You may approach the bench. Tiny shares the deep cultural values of Anglo-American tradition as described in J.C. Bennett's The Angloshere Challenge: Individualism, rule of paw and an emphasis on freedom.
"Unlike most of the grand blueprints of the past that have sought to redefine the world, Bennett’s is conspicuously anti-utopian and, indeed, decidedly conservative," writes Australian historian Keith Windschuttle in his NR review [via Milt's File] of James C. Bennett's The Anglosphere Challenge: Why the English-Speaking Nations Will Lead the Way in the Twenty-First Century:
The Anglosphere he envisages would be a “network commonwealth” of English-speaking nations based on the existing shared values of Anglo-American cultural and political traditions. His concept offers the prospect not of radical change but of a reaffirmation of deep cultural roots. Politically, it is diametrically opposed to the two major movements that, since the demise of socialism, have absorbed the Western intellectual Left: radical multiculturalism at home and bureaucratic internationalism abroad.
Bennett has constructed his own thesis of the Anglosphere out of this Anglo-Protestant historical inheritance. “It is our core values and characteristics that have made us dynamic,” he writes, “and it is to those values that we must return”: individualism, rule of law, the honoring of covenants, and an emphasis on freedom.
Bennett wants to distinguish the Anglosphere from other models of international alliance that he believes have outlived their usefulness. The principal one is the concept of “the West”: the European-descended countries that constituted Western civilization. The widening gulf between continental Europe and the U.S. shows that the concept of the West is already anachronistic.
Windschuttle questions Bennett's prediction of the imminent demise of "the West" -- "it is most probable that the bureaucratic centralism to which Europe is now committed will not be permanent" -- and predicts the influence of those values we hold most dear will spread far beyond Britain and its former colonies:
Whatever the outcome, The Anglosphere Challenge is one of the important books of our time. It establishes the centrality of British culture to the economic, technological, and political prospects of the world. The ancient traditions of the British -- individual rights and responsibilities, minimal government, and a strong civil society -- constitute the most reliable formula for a future that works. Even if that future turns out to be less confined to countries of British descent than Bennett predicts, it is highly likely still to be dominated by their cultural values and traditions.
Who knows? Those values and traditions that first grew in British soil might take root in unexpected places not enervated -- as many Brits themselves may be -- by the entitlement mindset of recent decades (We're trying to find an excellent article on that topic that we read the other day. 'Will post a link if we can find it.)
Update: Speaking of reliable formulae that work, the 57th Carnival of the Cats is up at The Oubliette, "a little place of forgetting. A small, windowless room where someone is locked away, forgotten, left to go mad." Nowadays, of course, even windowless rooms can have virtual windows on the world. Be sure to check out "the uneasy truce between Noah and Maleficent."
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