America -- the culture that embraces philosophical essentialism.

I've concluded that this is absolutely a problem with American culture.  It's deeply essentialist.   It makes for unwitting anti-intellectualism even when the opposite is intended.   For instance, people will seek to defend "science" against "women", or something like that.  They may not, indeed, express it in exactly those terms, but you can see they attempt to defend hard, masculine, "reason" against what they perceive to be as feminine mystifications or unreason.  And they don't even need to understand anything they have categorized as unreason.   It's not important to do so.  They dismiss it because at a deep level of their minds they have categorized it as womanly and irrelevant.  (I'm thinking of the way Rebecca Watson has been attacked by 'hardline" male pro-science types, for presenting her critique of evolutionary psychology.  The respondents tone is definitely misogynist and dismissive).

So, yeah, that is the culture.  It involves the internalization of a lot of religious precepts without realizing that this is what they are.   I am currently asserting on Facebook that Rush Limbaugh is America's "public intellectual".  That is a joke.  But,  I think he really epitomizes the essentialist tendency, to the extent that even otherwise smart people have elements of his ideology circulating in their  veins!