Since we’re discussing Romantic individualism, I’ll point to this: John Fund notes that women were turned away from the Cannes Film Festival for the crime of not wearing high heels – even women who couldn’t wear them for medical reasons. Fund helps us see the human suffering involved when people’s selfish desires (in this case, for sexual attractiveness) are manipulated for gain by the powerful, and even those who don’t want to participate find (as at Cannes) that the social system created by the uncontrolled desires of those around them is too rigid to be escaped. NRO’s new web format makes it difficult to cut and paste an excerpt, but it’s worth your time.
The headline on Fund’s piece invokes the legacy of the corset. This reminded me that when Rousseau first conquered me and made me his disciple, one of the things that really impressed me was his fierce attack on corsets, and the other self-tortures of the Paris elite. From this I’ll draw two conclusions: That Romantic individualism, both then and now (Fund points to contemporary examples of RIers who have resisted killer heels) has the resources to expose and shame systems of injustice even in spite of its false religious starting points; and that those who expose and shame systems of suffering and injustice will attract followers. Christians should take notice.
I have that article pulled up in a tab, and was mulling whether to post on it. Great catch, and I think you’re right that this is a worthy example of the rhetorical use of true observations embedded in faulty philosophy. More like this, indeed!
(source: Let Killer Heels Go the Way of the Corset | National Review Online)
(I also agree that NRO’s new format, though “slick,” and less troublesome to load than the creaking format before it, creates some challenges. Most especially, the Corner no longer displays in most of my browsers as a continuous list of recent posts, so effectively I can’t read it anymore.)