To the Journal editor:

To make some sense of this unfathomably complex world, our perceptual systems evolved to rapidly clump together similar sensory input into categories. This automatic, gut-level process confers some momentary survival advantage. It also gives rise to countless false associations which are the root of many superstitions and primitive and, most frequently, incorrect guesses.

People evolved to survive in a world that is fraught with danger. Quick guesses may help at first, but some folks never seem to get around to sorting out the actual nature of those previous threats and amend those initial associations.

To make things more difficult, our ability to produce language allows us to spread our own wrong-headed ideas just as easily as more carefully reckoned ones. In other words, it’s just as easy to say something stupid as it is to express something that’s carefully reasoned.

Sloppy thinking based on the automatic clumping of new experiences only breeds even more sloppy future thinking and behavior. We all fall victim to some degree of inherited sloppy group thinking from time-to-time. Most frequently, we unconsciously adopt the categories used by others that we choose to associate with without testing their actual utility or veracity; that’s what viral memes that spread via Facebook are all about.

Enter social media and cable news. What used to be barroom and coffee klatch “you know what I heard-isms” become the daily heady swill of the various electronic media. Politicians, never shy to generate favorable buzz at any cost, swoop in to win our hearts and votes by echoing our own half-truths back at us.

The whole “Critical Race Theory” brouhaha is an example of a fabricated solution in search of a nonexistent problem. If you don’t want your kids to learn in school that there are some undeniable continuing debilitating effects from 400 years of chattel slavery and successive waves of Jim Crow, then tell those snooty teachers: Military victories, yes! Holocaust, maybe! Racism, no!

Ultimately, each of us is responsible for clinging to the comfortable at the expense of endeavoring to find more enduring truth by opening our hearts and minds to the experience of all of our fellow Americans and all of God’s children. Or we can belly up to the bar and slobber about the good old days.

The very future of this American experiment is at stake.

WILLIAM KENNEDY

Houghton