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Cultural Values Summary
Note: this
summarizes the colonial family culture of our nation.
Puritan New England
Order - order that "preserves the whole"; individual order
but with institutional violence; little or no separation between Church and
State.
freedom - "ordered liberty"; conceived in
terms of collective, not individual liberty; "liberty maintained and
exercised in a way of subjection to authority." ; perfect freedom to do
what is right; a collective obligation of the-community to protect individual
members from the "tyranny of circumstance."
Power -town meetings whose object was to build
consensus. Hierarchy in society was determined by age, estate and reputation
respectively. Characterized by use of fundamental documents. Conscious attempt
to have a "middling" of society by eliminating both the top and bottom
tiers in society.
Virginia Tidewater Royalists
order -hierarchical, legitimized violence between superiors
and inferiors; sense of civic responsibility based on classic Roman and Greek
republicanism; emphasis on secular ethics.
freedom - hegemonic liberty: freedom to do what
your superiors knew was right; "noblesse oblige"; exaggerated sense of
personal liberties.
power -local and regional power structures dominated by
self?perpetuating oligarchies. Democratic among those who had the requisite
amount of property.
Pennsylvanian Quakers
order -a condition of peace founded on the Golden Rule and the doctrine
of the "light within"; considered by others to be radically permissive
freedom -reciprocal liberty; exceptionally strong belief
in "liberty of conscience"; actively supported ethnic and cultural
pluralism power -institutionalized dissent, organized parties, political
pluralism, commission government, light taxes and minimal gov't.
Backcountry Borderers
order -"retributive justice"; each individual was the guardian
of his own interests.
freedom -"natural liberty"; radical
libertarianism, minimal gov't and the right of armed resistance to authority in
all cases which infringed liberty. Highly individualist; "elbow room"
power -little formal structure; improvisational; characterized by
personal and charismatic leadership; anti-aristocratic; a sort of tribal
chieftain in a meritocratic warrior ethic.
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Peggy
Rowe's
