunch of (ignorant) people have said that pugs are so ugly that they are cute.

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