Primo primi

A booster article on what a great place Austin, Texas is includes this:

This raises troubling questions about these cities. Why is it that progressivism in smaller metros is so often associated with low numbers of African Americans? Can you have a progressive city properly so-called with only a disproportionate handful of African Americans in it? In addition, why has no one called these cities on it?

Most of my replies to these questions are too obvious to print. But they all end in, "Duh?"

Yet I must mention that the use of the phrase "raises troubling questions" reminds me of the nunnish phrase "surface a concern" I used to hear back in the day. And of course, there are the old standbyes, "breaking her silence" and "speaking truth to power."

My primo primi reaction is that I want to backhand the speaker right across the mouth. So is my secundo primi reaction. If the speaker were close by, so would my plane deliberati be.

Medieval moral theology, more psychologically acute than given credit for, distinuished between ethically irrelevant spontaneously arising desires prior to any consent of the will (primo primi), venially sinful desires that are confronted by reflection but whose force overcomes the will (secundo primi) and mortally sinful desires which have been consciously and fully consented to (plane deliberati).

In each of those obnoxious phrases, expressed by either a journalist, a nun, a victim/survivor, or a justice advocate, I hear an assumed backstory of personal innocence and placidity interrupted by the interior call of moral obligation to courageously and disinterestedly confront some otherwise unaddressed evil that disturbs it.

Which is always complete self-aggrandizing BS.

Hence, the itching backhand.


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