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We Need a Reckoning on the 1619 Project By Peter Wood
February 04, 2025

We Need a Reckoning on the 1619 Project

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Editor's Note

Like all revolutionary movements, the destructive Left cannot achieve its goals without convincing enough people that the old order is so evil it can only be destroyed. This is the purpose served by Critical Race Theory and, more specifically, by the New York Times’ 1619 Project, which cast slavery as the foundational principle of the United States. The project’s educational component has been hugely influential but, as Peter Wood points out, the actual numbers on its reach are unclear and even conflicting. Wood argues that a clear accounting of the propaganda’s reach in American schools will be a necessary, if difficult, step in any course correction.

The New York Times launched its torpedo at American history on August 18, 2019. I speak, of course, of “The 1619 Project,” which first emerged as a special edition of the newspaper’s Sunday magazine. In the ensuing five years and five months, the 1619 Project outgrew its original 100 pages of newsprint. It became a somber 50 second television commercial on February 9, 2020, that aired during the Academy Awards and featured the singer, song-writer, and actress Janelle Monáe. In 2021, it ballooned into a 590-page hardback book, supertitled “A New Origin Story.” In 2023, Hulu turned it into a six-part “docu-series” with Oprah Winfrey as executive producer.  

During those five-plus years, the New York Times ran thousands of print advertisements for the “project.” It substantively revised the magazine text without any public acknowledgment, which means unless you saved the original copy, you can’t know exactly what it said. 

One thing it said, on the inside back cover, was that the 1619 Project was on its way to the nation’s schools as a curriculum, including “a lesson plan that introduces this issue [of the magazine], summaries of the articles, an index of historical terms used, suggested activities that engage students creatively and intellectually and opportunities to connect with New York Times journalists featured in this issue.” 

That declaration came from the Pulitzer Center, a nonprofit founded in 2006 that attempts to amplify journalism that it judges to have broad public importance. It describes itself as “the venue for the world’s most innovative and consequential reporting, with journalism as the key element for mobilizing society through audience engagement strategies.” In other words, the Pulitzer Center is an activist organization that eschews the old journalistic ideal of providing the information people need to decide for themselves. It instead seeks to “mobilize” the public. And, as it happens, the reporting it selects for this mobilization is entirely of a progressive character.

Before the New York Times unleashed the 1619 Project, it entered into an agreement with the Pulitzer Center, in which the center became the Times’ “educational partner” for the project.  The center assumed the task of translating the 1619 Project into “programs for K-12 Classrooms, out-of-school time programs, and higher education programs.”  

Most of what we now know about how the 1619 Project has entered into the nation’s schools comes from the Pulitzer Center’s reports on its success. These have to be read judiciously. The Pulitzer Center doesn’t want to disappoint the New York Times, but it also has to guard against playing into the hands of critics, including elected officials who oppose the use of the 1619 Project in public schools. In that light, the Pulitzer Center takes care to report only the facts and figures that come directly from its own efforts to market the project. The readiness of teachers and schools to adopt the project on their own goes unrecorded.

The most recent report from the Pulitzer Center comes from an October 2024 “learning webinar,” but it is mostly anecdotal — though richly informative nonetheless. One of the participants oversaw the implementation of the 1619 curriculum in Buffalo as part of the Buffalo School District’s “Emancipation Curriculum.” She brought the 1619 Project to “60 school buildings, reaching over 30,000 students.” 

Another speaker, Theresa Maughan, was New Jersey’s 2022 Teacher of the Year, and the leading figure in the East Orange STEM Academy’s 1619 Project program called “Teaching to Transgress.” She takes pride in having brought science teachers into the fold by focusing on “race, medicine, and health equity.” Those were indeed part of the original 1619 Project. 

Shamia Truitt-Martin, a social studies teacher in the Carrington Middle School in Durham, North Carolina, “partners with North Carolina State University on the iScholar initiative where she develops culturally-informed STEM lesson plans with an interdisciplinary focus.” Her focus was on developing lessons on “Durham’s Black Wall Street and its place in American history.” Her testimonial began, “It all started because of our wonderful 1619 Project book that we love immensely. Right? We basically read it inside and out and knew everything about it.”

The focus of these participants was on the success of the 1619 Project in their own schools and districts, which appears considerable, but this tells us nothing about the national picture. The Pulitzer Center’s third quarter report offers one clue: It claims that its efforts to promote the 1619 Project “directly impacted 28,000+ teachers and students and created curricular resources that reached over 1.5 million people.” This appears under a headline “Reaching more than 2,800 students and teachers,” which I trust is a typo. But there is something else odd about the claim: Fatima Morrell says that she reached 30,000 students in Buffalo alone. Does the Pulitzer Center mean that it recruited 28,000 teachers?

Elsewhere, the Pulitzer Center throws up other numbers. In “Five Years of Teaching The 1619 Project,” we learn that the Center has built a “network of 541 educator partners” and has “reached 25,000 students in pre-K-12th Grade and 2,500 adult learners.” And: “We have facilitated 203 events and workshops attended by over 15,000 people, and published over 100 curricular materials on our award-winning 1619education.org website, which has been viewed over 400,000 times by people in all 50 states and Washington, D.C.” Back in 2020, the Pulitzer Center claimed that the Project was being used in more than 4,500 schools across the nation — that is, roughly 1 out of every 25 U.S. schools. 

Given the massive investments made in promoting the project, these seem like paltry numbers.  The hardback book version of the 1619 Project sold 45,000 copies in the second week after it was released in December 2021. The TV mini-series attracted more than 1.6 million viewers on May 31, 2023. These are cultural footprints much larger than the Pulitzer Center’s shoes. 

Of course, adult readers and television audiences may reflect dynamics that differ sharply from what happens in school districts and among teachers. But the 1619 Project also comes with the significant propulsion of the nation’s leading teachers union, the National Education Association, which has touted it from the start and continues to promote it as a resource “to support racial justice in the classroom.” This just doesn’t compute with only 541 “education partners” reaching 25,000 students over five years. Those numbers must represent the Pulitzer Center’s focus on a narrow count. Tens of thousands of teachers could be teaching 1619 Project-derived lesson plans without having registered with the Pulitzer Center as “education partners.”

But apparently no one knows, and there is no easy way to find out. I would say that there are abundant indications that the 1619 Project has greater traction in the nation’s schools than the Pulitzer Center’s data suggest. In fall 2020, the education journalist Naomi Schaefer Riley asked around at schools in Chicago, Baltimore, and Concord, Massachusetts, where she found teachers enthusiastically embracing it. I have had similar experiences whenever I’ve talked to teachers. Not every teacher endorses it, but almost every teacher knows about it and feels free to draw on it.

So we are left with a yawning question about how deeply the 1619 Project has penetrated our schools. When it comes to colleges and universities, however, there is much less room for doubt.  The membership of the American Historical Associations rose up in fury in 2022 when its president, James Sweet, offered some timid criticism of the project for trying too hard to read the past through the prism of the present. Sweet issued a groveling apology.

I am writing in this essay about how deeply the 1619 Project has penetrated schools, not colleges, and I have paid the barest attention to the project’s many critics. At least four books have been published that aim at discrediting the 1619 Project: in order of publication, Phillip W. Magness’s The 1619 Project: A Critique; my 1620: A Critical Response to the 1619 Project; David North and Thomas Mackaman’s The New York Times’ 1619 Project and the Racialist Falsification of History; and Mary Grabar’s Debunking the 1619 Project: Exposing the Plan to Divide America. North and Mackaman’s book collects a series of essays that first appeared on The World Socialist website in fall 2020, rewritten by a variety of eminent historians.

So the 1619 Project has not gone unattended by people who have paid serious attention to the facts. Nor has it gone unnoticed by state and national political leaders. Perhaps most noteworthy was President Trump’s response in September 2020, when he announced he was forming a “1776 Commission” to produce a better curriculum. That venture came to a meagre result because time ran out before President Biden took office, and Biden promptly abolished the Commission. Still, the sense that the 1619 Project posed a serious danger to the quality of American history and social studies education remained in the public mind, at least among conservatives.

The faults in the 1619 Project are many and egregious. The shortest summary is that it collapses all of American history into a tale of racial oppression. Some of its claims are factually correct; many are not. But the overall claim is egregiously false, and the alarm it has occasioned arises principally from the authors’ aim of teaching this false narrative to American school-age children.

Critics of all races,  from Trumpian conservatives to Trotskyite socialists, have raised their voices, but seemingly to little effect. In 2021, legislators in Arkansas, Iowa, South Dakota, Texas, Missouri, Florida, and Mississippi introduced bills to ban the teaching of the 1619 Project in public schools. The Arkansas bill failed. Iowa passed a bill banning the teaching of “divisive concepts,” which did not explicitly mention the 1619 Project. South Dakota’s governor issued an executive order banning the state’s department of education from applying for federal grants tied to critical race theory. The Texas bill, which more broadly attacked “critical race theory,” passed. It said, “A teacher may not require an understanding of the 1619 Project.” The Missouri bill stalled and continues to be debated. In Florida, the state board of education banned the 1619 Project in 2021, and the legislature passed the Stop WOKE Act in 2022, effectively banning the 1619 Project. In Mississippi the bill failed.

This is to say that public opposition to teaching the 1619 Project in schools has so far not yielded much in the way of results. Perhaps it has been eclipsed by concern over the active promotion of transgenderism in the schools. But repairing schools is a terribly difficult problem for those bent on reform. The unions stand in the way. The traditional autonomy of teachers stands in the way. School boards, usually aligned with the teachers unions, stand in the way. The progressive ideology, driven by schools of education, stands in the way. Above all, the opacity of American schools stands in the way. It is very difficult for parents, citizens, or political leaders to find out just what teachers are teaching.

The Covid epidemic briefly poked a hole in the screen that hides the curriculum from the outside world. That fed the initial rebellion against the 1619 Project. But with the return to in-person instruction, the curtain has once again descended.  

One thing the U.S. Department of Education could do is impose strict reporting requirements on schools to report what texts and teaching materials they use to teach history and social studies. As it is, no one knows how deeply institutionalized the 1619 Project has become. 

But we should find out. In some sense, the future of our nation may depend on it.

Authors

Peter Wood

Peter Wood is the president of the National Association of Scholars. A former professor of anthropology and college provost, he is the author of several books about American culture, including Diversity: The Invention of a Concept (2003) and Wrath: America Enraged (2021). He is the editor in chief of the journal Academic

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Signs of Hope

Good day all,

      My thoughts on the Holy Father's homily in bold print.  I see many signs of hopefulness in his homily and I am praying greater clarity and unity from Pope Leo.  The world will reject his clarity since it likes spiritual ambiguity and moral relativism, but I am hoping for a less divisive Pope than Francis.  - Fr. Tom

Dear Brother Cardinals, Brother Bishops and Priests, Distinguished Authorities and Members of the Diplomatic Corps, and those who traveled here for the Jubilee of Confraternities, Brothers and Sisters:

I greet all of you with a heart full of gratitude at the beginning of the ministry that has been entrusted to me. St. Augustine wrote: “Lord, you have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you” (Confessions, I: 1,1).

In these days, we have experienced intense emotions. The death of Pope Francis filled our hearts with sadness. In those difficult hours, we felt like the crowds that the Gospel says were “like sheep without a shepherd” (Matthew 9:36). Yet on Easter Sunday, we received his final blessing and, in the light of the Resurrection, we experienced the days that followed in the certainty that the Lord never abandons his people, but gathers them when they are scattered and guards them “as a shepherd guards his flock” (Jeremiah 31:10).

In this spirit of faith, the College of Cardinals met for the conclave. Coming from different backgrounds and experiences, we placed in God’s hands our desire to elect the new Successor of Peter, the Bishop of Rome, a shepherd capable of preserving the rich heritage of the Christian faith and, at the same time, looking to the future, in order to confront the questions, concerns and challenges of today’s world.   I never got the impression that Pope Francis considered it a rich heritage, but often just an interpretation and exposition of the faith for a given time and culture.  I am probably too harsh on the past Pope, but he was not one known for clarity.  I am hoping that the use of the word heritage indicates a more positive few of the past as a treasury of faith to be preserved rather than a liability to be dismissed.

Accompanied by your prayers, we could feel the working of the Holy Spirit, who was able to bring us into harmony, like musical instruments, so that our heartstrings could vibrate in a single melody. I was chosen, without any merit of my own, and now, with fear and trembling, I come to you as a brother, who desires to be the servant of your faith and your joy, walking with you on the path of God’s love, for he wants us all to be united in one family. The Holy Father uses phrase from St. Clement of Rome (Pope #3) and seems to borrow some additional imagery from St. Augustine like he did in his opening remarks.

Love and unity: These are the two dimensions of the mission entrusted to Peter by Jesus. We see this in today’s Gospel, which takes us to the Sea of Galilee, where Jesus began the mission he received from the Father: to be a “fisher” of humanity in order to draw it up from the waters of evil and death. Walking along the shore, he had called Peter and the other first disciples to be, like him, “fishers of men.” 

Now, after the Resurrection, it is up to them to carry on this mission, to cast their nets again and again, to bring the hope of the Gospel into the “waters” of the world, to sail the seas of life so that all may experience God’s embrace. Pope Benedict used the image of sailing the seas of life at the dawn of the digital age after his election as Pope.  I suspect Pope Francis might have as well, but when you stop paying too much attention you miss little details.  I prayed for Pope Francis his entire pontificate, but I didn’t give him much active attention.

How can Peter carry out this task? The Gospel tells us that it is possible only because his own life was touched by the infinite and unconditional love of God, even in the hour of his failure and denial. For this reason, when Jesus addresses Peter, the Gospel uses the Greek verb agapáo, which refers to the love that God has for us, to the offering of himself without reserve and without calculation. Whereas the verb used in Peter’s response describes the love of friendship that we have for one another.

Consequently, when Jesus asks Peter, “Simon, son of John, do you love me more than these?” (John 21:16), he is referring to the love of the Father. It is as if Jesus said to him, “Only if you have known and experienced this love of God, which never fails, will you be able to feed my lambs. Only in the love of God the Father will you be able to love your brothers and sisters with that same ‘more,’ that is, by offering your life for your brothers and sisters.”

Peter is thus entrusted with the task of “loving more” and giving his life for the flock. The ministry of Peter is distinguished precisely by this self-sacrificing love, because the Church of Rome presides in charity, and its true authority is the charity of Christ. It is never a question of capturing others by force, by religious propaganda, or by means of power. Instead, it is always and only a question of loving as Jesus did.  The 21st chapter of John is so rich. It is one of my favorite passages to reflect upon.  It is how God heals us of our sins.  It is both a healing moment and a recommissioning of sorts.  Jesus can’t have Peter moping through life as a the denier, Jesus is calling him to shepherd the flock.

The Apostle Peter himself tells us that Jesus “is the stone that was rejected by you, the builders, and has become the cornerstone” (Acts 4:11). Moreover, if the rock is Christ, Peter must shepherd the flock without ever yielding to the temptation to be an autocrat, lording it over those entrusted to him (cf. 1 Peter 5:3). On the contrary, he is called to serve the faith of his brothers and sisters and to walk alongside them, for all of us are “living stones” (1 Peter 2:5), called through our baptism to build God’s house in fraternal communion, in the harmony of the Spirit, in the coexistence of diversity. In the words of St. Augustine: “The Church consists of all those who are in harmony with their
brothers and sisters and who love their neighbour” (Sermons 359, 9).

Brothers and sisters, I would like that our first great desire be for a united Church, a sign of unity and communion, which becomes a leaven for a reconciled world. In our time, we still see too much discord, too many wounds caused by hatred, violence, prejudice, the fear of difference, and an economic paradigm that exploits the Earth’s resources and marginalizes the poorest. 

For our part, we want to be a small leaven of unity, communion and fraternity within the world. We want to say to the world, with humility and joy: Look to Christ! Come closer to him! Welcome his word that enlightens and consoles! Listen to his offer of love and become his one family: In the one Christ, we are one. This is the path to follow together, among ourselves, but also with our sister Christian churches, with those who follow other religious paths, with those who are searching for God, with all women and men of goodwill, in order to build a new world where peace reigns! Look to Christ! Pope Leo goes right into the invitation to listen and reflect upon the word of God. The invitation is unity through conversion.

This is the missionary spirit that must animate us; not closing ourselves off in our small groups, nor feeling superior to the world. We are called to offer God’s love to everyone, in order to achieve that unity that does not cancel out differences but values the personal history of each person and the social and religious culture of every people. The church is always missionary. Conversion to Christ does not annihilate all differences, but rather is a process of refinement, keeping what can be of service to the Gospel and losing what is opposed to it or hinders it. Getting rid of sin is just the beginning, putting on the mind and heart of Christ is the challenge.  I pray for our new Holy Father that he may be faithful, courageous and genuinely kind.

Brothers and sisters, this is the hour for love! The heart of the Gospel is the love of God that makes us brothers and sisters. With my predecessor Leo XIII, we can ask ourselves today: If this criterion “were to prevail in the world, would not every conflict cease and peace return?” (Rerum Novarum, 21).

With the light and the strength of the Holy Spirit, let us build a Church founded on God’s love, a sign of unity, a missionary Church that opens its arms to the world, proclaims the word, allows itself to be made “restless” by history, and becomes a leaven of harmony for humanity. Together, as one people, as brothers and sisters, let us walk towards God and love one another. Surprisingly short homily, bishops can often go on forever.

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Practice Gratitude - A reprint and expanded post
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Good Morning Digital Neighbors! Happy Wednesday Friends & Refugees, Early Birds and Later Dayers, Conversants and Lurkers, Phamily & Misfits, ADD Irregulars, WSN Curators, and Curmudgeons!  Today's reflection is one of my favorite ones from the past.  David Whyte's wonderful book Consolations - The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words.  It is a treasure trove of reflection on the gift of language and the power of words.  His reflection on gratitude is outstanding.

GRATITUDE is not a passive response to something we have been given; gratitude arises from paying attention, from being awake in the presence of everything that lives within and without us. Gratitude is not necessarily something that is shown after the event; it is the deep, a priori state of attention that shows we understand and are equal to the gifted nature of life.

Gratitude is the understanding that many millions of things come together and live together and mesh together and breathe together in order for us to take even one more breath of air, that the underlying gift of life and incarnation as a living, participating human being is a privilege, that we are miraculously part of something, rather than nothing. Even if that something is temporarily pain or despair, we inhabit a living world, with real faces, real voices, laughter, the colour blue, the green of the fields, the freshness of a cold wind, or the tawny hue of a winter landscape.

To see the full, miraculous essentiality of the colour blue is to be grateful with no necessity for a word of thanks. To see fully the beauty of a daughter’s face is to be fully grateful without having to seek a God to thank. To sit among friends and strangers, hearing many voices, strange opinions; to intuit inner lives beneath surface lives, to inhabit many worlds at once in this world, to be a someone amongst all other someones, and therefore to make a conversation without saying a word, is to deepen our sense of presence and therefore our natural sense of thankfulness that everything happens both with us and without us, that we are participant and witness all at once.

Thankfulness finds its full measure in generosity of presence, both through participation and witness. We sit at the table as part of every other person’s world while making our own world without will or effort; this is what is extraordinary and gifted, this is the essence of gratefulness, seeing to the heart of privilege. Thanksgiving happens when our sense of presence meets all other presences. Being unappreciative might mean we are simply not paying attention.

Paying attention- LOVE IT. One of my most frequent reminders in my preaching. We get more out of life by paying attention and not simply existing. a priori state of attention that shows we understand and are equal to the gifted nature of life. The gifted nature of life- hold on to that thought, the gifted nature of life makes all the difference in what we think about our story.

that the underlying gift of life and incarnation as a living, participating human being is a privilege - EVERY SINGLE PERSON IS PRIVILEGED - some more than others, but every single one of us. A personal philosophy built on the dialectic of privilege & victimology will lead to legions of unhappy and resentful souls, and not because they lack privilege, but because they lack the appreciation of the gift of living. To focus on what you lack will never help you discover what you possess and what is unique about you. To be a someone amongst all other someones - welcome to LIFE, Digital Neighbor. 😁 The people I love the most and care for the least are still someone amongst someones. It is not always easy to remember that when thinking ill of those you care for the least.

We sit at the table as part of every other person’s world while making our own world without will or effort; this is what is extraordinary and gifted, this is the essence of gratefulness, seeing to the heart of privilege. Thanksgiving happens when our sense of presence meets all other presences. Amen.

Thank you all for allowing me to sit and share at your table.  I have been so blessed by the people God or fate has placed on my life path and I have been delighted that these digital paths have opened up my horizon so wonderfully.  I greatly appreciate the personal sharing, the cultural commentary, the political ranting and wrangling, and above all the shared laughter and memes.

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Gratitude for freedom
Gratitude changes everything

Easter Monday – Gratitude for Freedom

Good morning, Digital Neighbors!  Happy Monday and Blessed Easter Friends to all you good souls on Locals and Substack.   Yesterday ended up being a catch-up day after Mass and brunch with my sister’s family. It was a great day to celebrate the joy of the Risen Lord.   I caught up on some sleep and some of the issues I missed while away from the time drain that was my typical internet habit.  I am sure I will return to some active consumption, hopefully with a more intentional attitude than I had before my Lenten media abstinence.

I caught up on some of the Douglas Murray – Dave Smith JRE and much of the debate that followed on it.  I have read a couple of Douglas Murray books, and I watched many hours of his interviews and appreciate his common sense and insightful commentary.   The internet, as divisive and drama driven as it I always is, seems to have fallen into the Dave Smith is dunce and Douglas is right or Murray is an elitist and credentialist who doesn’t believe in free speech.

I will still have to take some time before I have a more comprehensive understanding of this, but I tend to tilt towards free speech absolutism in the arena of public discourse and debate.  I am a fan of self-determined groups deciding among themselves the degree of free speech that they want to share within their group.  After all it is a voluntary group, and one is free to leave the group if you disagree.  If you don’t have freedom of association then you have even bigger problems than lack of freedom of speech. *cough* *cough* All the proponents of groupthink and herd feel demand conformity of thought or silence of opinion.

I have added this clip from the Darkhorse Podcast which has always remained one of my favorites for honest and critical thought.

I think Brett and Heather are very fair minded in this clip.  Can one admit they are ever wrong, mistaken or ignorant on a topic?   Brett and Heather fall into the circle of based conversationalists like Gad Saad, Scott Adams, and our gracious hosts at RR and Phetasy. Each has their own style but are all directionally pointed towards freedom rather than compulsion.  There are many others, but Scott is an adamant critic of calling out the arrogance of the experts. Some experts are reliable because they keep asking questions and offering critical thought. They are not only knowledgeable about their subject, but they are also capable of self-criticism and humble admission of error. It makes one more credible, not damaged goods. If someone has repeated and consistent errors most of us will stop listening to them. Some experts are not reliable because their commitment is to their preconceived and pre-committed ideas.  Such idealogues can be charismatic and convincing, but in the end, they champion a cause and not the honest discussion of the topic. It happens in every field. It used to just be religious institutions that compelled thought and behavior for centuries, now it can be any group with real or perceived authority and power. Just ask the Enemedia and Academia.

Arriving at approximate truths in public discourse takes time, is messy and requires some humility to admit when you went down the wrong path and committed too much energy to being in error.  I don’t know that most of humanity can embrace such raw honesty and humility. Imagine spending years on a particular cause to find out you are wrong? It is too easy to think that one has wasted their time and effort, but if you are honestly seeking is it ever a waste of time?  I don’t think so.   5 years down the road and I am happy that I asked questions during Covid. It opened the door to more questions and patience.  

·       I appreciate experts, but I don’t take their opinions as Gospel.

·       I appreciate questions asked in a critical manner.

·       No one and no idea are above question or criticism.

·       Yes, even dumbasses can ask critical questions of experts and should not be dismissed because they are a dumbass.  One can acknowledge their history of error, incompetency or ignorance, but if they have an honest question, its dismissal reveals the dishonesty of the expert.

·       Experts can be blind to their bias just like any of us. Experts can lie just like any of us.  Experts can be joyfully mistaken.

·       Arriving at the shores of understanding and approximate truth/testable reality takes time.  I am suspicious of anyone demanding immediate compulsion of thought and subsequent behavior.

Sorry, more than I wanted to write on a Monday morning.  Thank you if you took the time to real. Comment always welcome.  

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