Societies absorb new ideas only when those ideas do not threaten core beliefs

Evidence

Both societies and individuals are reluctant to risk adopting such opinions as seem apt to cause major changes in their attitudes. Mediaeval society certainly did not desire any sudden disruption. It was always capable of absorbing new ideas, and in the period with which we have been dealing there was obvious development in the fields of metaphysics and natural science, and in political theory. There was an admirable willingness to admit new ideas from an outside society, but these were not the ideas upon which the beliefs of individuals were consciously based, or those that they most took for granted and would have feared to disturb. The ideas which Islamic religion stated or implied seemed on the contrary liable to destroy many of the theological and moral concepts which Christendom most cherished. — Norman Daniel, Islam and the West, 1397

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the sociology of knowledge and how cognitive defense mechanisms operate at institutional scale, like in the material on why societies resist paradigm shifts. — connects to: Identical scientific ideas can cascade in one country but stall in another — Donald MacKenzie, An Engine, Not a Camera: How Financial…, 1094; Ideas spread only across terrain prepared by prior slow imitation — Ernesto Laclau, On Populist Reason, 117; Social change selects among available ideas rather than dictating belief — Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology,…, 66