Notes from a middle school teacher: on CRT and its spinoffs
A Rhode Island middle school teacher writes:
I love being a teacher and I care a great deal about my students, almost all of whom are non-white. This past 2020/21 school year was a sad and worrisome turning point for me as an educator. Providence K-8 teachers were introduced to one of the most racially divisive, hateful, and in large part, historically inaccurate curriculums I have ever seen in my teaching career.
Yes, I am speaking about the controversial critical race theory that has infiltrated our public schools here in Rhode Island under the umbrella of Cuturally Responsive learning and teaching, which includes a focus on identities. You won’t see the words “critical race theory” on the materials, but those are the concepts taught. The new, racialized curriculum and materials focuses almost exclusively on an oppressor-oppressed narrative, and have created racial tensions among students and staff where none existed before.
That is exactly what one might expect from a curriculum so racist and divisive. I can only conclude that this is the intent of those who designed and implemented this sort of poisonous indoctrination.
I believe they were also hoping it would fly under the radar. And after all, what choice do most parents have, particularly if both must work or if there’s a single parent and little time for homeschooling as well as not enough money for private school? COVID allowed more parents to see the CRT sausage being made, as it were, and now there’s more public knowledge about it and more parents incensed about it.
Not enough, but more.
To continue [emphasis mine]:
We did not need a new curriculum for students to learn about slavery and racism. We already did that, in great depth, relying in part on the writings of great African-American authors.
American history now is being retold exclusively from the perspective of oppressed peoples during the Revolutionary period through to the Civil War, and also in the literature of the Civil Rights movement. From my position in the classroom, it seemed that much of American history and literature was getting wiped out. No one of these new books, standing alone, would be problematic, it’s the new lack of diversity of perspective that is the problem. Although the 1619 Project itself has not yet been introduced, the historical perspective now has shifted to making slavery and racism the defining events of the founding and growth of America.
Public schools are now largely dominated by leftist thought and pedagoguery – especially in blue states and cities – teaching a generation of children to hate their country and that its basis is in Original Sin. This is not new, but it’s gotten far worse.
Please read the whole thing, even if think you’re already familiar with the sort of process it describes.
The grandchildren of today’s liberals will die in the flames of ethnic and cultural resentments which their pride wounded ancestors studiously, purposefully, and with malice aforethought, kindled.
Shrug.
DNW:
Shrug?
If those grandchildren die in the flames of some sort of racial conflagration, are those grandchildren at fault? Or do you think the sins of the grandparents should be visited on grandchildren? And by the way, wouldn’t everyone’s grandchildren – including those of conservatives – be similarly at risk in that conflagration?
Whence comes this shrug of yours?
Shrug.
It seems “I’ve got mine and I don’t care” is a mode of deep philosophical “thought.” And when the gyre expands to take all that the thinkers thought was “theirs?” Comforting to know that you have no children, grandchildren, or any extended family that the gyre will claim. All about me in the now, it seems. Maybe when you are dead and gone a shrug is all you can (not) do.
“Shrug” feels like surrender to me. “It’s going to happen regardless, so I may as well go about my life as comfortably as I can.” I suppose that’s tempting to those of us old enough to think we might not live to see the end results, but a) it’s too self-centered for me to accept and b) it’s almost certainly not true. The fire is burning fast now, and we’ll all see the consequences.
Can we stop the carnage from coming? Maybe not, but I’d rather die knowing I did everything I could than leave the world to the flames knowing that it was, at least to the degree that I surrendered, my fault.
Private schools too are contaminated too, at least in my blue state. We still get the magazine of the school from which our daughter graduated. Lately it’s full of predictable BLM nonsense even though its student body is overwhelmingly white and wealthy.
Oppressed versus oppressors? Class struggles? All brand new stuff huh? The Marxists are, and have been, on the march since before WWII. We can shrug it off or meet it head on. I choose to meet it head on. We have to call it what it is. Marxism/Communism dressed up in new language.
What needs to be taught in our classrooms is the history of the USSR, of Cuba, of Allende’s Chile, of Zimbabwe, of Venezuela, Mao’s China, and more. There are reasons these nations failed. Those reasons are what need to be studied in our schools, not the phony, so-called 1619 history of the USA.
I interpret the “shrug” comments to mean that what’s right or fair or deserved is irrelevant to what WILL happen. The SJWs are willing to cut down every law in America to get after the devil of racism, and who will stand upright in the winds that will blow then?
Most of us here are Americans and we are very privileged that the norms for most of human history did not apply to most of us here. That norm is armed strangers will enslave/hurt/kill you and your family and/or take all your stuff for no reason other than you’re not strong enough to stop them, and there’s going to be no way to better your situation without becoming the client of someone more powerful who will help you (for a price which may not be that much lighter).
We’re rapidly moving to laws that work differently for different people based on characteristics that can’t be changed. When the legal and non-violent recourses are shut off, what remains cannot be constrained to work in fair or right ways.
Re “the shrug”
How much time and energy are you going to expend in order to save people from themselves? The aim of the modern liberal has always been to fundamentally transform America, in law, and in culture, and in morals.
Trying to save them against their will, is not only futile, it is like clasping the proverbial serpent to your breast. “Counterproductive” as the generation used to say.
So, to the extent that they have succeeded in their aims, they are now merely reaping the first fruits of what they have sown.
They are finding to their chagrin, that they too have been judged to be living in the houses and driving the cars of more deserving and oppressed others; not just those rich bastards at the G.P. Yacht Club.
Welcome then, liberal grandma and liberal grandpa, to your abode in the mental world you have yourself made.
Doesn’t mean I’m personally giving up.
In fact I was just doing some long overdue work on the vacation farm; including the well, the barn wiring, etc. Not because I expect a conflagration; but, because it is my duty to myself and to important others to be at least somewhat prepared. Just as it is the duty of every man here, under 75, and not debilitated by disease or accident, to keep as fit and capable as he can.
And from all accounts left here by old surgeons and airline pilots and soldiers, many of these older guys now approaching 80, have succeeded admirably.
So no, I am not giving up. And although I have no great expectation of escaping the effects of the cataclysm should it come, my general attitude not to put too fine a point on it, is superficially at least, this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j0X7nSLMV5c&t=125s
George is correct. Black racist nonsense is everywhere.
I believe to goal of the Left is to produce a violent, revolutionary cohort that will make the Antifa/BLM violence, looting and arson all look like child’s play. Get Whitey!
If we refuse to recognize this, and squelch the Left utterly without any moral qualms, we will have deserved the outcome. This is a fight for our lives, our children’s lives, a decent culture. Many public schools all across the USA have majority black students because the brighter ethnics (Latinos, Europeans, Asians) all have fled. Our tax dollars are being used by the Teachers Unions to promote CRT and Marxism, and pay teachers for so doing!
In Charles Murray’s very recent book,”Facing Reality”, he updates the well-known Bell Curve data. While there are brilliant individual blacks (as we all know), as a group the black mean IQ is 15 points lower than whites’ group average of 100. We see this in Haiti, no? What can we expect from someone with an IQ of 85? Anything good, especially when they have been indoctrinated with CRT their entire lives?
There has been no average IQ improvement in blacks tested in English and math at 4th, 8th, and 12th grade levels in the past 40 years, none.
The battle for the schools was lost about 15-20 years ago. Bill Ayers set the process in motion so that the left took over the Ed schools and departments. Once they had those under control, they very carefully, and subtly, started the curriculum change to begin pumping out leftists teachers. Saw it in my own college where in a faculty meeting 17 years ago I protested some new courses being proposed by the Ed dept. I was told they were benign courses and I was overreacting. 95% of graduates of Ed for the last 15-20 years are now committed leftists. I see no way to root them out short of a complete, and I mean complete, revolt by parents. Of course, many of those new parents were brought up in that same school system and are somewhat sympathetic to the CRT mess.
How many of us are willing, at this stage in life like me rapidly approaching 70, to say run for the local school board? Would we even have a chance to be elected on a conservative platform of school reformation?
DNW:
Well, if they are true to their upbringing, they will have certainly brought it upon themselves. Remember, “grandchildren” does not mean youths, necessarily.
So, you might consider as an example Pajama Boy and his psychic kin, or Chuck Schumer’s daughter, or Bill Clinton’s whelp, or the 56% percent of young white liberal females under 30 who reported to the Pew Research Organization, that they had been clinically (presumably) diagnosed with psychological disturbances.
Fifty-six flipping percent. Geez, just on how many levels are we supposed to become martyrs, and to what? The principle of enabling and doormat-like servitude?
Well now, Neo, that’s a damn good question and it gets right to the heart of the matter, as I am sure you have already intuited I was about to say.
Shall, ” with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again” apply to these Nietzschean dweebs and hedonic nihilists? Shall Ezekiel’s ” ‘I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but that the wicked turn from his way and live. “ apply to those who reject the “Premise Himself”, and thus the foundation and categorical authority of the notion that: “The soul who sins shall die. The son shall not bear the guilt of the father, nor the father bear the guilt of the son. The righteousness of the righteous shall be upon himself, and the wickedness of the wicked shall be upon himself.”
For the CRT crowd and the BLM crowd, and the progressives who despise the middle of this country surely do reject the the hypothetical: both antecedent and consequent.
When the old rules and limits are rejected, why would the protections derived from the principle of respecting them, be imagined to still apply to those who do the rejecting?
From Neo’s post: “I believe they were also hoping it would fly under the radar. ”
There is a local opinion columnist, not particularly ideological, but not particularly sharp, either, who serves as an example of how this stuff flies under the radar. It comes to her attention only via media stories about Republicans trying to pass laws to obstruct this racialist pedagogy. So her response is “Why can’t those obnoxious meddling Republicans leave teachers alone? Let them do their jobs without interference from politicians!” A more complete missing of the point is hard to imagine. You might say it’s deliberate deception (which of course it is on the part of the CRT zealots), but I know her, and I don’t think it is. She’s just that clueless.
Notes from … a[n underground] middle school teacher?
The protagonist and first-person narrator is an unnamed 40-year-old civil servant known as The Underground Man. The only known facts about his situation are that he has quit the service, …
I know of a few middle school teachers who have quit, though that was many years ago. Changes (and rot) come to California first and then spread to the rest of the country.
A friend of mine did a number of years of home schooling followed by a Christian charter school for her children. She also studied the history of government run schooling in the U.S. and Dewey’s impact on it. And loaned me her copy of Goldberg’s Liberal Facism.
From the Ramona Bessinger op-ed:
This was the essential core of a movie called “Freedom Writers” loosely based on a true story. The Holocaust and Anne Frank is exactly the sort of thing that inner city kids can relate to. I was rather shocked to look the movie up in IMDB and found virtually no reference to the Holocaust, Anne Frank, or Miep Gies who actually appears in the film. How far have we fallen down the Louis Farrakhan rabbit hole? I wonder if the film has been edited in recent years. Many are.
This article is roughly how I recall the film.
“When the old rules and limits are rejected, why would the protections derived from the principle of respecting them, be imagined to still apply to those who do the rejecting?”
Neo pointed out that the children and grandchildren of those who reject the limits who will suffer along with their ancestors. But more broadly, I say that the protections should apply to people who reject them principle for a simple reason: because they are MY principles. The fact that these people have rejected them has nothing to do with it.
DNW:
You have no idea what the grandchildren of today’s liberals will believe, and obviously not all of them will agree on anything in particular. So I believe your callous shrug is quite misplaced.
And why shrug at anyone’s suffering? Why not pray for them (and their children and grandchildren) to see the light?
Frederick:
“Shrug” means, essentially: I don’t care ; I’m indifferent to their suffering.
Correction. Actress Pat Carroll plays Miep Gies.
“Black racist nonsense is everywhere.”
And no one, not even the best and the brightest, the sweetest and the toughest, the hardest working and the most altruistic and empathetic, are immune from this modern version of the Salem witch trials—which are actually, not so much trials as Robespierre-style pronouncements, with the attendant psychological bullying and reputational quasi-guillotining. (But how long will it/can it stay a quasi-bloodbath…?)
https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/a-witch-trial-at-the-legal-aid-society
Regarding the decision to erase Anne Frank from the curriculum, I suspect it has something to do with the fact that the Holocaust “gets in the way”—in a major way—of CRT and the slavery narrative.
(Can’t have kids, or anyone for that matter, feeling empathy for anyone other than Blacks because ONLY BLM.)
“The SJWs are willing to cut down every law in America to get after the devil of racism, and who will stand upright in the winds that will blow then? Frederick
It’s not the devil whom they seek to ‘get after’ but God. They repeatedly demonstrate whom they serve.
“I believe to goal of the Left is to produce a violent, revolutionary cohort that will make the Antifa/BLM violence, looting and arson all look like child’s play. Get Whitey!” Cicero
That may eventuate in blue cities but outside those cesspools… ‘Whitey’ is armed.
“So much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire, by people who don’t even know that fire is hot…” George Orwell
It would seem that “Biden” ‘s goal—with across-the-board Democratic Party collusion, as reflected in the streets by the Democratic Party’s antifa and BLM shock troops—is to make things in the US as tribal, and violent (or virtually violent? So “Biden” can step in and “save the day”…) as possible, since THAT is the key to transforming America.
And in other, tribal, news:
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/south-africa-crumbling-amid-widespread-looting
(Let’s hope, against hope, that it’s not a morality tale…)
J.J.: “What needs to be taught in our classrooms is the history of the USSR, of Cuba, of Allende’s Chile, of Zimbabwe, of Venezuela, Mao’s China, and more.”
Yes!
Teaching students to hate each other cannot possibly benefit anyone. It results in violence.
The unresolved 2020 election is a major fork in the road for CRT in America. If we do not fix the fraud, we will live to regret it. If 2020 is not rectified, DNW’s apocalypse will be upon us (shrug or no shrug) and we will deserve it.
It is absolutely evil to teach any child that they are better or worse, or more or less worthy of love and respect, than any other child based on the color of their skin.
Period.
Re the Shrug:
The Left has no problem with guilt by association and guilt by descent. They’re not going to mend their ways until they know in their bowels that that what goes around comes around. Fairness, niceness, pearl-clutching doesn’t come into it if you want to hang onto *your* progeny.
@Kate: It obviously benefits some people. And do you seriously think Violence isn’t a plus for some? Imagine, if you will, that you were born and lived your entire life on a Turkey Farm run on the best and most humane lines. Now it’s, I dunno… let’s say November 1. Your received ideas on the morality and utility of violence and just about everything else ‘political’ you may have learned up until yesterday through lived experience have precisely zero relevance going forward.
Can Do!
You might consider that Kate has lived abroad in other cultures and may not have the same zero sum, brutal outlook as you.
Gobble, gobble, grok?
Zaphod, obviously it benefits ill-intentioned and dishonest people. But a society in which groups hate each other and are willing to act on that hate is going to be hell on earth until the hate burns out, or until one group kills most of the others.
I went to Nathan Bishop Middle School in Providence 50 years ago. I remember in 7th grade English class we had a section on the dystopian novel and read 1984, Brave New World and Lord of the Flies. I don’t think 12 year old me would have believed how things have turned out now.
People are tribal. Life is mostly hard and often dissatisfying, even for most of us Americans, of all tribes and colors, who have it pretty damn good in 2021. (Our political class notwithstanding)
We look for other tribes to blame. To hate. Life would be better if it wasn’t for the damn (fill in the blank).
At our best we seek to overcome that.
At our worst we encourage it.
We sure as hell shouldn’t be teaching it to our kids.
American women’s birth rate is now down to 1.6 (replacement, maintaining status quo, requires 2.1). The tattooed crowd will not make up the difference. It has been a quick plummet, and it is not over. In Germany, IIRC, the rate is about 1.
No reproduction = no society, no culture, but self-extinguishment of a people instead. Secularism at its finest!
Yup. Demographics is Destiny.
The only way that Western Civ survives is through Female Re-subjugation.
In any kind of advanced economy, most women — and triply so the intelligent ones — simply will not reproduce if given a choice. This is unsustainable. The answer is simple and brutal and zero-sum. Of course we won’t do it… but the Collapse will do it for us. And so the wheel turns again.
@Kate:
You’re describing phenomena. You’re not describing how to stop them.
Were you in India when the Ayodhya Mosque/Temple thing happened?
I was in Hong Kong but was involved in a project with the most other-worldly intellectual, deeply cultured raga-reciting and at the same time incredibly money-grubbing, stock-jobbing Bombay Jain. In about 3 seconds flat he went from the boilerplate “When I’m old I’m going to give it all away and walk the earth and starve myself to death in serenity” Standard Jain Shtick to ranting about “Come on boys, #^*%ing kill those Muslim %^&*$#%^#@ers!”
Well, eventually that one burned itself out.
Only two outcomes for the head of steam building up in the US: Massive Stalinist authoritarian stomp down crushes both teams, or it goes off and has to burn itself out. There will be no magic unicorn walk back from the brink.
physicsguy:
> The battle for the schools was lost about 15-20 years ago. Bill Ayers set the process in motion so that the left took over the Ed schools and departments.
20 years ago was 2001. The battle was lost at least 40 years ago, and likely more like 60 years ago. Taking over the academies really did poison the whole well of society, because the entire engine of modern society flows from credentialization.
The Covid-19 epidemic has been instructive in this regard, because even though most of the people who are Mask-Skeptical / Vaccine-Skeptical are better informed than Mask-Advocating / Vaccine-Advocating, and in many cases their analysis can demonstrate more rigor than so-called medical experts, the only thing that matters is being Among the Anointed Few as a “Public Health Official.”
Critical Race Theory is unexceptional in my view.
Yes, Critical Race Theory is racist, it’s an educational theory that’s explicitly teaching anti-White hatred based on myopic readings of the present & past. However, CRT is nothing new. Affirmative Action and other types of approved, legal anti-White discrimination have been around for decades.
Even if people mobilize against Critical Race Theory those people aren’t going to stop and they aren’t going to go away. Anti-White hatred is a real industry, my employer has a dedicated position specifically geared towards discriminating against White Men. When we receive resumes, they are always carefully pre-screened by the HR department so that we only see the diversity-approved candidates. What do you suppose the chances are fair-minded Americans mobilize against the actual, real systemic anti-White discrimination enshrined in Affirmative Action policies?
https://waterfire.org/about/board-of-directors/barbara-mullen/
The person responsible for this travesty in Providence is this creature. How much you wanna bet her familiarity with American history (as opposed to Ed school blather) is approximately zero?
BTW, the Providence Public Schools assiduously conceals the name of the superintendant on their website.
^^^ What kind of a Sheeple would permit their sworn racial enemies to set their educational policies?
I’d guess that most who buy into the slavery as America’s “Original Sin” premise are secular, by their logic there is no objective criteria for such a concept, but only cultural – which changes over time – and therefore man made. A secular religion, social progressivism is; and in this form, Wokeism.
@ Legitimacy: Even in med school admissions higher preference is given to URMs (Under Represented Minority). For example, if you ask a physician who is advises pre-med students on where to apply based on their numbers, he’ll say this: an AA (African-American) who gets a 513 MCAT score (a couple points below national average) with a 3.8 science GPA is encouraged to apply to top 20 schools as well as matches and safeties. In comparison, a white or Asian applicant with a 513 MCAT and same science GPA is said that a top 20 school is a “reach” and to mainly focus on schools that range from mid-tier, lower ranking and DO programs.
Reason being? A black who has a 513 MCAT and 3.8 sGPA are rare, where only 10% or so black premed applicants have those numbers.
Of course, this method has been touched upon by the Harvard-Asian admission scandal where it was deemed totally acceptable for URMs (read: blacks, Hispanics, and Native Americans/Indians/Whatever) with lower scores and less impressive packets to be admitted over minorities who tend to overachieve (Asians, Indians, ME) and whites.
I know two Hispanics that were admitted with below average ACT scores and, at best, unimpressive applications, to our state flagship which considered one of the better universities in the country. Both graduated on time, so within four years, but their career trajectory is so painful mediocre where one can say that the university on their resume probably didn’t help at all. What they achieved so far could’ve been achieved by anyone who went to the any in-state directional school. This is not to target Hispanics. This is to say that innately mediocre people without much talent will remain mediocre. I know of Hispanics who have scored well beyond the national ACT range, have amazing applications, and have gone on to fulfill their potential as one would think of a person with that base. A white or Asian applicant with below average stats and same applicant profile wouldn’t have been accepted unless they had a connection to the university.
“People are tribal.”
Indeed; however, the great IDEA AND GOAL of the USA was to DE-TRIBALIZE people. Or try to.
To UNITE them under a superior and transcendent CREDO… (“To crown thy good….”—even if somewhere, someone snorts….)
“e pluribus unum” — as much as possible. (But of course, Yankees fans and Mets fans STILL hated(!) each other. Ditto for Chisox and Cubs fans, and Yankees and Red Sox fans, etc.—Oh, if only such was the extent of the “hatred”….)
Our “moral betters” are currently tryting to RE-TRIBALIZE us.
Mustn’t allow them to do it….
“Bill Ayers set the process in motion so that the left took over the Ed schools and departments. Once they had those under control, they very carefully, and subtly, started the curriculum change to begin pumping out leftists teachers. Saw it in my own college where in a faculty meeting 17 years ago I protested some new courses being proposed by the Ed dept. I was told they were benign courses and I was overreacting. 95% of graduates of Ed for the last 15-20 years are now committed leftists. ” – physicsguy
See Ammo Grrrll’s latest post on the same process in a different arena.
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2021/07/thoughts-from-the-ammo-line-384.php
“Ammo Grrrll poses the question WHAT ON EARTH HAPPENED AND HOW DID WE GET HERE?”
It’s all in the Book of Mormon, including the division into tribes.
That did not end well.
2 Nephi 28:21 And others will he pacify, and lull them away into carnal security, that they will say: All is well in Zion; yea, Zion prospereth, all is well—and thus the devil cheateth their souls, and leadeth them away carefully down to hell.
Another bit of evidence, by which anecdotes become data.
https://notthebee.com/article/k-12-educators-in-oregon-attend-an-anti-bias-education-that-challenges-teachers-to-push-back-against-and-subvert-crt-bans-in-schools
‘the great IDEA AND GOAL of the USA was to DE-TRIBALIZE people’
This ^^^
Watch what they do, not what they say.
Now, not to trespass on n.n.’s territory – but is anyone surprised that this originates with people who support abortion?
They HATE children.
And if they can’t kill them in the womb, they will destroy their souls.
They are agents of Satan and they Hate, Hate, Hate, Children.
@Molly+Brown
When I read your comment this line from the movie Overboard popped into my head.
“Edith Mintz: But darling, if you have a baby, you won’t be the baby anymore.”
You are right about the hate of children, I think it is, at least somewhat, based on massive jealousy when they think of no longer being the center of their own universe.
neo on July 14, 2021 at 5:47 pm said:
No idea? I have some reasonable idea. And the grandchildren of today’s liberals would include the grandchildren of today’s liberal baby boomers.
Now you have really stepped into it. You have brought up matters that are important but that cannot be properly discussed here.
The passing answer to the first question is potentially a purely secular one if we wish it to be. And the answer is “It depends.” And if you ask, “Upon what?” the answer to that is “It depends, too”.
As an example, the most comical answer put forth as a “reason” for caring by Atheist plus types, is “Empathy”, which reduces to, “Just because I happen to be ‘wired’ that way, and think that I would approve of the outcome”. The proper response to which is ” So effen what? ”
As for the second question, regarding praying for the good and the moral (and possibly spiritual) redemption of the damnable?
All I have to say at this moment [not asking “Pray to Whom?”, or “Exactly why?”] is : ‘Neo, I’m surprised at you.’ LOL
As an aside, this all reminds me somewhat – in a vague way – of the situation with that cloud of pious Christian fan-boys Ed Feser has attracted – as opposed to those of us who appreciate his work because we largely largely with the implications of his analyses regarding the redounding effects of scientistic reductions on the reducers themselves.
These others though, the sincere ones, who sometimes come off as junior Franciscans in-training or something, continually walk into the line of “his side’s” return fire – with stuff about how the Catholic A-T types and their intellectual allies should “be better than that” and hope for the conversion of the atheist dweeb types, rather than engage in throwing the moral acids of nominalism right back into their infantile androgynous faces in the spirit of joyous no-holds barred secular retaliation.
A shrug for the tome. Just doesn’t matter. He doesn’t care. He’s counting agnostics that dance on pins. He’s got his.
For: “because we largely largely ”
read instead, “because we largely agree”
You don’t have to respond to this, om. I feel you deserve some time off from your work of unrelenting vigilance.
DNW on July 15, 2021 at 7:01 pm “… as a “reason” for caring by Atheist plus types, is “Empathy”, … So effen what? ”
If empathy (or is it really sympathy?) is an inherent (i.e., genetically determined) human psychological characteristic (or at least an inclination), it seems to have been an adaptation aiding humanoid survival for at least 50,000 to 800,000 years. I hope that counts for something. However, there may also be a Christendom related cultural overlay, as members of Western civilization, that may be difficult to sift out of our feelings.
DNW:
Brevity and clarity are hard
in writing, even more so for a philosopher.
Are you the hallway monitor now?
DNW:
Besides Ed Feser Catholic and non-Catholic Christian theology-philosophy nerds, I don’t think anyone here knows much of anything in which you’re referring to.
For those that aren’t aware, “A-T” stands for Aristotelian-Thomistic.