"An anti-democratic love of beauty and power"

I've been intrigued by the growth of a culture of cosmetic surgery in both the U.S. and South Korea, as this post mentions.  In both countries there is rapidly increasing demand for these services, and more doctors are switching from actual medical specialties to enhancing appearances.  But individual explanations for *why* they are doing so are totally divergent.  In the U.S., it's all about the ethics of authenticity: "I am not using these injectables to look 25," one user insists. "I don't want to be 25. I just want to look like me."

In Korea, self-explanation focuses on convergence to a norm:

"They want to make their faces just like the Korean stars', and they know that the Korean plastic surgeons are most skilled at building these faces," said Kim, who added that his business has been growing by about 30 percent a year since 2000.

The pressure is intense: "A survey here this year found that 80 percent of women older than 18 say they feel they need cosmetic surgery, and about half said they have had such surgery at least once." 

Of course, our MTV pioneered "I want a famous face," so perhaps I shouldn't delve too far into "Chrysanthemum & the Sword" style analysis of cultural divergence. (Though Roger Alford's Think No Evil: Korean Values in a Era of Globalization certainly makes it tempting.)  Rather, I'd like to skirt the Weberian verstehen tradition of asking people to make sense of their experience from a first-person perspective.

So what's really going on here?  Here's a nice Durkheimian take on anomie -driven appearance-enhancement from Blaine Harden's article:

As social bonds weaken, physical appearance has become more important to personal happiness and professional success, according to Ayami Noritake, who is researching plastic surgery here as part of her doctoral degree in gender studies at Australian National University in Canberra.

I see these points, but can we dig a little deeper? My own work has focused on an Ellulian perspective on plastic surgery: the way in which we become the tools of our tools, first creating methods of enhancing appearance and then being startled when their prevalence starts disadvantaging those who don't embrace them.  From a pure policy perspective, one might toy with the idea of extending "blind auditions," where people interview for jobs behind screens in order to limit the tyranny of appearance in the marketplace.

But perhaps that tyranny is an ineliminable part of our souls, as Anthony Kronman suggests in this provocative excerpt from a forthcoming book on the humanities:

[M]uch of poetry is motivated by an anti-democratic love of beauty and power. . . . [T]hese ideas and experiences are suspect from the standpoint of liberal values. None represents the "right" kind of diversity. None is suitable as a basis for political life, and hence -- here is the crucial step -- none is suitable (respectable, acceptable, honorable) as a basis for personal life either. None, in the end, can perform any useful function other than as an illustration of the confused and intolerant views of those who had the misfortune to be born before the dawning of the light.

Kronman urges us to broaden our horizons, to make room in the educational process for considering the "soldier who values honor above equality, the poet who believes that beauty is more important than justice, or the thinker who regards with disinterest or contempt the concerns of political life." 

But at least when it comes to "beauty over justice," I think our society provides ample illustration of that value.  The new celebristocracy provides ready-made models of that good life sung by 21st century troubadours.   National honor appears to be doing pretty well, too.  And it seems like the "thinker[s] who regard[] with disinterest or contempt the concerns of political life" are exactly the people he's ostensibly criticizing.

In any event, I think Kronman is a deeply wise man whose book The Lost Lawyer is a classic work of jurisprudence. I look forward to reading the rest of his upcoming book as I try to understand the medical profession's growing culture of enhancement--a culture clearly driven by "an anti-democratic love of beauty and power."

Hat Tip: Mike Madison.

Comments

[Daniel Goldberg]

Fascinating. However, I do tend to think that it is exceedingly difficult to draw any clear boundary between therapy and enhancement, in large part because if we (as we should) reject the mind-body distinction, many "enhancements" may be profoundly therapeutic.

[Frank]

Well, I'm not all that much in favor of the triumph of that variety of the therapeutic (to give a shout-out to Philip Rieff).

But seriously, I have to work harder to delineate that boundary, I know. Interestingly, in the PArens collection one essay described how public health systems determined when someone's appearance was so abnormal as to merit state assistance.