Craftsmanship is more than skill. It is a disposition, a state of mind, and a stance toward the world. The crafted object is idea and spirit made manifest. Robinson Crusoe was the craftsman par excellence. No one has more vividly described the inner world of the craftsman than Daniel DeFoe in his classic tale of the shipwrecked man on his island. Crusoe cured his solitude. He cured it with manual effort and small acts of creation. The most radically isolated of men, he lived in peace. 

Here is DeFoe on Crusoe’s work to make an umbrella:

“After this I spent a great deal of Time and Pains to make me an Umbrella. I was indeed in great want of one; I had seen them made in the Brasils, where they are very useful in the great Heats which are there. And I felt the Heats every jot as great here, and greater too, being nearer the Equinox; besides, as I was oblig’d to be much abroad, it was a most useful thing to me, as well for the Rain as for the Heats. I took a world of Pains at it and was a great while before I could make anything likely to hold; nay, after I thought I had hit the Way, I spoil’d two or three before I made one to my Mind; but at last I made one that answered indifferently well: The main difficulty I found was to make it to let down. (more…)

In an excellent essay at Upstate Conservative, Thomas F. Bertonneau explains why ‘gnostic’ is an appropriate label for today’s liberal. As defined by Eric Voegelin, gnosticism stands for religious, and profoundly anti-spiritual, political radicalism. No other word encompasses this toxic combination of religious fervor and existential disappointment. Bertonneau writes:

The term “liberal,” like the term “change,” lends itself rather more to mendacious abuse than to just employment, especially when adopted as a label by the Left, which likes to hide its havoc-making program of transforming the un-transformable beneath the “L-word’s” ointment-like blandness. That the term “liberal” had long since devolved into something meaningless or misleading struck Voegelin already in the 1960s as a hindrance to transparent discourse.

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Kristor writes at VFR:

It seems to me that when Darwinians express awe or reverence for nature, they are not so much dishonest as inconsistent. Honestly and straightforwardly carried through to their logical conclusions, their principles make a mockery of such feelings. Yet they cannot help having these feelings that they do have. They have these feelings because it is bliss to be alive, bliss to exist; it is bliss to know, and so to know is to love, to adore, and willy nilly to worship. (more…)

The blogger Justin at Truth Shall Set You Free  argues that Walt Disney’s The Little Mermaid is a perfect introduction to female psychology for young boys. He writes:

… The Little Mermaid contains everything you need to know to understand women. It is exactly the movie you would want to show your sons, and make sure they fully understand its lessons. Which may seem odd at first, because it is usually identified as a girl movie, being, in fact, one of Disney’s big five Princess Movies.

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Reader Larry B. asks this question:

Who suffers more: a perfect being in an imperfect world, an imperfect being in a perfect world, or an imperfect being in an imperfect world? 

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N.W. writes:

I’ve often wondered how one can take joy in a thing which the one who made it took no joy in making. For instance, which of these two toys would a child prefer to be given: 

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Before the 1972 Oakland A’s hit the field, it was rare to see baseball players with beards or moustaches. The A’s brought a whole new look, one that continues in various forms to this day.

Team owner Charlie Finley offered a $300 prize to the player who could grow the most interesting facial hair and held “Moustache Day” at the park, offering free admission to anyone with a moustache. (Hey, it was the seventies.)  Rollie Fingers, shown below, won the prize. The fact that the A’s went on to win three World Series didn’t hurt their look.

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Apropos of the recent discussions of beards and men, I was wondering why so few men in the 40s and 50s had facial hair. The reason was obvious, but I didn’t see it.

P.W. writes:

One of the main reasons that beards fell out of favor in the 20th Century was for military reasons, especially during the World War I years and beyond. 

This is because of the invention of poison/nerve gas. Men with beards and a lot of facial hair (mustaches, etc) are not able to obtain an adequate seal on their gas-mask, thus beards were abandoned first by the military so that their gas-masks would work correctly. Beards were discarded by the military for purely practical reasons and that trend then trickled out in to the general populace. 

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In a review at Frontpage Magazine of Precious, a new Lee Daniels film about a black welfare mother, Kidist Paulos Asrat writes:

At one time, black Americans had the edifying art of Negro spirituals, infused with religion, with which to escape the trappings of undignified lives. Now they have mediocre films and stories that moralize, but fail to inspire. If Daniels had let Mary sing “Motherless Child,” instead of performing her grotesque confessional, the magnificent spiritual would have transcended her grievance.

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A return to traditional family values may sound nice, but it makes no sense economically. The world has changed. We can no longer afford many children; women must devote themselves to work; and institutions must take over child-rearing.

This is the common objection to any proposals for restoring the traditional family. But it is a myth. In fact, the opposite is true. We cannot afford to go on as we are.

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  A Coast Guard cutter in Guantánomo Bay rocked back and forth when the earthquake in Haiti struck even though the epicenter was 200 miles away. The scale of the disaster is unimaginable. My heart and prayers go out to all Haitians.

OLIVE CHANCELLOR, the bluestocking feminist in Henry James’s The Bostonians, is a classic gnostic, if one draws on the definition of Eric Voegelin. “It was the usual things of life that filled her with silent rage; which was natural enough, inasmuch as, to her vision, almost everything that was usual was iniquitous.” Olive dreams of martyrdom and, as Thomas Bertonneau pointed out in the previous thread, she appears to view herself as a descendent of Hypatia, the Neo-Platonist scholar in early fifth century A.D., whom a Christian mob murdered during the burning of the famous Musaeon, or Library, at Alexandria. The gnostic is radically dissatisfied with the world at large and nevertheless retains hope that it can be changed. If that means going down in flames, as Olive does in her own way, that is the price to pay.

Lawrence Auster writes:

Your summation of the six characteristics of the gnostic is good. I am excited to see people picking up on the recent discussions and trying to bring gnosticism into ordinary usage as an accessible concept and analytical tool which can help us understand so many contemporary belief systems.

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Miss Birdseye is a delightful character in Henry James’s novel The Bostonians. Or let’s say the elderly activist and irrepressible humanitarian would be delightful if she weren’t so vividly and painfully real. I have known Miss Birdseye in various young and old incarnations, and perhaps you have too. The problem with this woman is that she is fundamentally decent. She is just so blind to human nature. She is lost, astray in her grandiose fantasies of rescuing the dispossessed and fanatically prejudiced against her own people. Here is a description of her early in the book:

She was a little old lady, with an enormous head; that was the first thing Ransom noticed – the vast, fair, protruberant, candid, ungarnished brow, surmounting a pair of weak, kind, tired-looking eyes, and ineffectually balanced in the rear by a cap which had the air of falling backward, and which Miss Birdseye suddenly felt for with unsuccesful irrelevant movements. (more…)

An article in the University of Maryland’s Philosophy and Public Policy Quarterly argues the evils of homeschooling. It states:

The husbands and wives in these families feel themselves to be under a religious compulsion to have large families, a homebound and submissive wife and mother who is responsible for the schooling of the children, and only one breadwinner. These families are not living in romantic, rural, self-sufficient farmhouses; they are in trailer parks, 1,000 square foot homes, houses owned by relatives, and some, on tarps in fields or parking lots.

Izzy Lyman offers an excellent rebuttal at the website Big Journalism.

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  According to this fascinating glimpse into the subject of male facial hair and presidential politics, only five U.S. presidents have worn full beards, supporting the argument by one commenter that while facial hair may be for frontiersmen, hippies and prophets, it is essentially un-American. However, when one takes into consideration mustaches and mutton chops, the claim becomes more dubious. Nevertheless, there has not been a bearded presidential candidate since 1916 and the last man with facial hair to win the presidency was Taft in 1908. The 1912 election marked a turning point as it was the first time a candidate with facial hair was defeated since 1856. Nicholas Whyte writes: The last bearded man to run for the Presidency was Charles Evan Hughes, the Republican candidate narrowly defeated by Woodrow Wilson in 1916. It is said that Hughes "grew his famous beard in 1890 in the interest of efficiency - to save trips to the barber." Theodore Roosevelt, reconciled with the Republican Party, unenthusiastically campaigned for Hughes whom he called "Wilson with whiskers."  

Tammy writes:

A friend directed me to your blog today and I am so glad she did. I decided to drop you a note and let you know how much I enjoyed it. After reading your current post, I clicked on your first entry in your Featured Posts list, “Why We Must Discriminate.” My first thought while reading it was, “Wow, this is a very brave woman to even touch this subject in a public blog.”

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The Bostonians, by Henry James
A Thinking Housewife Book Club Selection

Before there were pick up artists, dark lords of singles bars and beta men studying the fine points of female psychology, there was Basil Ransom, a man who knew how to conquer and reform a feminist.

That’s depressing when you think about it. One hundred and twenty five years ago next month, the first installment of one of the most perceptive books ever written about the cultural decline and fall of Western women, the Henry James novel The Bostonians, was serialized in a magazine. Thirty-five years before female suffrage and long before the birth control pill was in stock, James saw it all. He foresaw the catastrophic shriveling up of the feminine life force into a strained caricature of masculinity. He knew Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem before they ever drew a breath. He could have written the manifesto for NOW (with more eloquence) and delivered Nancy Pelosi’s first speech as Speaker of the House. He warned the world. And no one listened.

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Michael Hegel writes:

I recently discovered your blog and must commend you for not covering day-to-day politics but instead taking the time to address the more interesting social questions that actually impact our daily lives. I can’t say beards are a hot topic, but as your readers appear to have some preference for the look, I’d like to offer a contrary and perhaps ridiculously principled defense of the clean-shaven, Roman way.

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