glyph 525: anglosphere toolkit, james c. bennett, albion's seedlings, iain murray, compression of cultural evolution, reuse of old ideas to make new openspace to host the lives of explorers, vortex beowulf

"What the USA did was to take the patterns and toolkit the British used to create their society, and to simplify, universalize, and generalize it until it became a versatile template that could quickly convert expanses of raw land into new, functioning self-governing communities without a thousand years of cultural evolution, and a concept of citizenship that could take European peasant communities who had been dumbly following orders for a thousand years, and turn them within a generation into citizens, jurors, legislators, militiamen and volunteers, vestrymen and congregation-members, entrepreneurs, and self-actualized persons -- the whole Anglosphere toolkit -- all in a deliberate manner that the British never thought they would need, but now might do well to look at.

"Americans have in many ways been congratulating themselves for the wrong things. The truths of the Declaration were hardly novel or shocking to the Englishmen who read them; rather, they saw them as a Whig five-finger exercise that had been boilerplate since 1688. What was shocking was that the Americans were throwing their own ideals back in their face."

James C. Bennett, July 8, 2006

More of Bennett's work:
Albion's Seedlings: http://anglosphere.com/weblog (active 2004 through 2007)
Explorers Foundation's vortex Anglosphere

https://explorersfoundation.org/glyphery/525.html
October 21, 2012; edited/updated February 20, 2021