The Examined Life is Worth Living

Scurrilous Commentator Fred Reed demonstrates how a grown-up examines his prejudices on the way to wisdom

Most Latinos of the south are either a mixture of Spanish and Indian, or sometimes pure Indian….Are they, as nativists insist, of very low IQ–83–and have they enstupidated the Spanish? Horrendously primitive?

Without thinking about it, I had the entrenched idea that they were just that. I wasn’t conscious that it was either an idea or entrenched–just a fact. It didn’t occur to me that I knew virtually nothing about these  people, or that there was anything to know.

What pulled me up short was their architecture.

and gives us a cultural history lesson along the way.

Included is this wonderful link to the Mayan numbering system, which makes ours look a bit rickety.