Status Updates From No Place of Grace: Antimode...

Slow going.

How should a worker approach mere drudgery? Percival Wiksell asked in the Artsman. He should “pull himself together, and, taking the fat with the lean, keep his face lighted and his hand willing”—a proper attitude was the key to true craftsmanship. “Like the sailor we must do the hard work with a song—make prose into poetry by external means.”

Enthusiasm for the work ethic led craft leaders sometimes to ignore Morris’s distinction between “useful work and useless toil.”

Excerpt from: "No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880-1920" by T. J. Jackson Lears. Scribd.
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perfectionism revealed a this-worldly function: men hewed wood not to save themselves, but to increase their professional efficiency. Among advocates of “self-culture,” such secular emphases increased. For educated Americans, perfectionism survived as a habit of mind if not as path to salvation. It sustained the delusion that social problems were entirely soluble through individual moral betterment.”

liberation bred self-doubt and even self-disgust. “You do not know what life means when all the difficulties are removed!” Jane Addams cried as a young woman. “I am simply smothered and sickened with advantages. It is like eating a sweet dessert the first thing in the morning.”

By emphasizing techniques rather than ultimate values, and by encouraging focus on immediate emotional requirements, the therapeutic orientation often left him mired in “morbid introspection.” Personal moral responsibility remained more problematic than ever; neither the mental hygienist’s counsel of restraint nor the mind-curist’s advice to “let go” broke the circle of self-absorption.

The softening of theological rigor had not produced any parallel loosening of the bourgeois morality of self-control. As the code of respectability lost supernatural sanctions, its demands for fastidious conduct seemed more onerous, its contradictory expectations less easy to bear. “

William James wrote that “a man has as many social selves as there are individuals who recognize him and carry an image of him in their mind.”

Excerpt from: "No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880-1920" by T. J. Jackson Lears. Scribd.
This material may be protected by copyright.

Read this book on Scribd: https://www.scribd.com/book/516195439

While the dominant perception of the interdependent urban mar-
ket was that man had broken loose from preindustrial isolation and
poverty, there was a paradoxical underside to official optimism: a
sense that individual causal potency had diminished, a growing
doubt that one could decisively influence one's personal destiny. No place of Grace

One of Emerson’s aphorisms summarized the dilemma of nineteenth-century Economic Man. “Every spirit makes its own house,” he wrote, “but afterwards the house confines the spirit.”

it's good!

Deeply engaging historical writing on a period of time that set the stage for today's crises of consumerism. Hopelessly absorbed in this.