Groups seem most provincial exactly when convinced they share universal opinion

Evidence

The feeling of Latin Christians was so strongly that they were supported by the weight of world opinion and history. They believed that what they rejected was peculiar and alien to all nations, to the pagan philosophers and to the Holy Scriptures; obviously offensive to good taste and to reason. It is exactly in their conviction that they shared a universal opinion that they seem most provincial. It was natural, but polemically profitless, that they could not imagine Scriptural stories in forms other than those in which Scriptures recounted them. They could not think themselves, even for purposes of argument, into a position that was not based upon Scripture. The Qur’an became the object of their ridicule because it was unfamiliar, and the effort to see that that kind of ridicule was applicable by an enemy to their own Scripture was beyond them. They were tied to their own tradition and unable to look outside it. — Norman Daniel, Islam and the West, 444

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: A dense, generalizable insight: the strength of conviction in universality is precisely the mark of cultural provincialism — applies well beyond medieval polemics to any ideology that mistakes its own tradition for self-evident reason.
• SEED: An essay angle: how every age mistakes its own historically-situated assumptions for universal self-evident truth — the medieval Latins as a mirror for modern certainties.
• XREF: Resonates with the reader’s standing interest in how groups mistake their own tradition for universal reason; parallel with national identity and the ‘bias of communication’ material.