Response to Prof. Miller on “Bodies”

I don’t mean to go on about death. After all, this is supposed to be First Things, not Last Things. But I wanted to add something to Prof. Miller’s post , with which, as far as the Catholic moral philosophy goes, I am in complete agreement. Unlike Miller, I am less worried that the viewing public attends the Bodies exhibit in a sort of perverse, gawking sense of vulgarity, much as moviegoers consistently line up to see films like Freddy vs. Jason (although I acknowledge that this, surely, is part of the attraction¯why else would Hollywood continue to make those movies?).

My concern is essentially twofold. First, I worry about the way in which the Bodies display encourages us to view ourselves as just that: bodies . The funeral liturgy expresses the mysterious way in which a person consists of both body and soul, which are somehow not really two different things but actually inseparable from each other in the fullness of the human person. We thus tend to feel shock when we see dead people displayed in gruesome or unusual ways¯it puts the materiality of the self front and center, with all indication of the soul completely gone. But as I said earlier, it is not necessary that we feel that way. Displays like this encourage us to see the human person as nothing more than the denuded body. Modern science already tells us to see ourselves this way, and this display is an outgrowth of its ethos. It would not be possible without it.

In addition to that, the whimsical/scientific way in which the bodies are displayed discourages us from feeling a sense of awe and reverence at death¯as Allan Bloom said, it is another facet of our attempt to put death to death. The reality of death has always led us to philosophy and religion, to a sense of our own fleeting lives; to moral introspection and repentance; and to faith that, somehow, something about the human spirit outlives it¯something like a soul. This only finally makes sense theologically, and so death points us toward religion.

I wonder if this, at bottom, is the reason for the popularity of the Bodies exhibit and, for that matter, the impetus behind the new sociobiological evangelists. This is something that came to me this spring while taking Steven Pinker’s neurobiology course at Harvard. What, I wondered, would drive someone to spend his life in defense of the proposition that, in effect, we are all just (more or less) very complex IBM computers? The answer became clearer to me while talking with a friend of mine, who said that Steven Pinker had allowed him to "get rid of a lot of BS"¯by which he meant his anxiety about love, meaning, purpose, and sin. If we don’t have souls, and God doesn’t exist, then the entire corpus of human philosophical and religious speculation loses its power. If we never had souls in the first place, then we don’t have to worry about why ours feel so empty. And if God does not exist, then he cannot judge us for our sins. God is replaced by Science, and we are absolved of our guilt.

The problem is, it doesn’t work. Not quite. We can never quite completely believe that our souls are not real, and so we have to work doubly hard to convince ourselves otherwise. And so, the sociobiological evangelists (they even have a church now¯" The Brights ") and its aesthetic outgrowth, Bodies: The Exhibition. For only $24.95, we can go to a brightly lit, "scientific," and "educational" museum and see that, in the end, death has lost its sting. The soul can quite nicely be removed by Dr. von Gunther’s patented plastinization process, and we no longer have to feel anxiety at death. There is no reason to feel awe or reverence, and we do not have to worry our heads about philosophy or religion.

I agree with Claire that the Bodies exhibit is educational. But that, to me, is what is so troubling about it. I think it may very well be a continuance of the sort of Enlightenment education that, by its very nature, robs us of our souls.