Religion

Body Worlds 3 exhibits the hubris of science  

The pursuit of scientific knowledge can never be ethically neutral. It’s alienating by definition 

by Michael Nenonen  

You decide how much it's worth to you:

Last week I visited Body Worlds 3 at Science World. The Body Worlds exhibits are the brainchild of German anatomist Gunther Van Hagens, who uses a process known as plastination to preserve human bodies in a way that the mummifiers of old could only dream about. Body Worlds displays organs and body-sections as well as eviscerated corpses in strange poses. Walking through the exhibit, I saw one corpse balancing on three balls while holding aloft organs plucked from his torso, and another whose genitals had been split open to reveal his urethra’s connection to the head of his penis. I saw heads cracked wide and brains revealed, and a skeleton with eyes intact kneeling at a cross decorated by a human heart. The displays were accompanied by a wealth of medical information. Indeed, the only information they didn’t provide was who these people were. I was reminded of the questions asked by the monster in the 1994 production of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein: “What kind of people is it in which I am comprised? Good people? Bad people?” His creator replies, “Materials. Nothing more.”

Given the conversations I overheard, “materials” is all some of the people visiting the exhibit could see. What else could explain the willingness of so many to bring their pre-schoolers to such a macabre venue? The place was overflowing with children who inspected these mutilated corpses with amused detachment. Will they at least show the dead the courtesy of having a few nightmares on their behalf?

Body Worlds reveals something about us that goes deeper than viscera. It shows how easily we alienate the knower from the known, and thereby treat things that should demand our reverential contemplation as nothing more than desacralized spectacles. According to historian Theodore Roszak, author of Where the Wasteland Ends: Politics and Transcendence in Post-Industrial Society (Doubleday, 1972), this process of desacralization has a great deal to do with the dominance of scientific thought in the modern world.

Roszak uses the writings of the 16th Century philosopher Francis Bacon to illuminate the basic features of scientific knowledge. Roszak says that for Bacon, scientific knowledge “is that which yields a steady increase of human control over the environment, which grows incrementally and systematically as time passes, and which is forthcoming upon deliberate exercise of the will to know.”

Science is distinguished from other forms of knowledge by its reliance upon an objectifying methodology. This methodology creates knowledge that, once acquired, can then be distilled and packaged for ready consumption by other people. Thus, in a few semesters undergraduates can obtain scientific knowledge that took people like Newton and Einstein many years of labour to accumulate, and can then use that knowledge to propel their own research into areas these geniuses never considered. The same can’t be said, for example, of aesthetic or ethical knowledge. Regardless of how many times we read War and Peace, we simply won’t absorb the full measure of Tolstoy’s vision in a way that would allow us to further the work that he began. Tolstoy’s writings will remain his own in a way that Stephen Hawkings’ writings won’t. Furthermore, because of the power it offers, scientific knowledge is now prized far more than other ways of knowing, which are in turn treated like sentimental indulgences.

There is, however, a price to be paid. If the way we pursue knowledge shapes our psychological outlook, then the pursuit of scientific knowledge inevitably reinforces our capacity for alienation. As Roszak writes, “Here we have the secret of the New Philosophy, the insight that Bacon and his disciples dimly perceived through their often nebulous discussion of a novum organum. Essentially, theirs was the early search for a philosophy and an ethic of alienation. They had found the great truth: break faith with the environment, establish between yourself and it the alienative dichotomy called objectivity, and you will surely gain power. Then nothing—no sense of fellowship or personal intimacy or strong belonging—will bar your access to the delicate mysteries of man and nature. Nothing will inhibit your ability to manipulate and exploit. This is the same power we gain over people when we refuse to honour their claim to respect, to compassion, to love. They become for us mere things on which we exercise power. Between ourselves and them there is no commerce of the feelings, no exchange of sentiment or empathy. We know them only as a behavioural surface. And knowing them only in that way, we can then remark coolly how interesting it is that they make these sounds of protest, anguish, or despair; we can stand back and note this quaint behaviour . . . the throb in the voice, the tear in the eye, the spasm of pain. But we make certain that their distress strikes no sympathetic chord in us—for we are only detached observers, and our project requires us to go no further than to record, to measure, to probe further, and to get on with the assigned job.”

Roszak doesn’t exaggerate the sadism of scientific consciousness. It’s allowed scientists to conduct torturous experiments on uncounted millions of animals whose minds are as vulnerable as ours to anguish, horror, and despair. Far from being driven by necessity, the vast majority of these experiments produce no new information at all, and of the few that do, most provide only trivia that’s useless for anything besides the advancement of the researcher’s career. The Marquis de Sade was the first to philosophize about the unrestrained application of the scientific gaze to the human body, and what de Sade only wrote about, scientists like those in Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany have eagerly carried out. Anthropologists, psychologists, and sociologists have long sold their services to governments and corporations interested in manipulating human behaviour for the sake of power and profit. Many of the threats our world faces today, such as global climate change, environmental toxicity, and the possibility of biological, nuclear, and chemical warfare are direct consequences of scientific hubris. Regardless of the benefits it’s brought our species, science has a hell of a lot to answer for.

Scientists often dismiss such criticisms by saying that science is itself ethically neutral, like a knife that can be used either for surgery or murder. This argument overlooks the fact that because it shapes our consciousness, science is inherently ethically charged. To the degree that it compromises our capacity for empathic connection with the world around us, science has decidedly negative ethical consequences.

True, scientists will talk about the “wonder” they feel when exploring the infinite complexity of their subject matter. But, as Roszak points out, they “appropriate the word for another kind of experience, for the sense of achievement that one derives from intricate measurements precisely made, from quantities and relationships given a grandiose order, from subjecting the once uncontrollable to human manipulation, from translating the once incomprehensible into a mathematical and mechanistic imagery . . . and perhaps too . . . from reducing the formerly marvellous to a ‘nothing but.’ Such satisfactions are not the same as those of artistic or visionary imagination.”

While precious few of us are scientifically literate, nearly all of us have internalized the psychological framework that makes science possible. Regardless of our scientific ignorance, we know enough to deaden the empathic connections between ourselves and what we behold. As the toddlers at Body Worlds demonstrate, we’re never too young to start dying.

You decide how much it's worth to you: