by JL Wall

[EDIT: I really need to be better about remembering to sign my posts over here when I first put them up.  For future reference, if they talk about being in Chicago and being Jewish, it's probably me. -- JLW]

I remember when the “Body Worlds” exhibit was in Chicago a few years ago and ads for it were plastered all over the city – there was one night in particular that I couldn’t get away from them (I think I was waiting on a bus) and I couldn’t bear to look at them – not because I thought it was gross, or dirty, or anything like that, but because, even though these were the bodies of “donors,” I felt it was disrespectful to them to ogle the dead body. I’ve always felt those taboos particularly strongly (and, contra Van Hagens, I don’t see anything wrong with that). Anyway, at risk of repeating what’s already been said, we now have this:

A new exhibition featuring preserved dead bodies having sex opened in Berlin on Thursday with critics saying a maverick German anatomist dubbed “Doctor Death” has gone too far this time.

The couple, part of Gunther von Hagens’s exhibition “The Cycle of Life”, is the “low point in his tastelessness”, Michael Braun, culture expert from the conservative CDU party, told AFP.

Von Hagens said his copulating couples show the sexual act in “bracing clarity”.

The exhibits, of four “consenting donors”, are in a separate room accessible only to over-16s.

But it is, in a sense, the inevitable extreme if there’s an insistence on dividing the body and the soul, the worldly and the spiritual, and declaring the former base and unworthy and the latter alone sacred or noble. If we are prisoners in our bodies, why not conquer and imprison the prison itself, to free ourselves, as one might say the name of an incubus to defeat it?

The religious case against it is easier—to point out the role of creature and Creator, to remind one that such subjugation of the body is, in fact, to forget that, in the words of Rabbi Heschel, man “is the knot in which heaven and earth are interlaced”: that the body and the soul are essential to state of being human.

A more secular case is harder, especially for me; I’ve been raised to think that there are just certain things one doesn’t do: that the taboos are there for a reason; that even if there is nothing behind them, they are good for the order and structure and survival of society? That this “liberation” from the bodily prison, the so-called subjugation of the guards is actually the subjugation of the human body to the fruits of human technology—only reinforcing Wendell Berry’s dichotomy between the organic and the mechanical, and that it is a dangerous symptom of the growing dependence on that which cannot be sustained inevitably? That, in other words, we would liberate ourselves from one prison into another? (Are these even truly “secular” anymore?)

I don’t mean to imply that there isn’t a good non-religious case against what I’d term the body’s desecration; but any argument against it must be founded on the belief that there is something unique in mankind. The moment a human being is literally “just another animal,” anything is permitted.

     Filed under: morality, religion, science/tech