One of the speakers in The Symposium, Plato’s great dialogue on the characteristics of love, makes the point that what is “done well and rightly” is beautiful, and what is not rightly done is ugly. The proposition has more predictive power than we’d like to admit. Elite urban parenting, for example? Hideous. This makes no sense, given the resources involved, but so it is.
Be honest: you’re filled with uneasy loathing at the sight of expensively dressed adults bored together on the morning playground, or by the sound of the patient-voice as gentle-parenting Mommy explains something, or when you cross paths with the attractive woman virtuously biking along with her cute kid in a big child seat on the front of the bike, as I did in Brooklyn this week. What’s repulsive is the combination of upper-middle-class safety-ism and faux-spontaneity: kids rocking their supposed individuality with wild hair, a year-round Halloween costume or Daddy’s favorite-band T-shirt.
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