Our culture has developed restraints and rewards for maturity. Robinson’s letter to those on the Mayflower noted that as important as not “giving offense” was not taking it. We know the litigious mind often the goal is less money than moral power. We hear the tattle tale sister, the battles over space and goods of pre-schoolers. We’ve sublimated the healthy desire for justice into our judicial system and have grown out of the petty battles of childhood. Maturity comes when we move responsibility into ourselves as often and much as possible. What others think or have or do isn’t important the choices we make to build our lives is.
The great gift of our tradition is individualized responsibility. (Look at how Winthrop or Bradford accepted material hierarchies but consistently saw souls as equal; a community bound by the ligaments of love was likely to have unevenly proportioned parts, but the toe was no less a part of the whole than the heart.) Individualized responsibility also comes from our belief in the universal spirit influencing much else in our country’s history. A century or two passed and these beliefs were give a form more political than theological and defined as inalienable rights.
usefully countered the desire in British mill towns to send ships and supplies to the Confederacy. Any political group that abdicates that ground has left themselves vulnerable.