The Substance of Style, Part III

The notion that we have moved into an age of aesthetics has a number of applications, from child psychology to municipal politics to the accuracy of the national economic statistics.

I'll stick with child psychology today, and I'll wait until tomorrow to remind you that Postrel is, after all, a libertarian author and there is a politics to everything she writes, even when (as for some chapters in this book) it is not at all in the forefront).

Child psychology. She observed a father telling her daughter that she shouldn't be so concerned with looks, that there are superficial and meaningless. She thinks this bad advice.

"When a father tells his teenage daughter that looks are 'meaningless,' he is not assuring her that she is attractive or will become so over time. He is saying that she's loved and valued for her other traits, regardless of how she looks -- a loving but irrelevant affirmation. Her looks do mean something important to her. They don't match her sense of who she is or would like to be. By changing the subject her father is inadvertently agreeing that she looks bad, exacerbating her sense of failure. We do not respond similarly to teenagers who wish they were stronger, more musical, or better in school, we coach them on how to build on their natural gifts. Yet somehow we believe that looks are different, that appearance must be worth either everything or nothing."

My idea of "child psychology:" is dated, and was chiefly cognitive when I could claim to have ideas on the subject at all. (That is Piaget above.) So I await reader comment and enlightenment on whether Postrel has a point here.

Something explicitly political and libertarian tomorrow.

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