Beyond Feelings - Vincent Ruggiero.original_ [27]
So great were the shock and fear that greeted Darwin's theory, in fact, that almost three quarters of a century after it was first advance, a teacher named Scopes in a small Tennessee town could be brought to trial for teaching evolution in his biology class. His trial pitted two famous American against each other – the prosecutor, a gifted orator, William Jennings Bryan; the defender, a brilliant lawyer, Clarence Darrow. When their historic confrontation was over, Scopes paid merely a token fine, and the teaching of the theory of evolution was vindicated. Soon after that, the law he had been tried under was repealed.
Yet the resistance to change did not pass to easily. Half a century later a poll of high school students in the same Tennessee town revealed that 75 percent of them still interpreted the biblical story of creation literally, and many townspeople believed Darwin's theory causes "corruption, lust, immorality, greed… drug addiction, war, and atrocious acts of genocide."2
To this day, despite their previous failure, supporters of "creation science" around the country are working to get equal time for their view in the nation's classrooms.
The task of guarding the established ways of viewing things has always been regarded by many as a sacred task. This is true even in primitive cultures. For example, the Trobriand Islanders considered sexual success a praiseworthy accomplishment. The man who was unusually successful with women was much admired and honored. Yet it was assumed that such success would be achieved only by the favored social class. If a common islander became too successful, he was resented. As one observer, Robert K. Merton, suggested, this reaction was not due to any conspiracy on the part of the Trobriand chiefs: "It is merely that the chiefs had been indoctrinated with an appreciation of the proper order of things, and saw it as their heavy burden to enforced the mediocrity of others."3
Of course, it isn't always panic that makes us cling to established patterns. The man in Robert Frost's poem "Mending Wall" kept repairing the wall between his land and his neighbor's not because there was still any good purpose in doing so but only because his father had done so before him. Consider this case of uncritical dependence on past ways. A girl was told by her mother, "Never put a hat on a table or a coat on a bed." She accepted the direction and followed it faithfully for years. One day, many years later, she repeated the direction to her own teenage daughter, and the daughter asked, "Why?" The woman realized that she had never been curious enough to ask her own mother. Her curiosity at long last aroused, she asked her mother (by then in her eighties). The mother replied, "Because when I was a little girl some neighbor children were infested with lice and my mother explained I should never put a hat on a table or a coat on a bed." Thus the woman had spent her entire adult life following a rule she had been taught without once wondering about its purpose or validity.4
At times a tradition may seem relatively unimportant and yet in a subtle way hold tremendous significance for people. In the late 1960s, for instance, the tendency of many young people