"Body Worlds"

Heard about the "Body Worlds" exhibit, in which actual eviscerated and dissected human bodies are turned into a plastic-like substance, then posed and exhibited for museum crowds? It's here in Dallas now, and I asked two smart guys to go see it and write their opinions for the section I edit.

In his pro-exhibit essay, Dr. Daniel Foster, a member of the president's Bioethics Council, says that "Body Worlds" could inspire in viewers a sense of wonder at the complexity of the human body. Excerpt:

As a physician, I examine living bodies almost every day. I also know much about the body at the molecular level from my own research and study. Yet I came away from the exhibit thinking it unique and quite wonderful. There are not many experiences that provide education about the body and how it sustains life; awe at the marvel of that body; thoughts about serious things like health, mortality and death; and, perhaps, now and again, a near-religious experience.

In his anti-exhibit essay, Thomas Hibbs, a Catholic philosopher and professor of ethics and culture at Baylor, says "Body Worlds" is a kind of pornography masquerading as pedagogy:

Let's be honest: The draw of Body Worlds is not its promise to instruct the masses on how the human body looks and functions underneath the skin. We could do that with very sophisticated artificial models, but it's unlikely such an exhibit would cause much of a sensation, or (therefore) be an attraction.

No, the exhibit's equivocation about "real bodies" discloses its real agenda: to present flayed, disemboweled and deconstructed humans, while using a pedagogical and pseudo-scientific rationale to disarm moral squeamishness.

...Merely asserting that one is engaging in the laudatory practice of overcoming taboos about the proper use of dead bodies does not make it, in fact, laudatory. One might equally claim that hard-core pornography can educate viewers about sex by reducing sex to the manipulation of body parts stripped of any larger human significance.

The problem with death in our culture is not that we have taboos about it, but that we lack a rich language for articulating the experience and its meaning. It's hard to see how Body Worlds will help solve that problem. Indeed, what is on display is not the mystery of death, but the reduction of bodies to inert plasticized parts displayed for viewers – a pornography of the dead human body.

Regular readers should have no doubt about where I stand on the matter. But both essays are worth reading, and discussing.