Consider a few other examples --apart from the matter of evolution, where religious dogma is clearly at stake-- of this tendency to comprehend reality solely in terms of the pieces and to fail to see the crucial systemic dimension.
From my years of doing talk radio in a traditionalist-conservative area, I can attest that they also tend to think that criminals should be held WHOLLY responsible for their wrong-doing. In their moral judgments, they clearly are not integrating into their understanding the implications of the epidemiological nature of crime. It is clear that people born into a screwed up part of the world are likely to come out more likely screwed up themselves than people developing under more favorable circumstances. Yet the manner in which these people tend to think of moral responsibility affords no weight to the systemic factors in shaping human character and behavior.
And the people from this same traditionalist subculture seem especially prone to buying the argument that the market economy is simply a vehicle for free human choice, with no systemic dynamic of its own. From that purely inside-out, or bottom-up, perspective any intervention in the market to shape is necessarily an impingement on our freedom to choose. They seem to find it difficult, if not impossible, to grasp how, actually, it is only by intervening against the logic of the system that we gain any real choice in what kind of society we’re going to be.
Why that would be, I don't know. I wish I did, for I imagine that the answer to that question would bring into relief some rich and deep dimensions of culture and consciousness. (And I wonder, too, if that's true of traditionalism cross-culturally, or is specific to the form of traditionalism in our country, or in Western civilization.)
It is also, I would bet, an important question. For from what I can tell, the major forces shaping human destiny are governed ultimately less by the minds and communities that constitute our "natural" frame of reference than by the dynamics of larger systems in which we are embedded.
Our only chance to be able truly to CHOOSE our future depends upon our ability to understand the kinds of forces that have historically crippled the ability of human kind to choose its future.
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