Bound feet

I saw an old lady being helped across the road the other day. She wasn't very steady on her feet. Few of her age -- she must have been in her eighties or nineties -- would be. But what caught my eye was her bound feet, still neatly tucked into white socks and little black shoes.

It is a rare sight nowadays. She must have been among the last of the generation, as the practice was banned after the Chinese revolution of 1911. I asked around the office yesterday, and most of those under 30 have never seen anyone with bound feet in their entire lives. Never even thought about it.

How we forget!

	Bound feet, with and without shoe

For centuries, upper-class Chinese culture required their women to have bound feet. It was their idea of beauty. Ideally, their legs should have tapered to mere points when it reached the ground. (Funny how classical ballet had the same idea!) Short of amputation, the next best method of achieving that, was to take a girl before puberty, and start binding her feet tightly with lengths of cloth. The bindings would be tightened by degrees over many years, and basically, the feet would be deformed into something like half the size of a normal adult foot.

It was very painful for the girl, and at the end of the day, she was a cripple. It made it difficult for her to keep her balance, and quite impossible to take large strides, which might have been the whole point, for the Chinese idea of feminine grace was to have their women glide along in imperceptibly tiny steps, supported by maid-servants.

So as not to lose their shape and splay out, the women had to keep their feet tightly bound all through their adult lives. Whenever they removed the dressings to wash their feet, there would often be a terrible smell from accumulated sweat, and a pretty horrible sight to behold, of twisted toes, doubled-over arches and folds of skin festering with fungus and bacteria.

Ah, but how else to make your daughter marriageable?

* * * * *

We live in an age when every now and then, someone decries our loss of our moral compass, and advocate a return to traditional values. With it is a romanticising of the past. I have always considered this to be a dangerous approach.

The past comes whole. Its values, concepts, and practices were based on the way society was stratified, on the information available to them, on the technological limitations they faced. You can't take some element of the past and transplant into the present with all the differences in circumstances. 

Brides who were not virgins on their wedding nights used to be unceremoniously returned to her parents the next morning. You can't do that now, not because we have forgotten how to be unceremonious, nor how to chase people out of the house. You can't do that now because the social framework has changed. Women now have rights and no unmarried woman belongs to her parents like so much property, anymore.

But can't we pick and choose the good points from the past? So out with bound feet, and out with returning non-virgins to their parents. In with filial piety and in with looking after aged parents. But the key operative remains "pick and choose what's applicable and useful to the present". If we are anyway going to select the moral code we want to apply to our community on utilitarian considerations, why limit the picking and choosing to examples from the past? Why not reconstruct our personal and societal values from first principles? Judge our values on their own merits. I would think it more efficient to arrive at moral concepts with the present knowledge of the world, rather than try to wedge in some old ideas with all their associated baggage.

In other words, when we debate morality, it's better to keep references to history out of it. The patina of age is often used to substitute for clarity of thinking.

I guess the main advantage of recycling old values is that they are easier to sell. A custom or injunction that has a few hundred years of history behind it is seen as more authoritative. Add to that our tendency to see the past through rose-tinted glasses, and even some pretty dreadful ideas, like White superiority, Chinese superiority, or Japanese particularism, or for that matter, male machismo, attract a sizable following.

Yet, therein lies the a danger. Getting people to buy an idea because it has history does not promote critical thinking. A society that uses history or tradition as the main justification for its moral code is a society with bound minds, as crippled as those with bound feet.

© Yawning Bread 

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