Now the fevered flag-waving has finally wound down, let’s put the Olympics into perspective – my cat could outrun Mo Farah. This isn’t the delirium of a besotted owner. No, the brutal truth of the matter is that, however many medals we humans award ourselves, in terms of pure physiology the naked ape pales beside our animal brethren. In spite of this, cats don’t rule the world and this is because where we do win gold is our use of tools, which we have been successfully incorporating into the schema of our ineloquent neotenized bodies since before antiquity. Indeed, philosopher Andy Clark argues that homo sapiens are “natural-born cyborgs, factory tweaked and primed so as to be ready to grow into extended cognitive and computational architectures: ones whose systemic boundaries far exceed those of skin and skull.”
Superhuman, the new collection by the Wellcome Trust, is a shrine to such self-augmentation. Its glass cases are crammed with the strange and familiar – a false nose for syphilis suffers that looks like something out a Christmas cracker, dentures made of real teeth, glasses, early dildos, high heels, a leg prosthesis, pills, and many other cunning and bizarre contraptions, which together act as an effective wake-up call to how extensively “enhancements” permeate human existence. Accompanying these artifacts are art, films and academic interviews, which offer a fascinating glimpse into the history of enhancements and raise some crucial questions about how we should react to the approaching acceleration of augmentation.
At times, there is a little too much of this unstructured questioning. A talk by Clinical Neuropsychologist Barbara Sahakian, though otherwise insightful, soon dissolves into a slightly condescending barrage of ‘what do you think’? And by the end of exhibit being called upon so regularly for your opinion starts to appear less like open-mindedness and more like perspirative desperation at a lack of substantive answers.
The biggest disappointment, however, was the absence of interiority. Contemporary philosophers of embodiment tend to distinguish between the body as an object (this being the body of externality and organs as studied by medicine) and the lived body (that forms the locus of an individual’s experiences, existence and selfhood). Though enhancements can be directed towards the body as an object, for instance cosmetic surgery (though this does, of course, modulate an individual’s affect towards their own selfhood), it’s the impact upon the lived body, on an individual’s abilities and experiences, that is surely the most appealing facet of human augmentation. After all, comic fans fantasise about being superheroes not for, say, the interesting molecular structure of the Hulk’s muscles, but for the experience and power that having these muscles would entail.
Despite this, the lived body is a silent witness to the exhibit. There was one touching interview with boy with thalidomide impairments, but, as a child of merely five years old, his reflections were incredibly naive. One has to ask why they couldn’t have shown an interview with an insightful and articulate disabled adult like artist Alison Lapper? Unless, of course, you’re averse to giving the differently embodied an equal voice. Perhaps accusations of disablism are too harsh, but there is an awkwardness to a museum collection about body enhancement which invites us to address the topic through objects rather than subjective experiences.
If these omissions are shaming, the talk by philosopher Julian Savulescu is actively terrifying. Savulescu works from the sound speculation that our moral shortcomings could lead to our extinction, and proposes that we use our knowledge of neuroscience and psychology for the “moral enhancement” of humanity. Never mind trying to define the specifics of morality, it’s surely wishful thinking to believe that a society so self-serving that it risks its own existence can be trusted with invasively altering humanity’s in-built morality in a way that’s truly altruistic.
This sort of obstinate blindness to the real dangers of human augmentation pervades Superhuman. For though it goes some way towards addressing the ethics of individuals choosing to enhance, and successfully tackles irrational fears of technology subjugating humanity, no mention was made of how enhancements could be used by humans to subjugate each other. I shivered on reading the exhibit’s projected timeline, which flings out predictions: by 2020 “people from all backgrounds and of all ranges of ability will acquire valuable new knowledge and skills more reliably and quickly”, while by 2030 “the ability to control the genetics of humans, animals and agricultural plants will greatly benefit human welfare; widespread consensus about ethical, legal, and moral issues will be built in the process”. Surely it isn’t merely cynicism that calls this over-optimism? Foucault argues that the body is the primary target for societal control and considered through the prism of history it almost certain that the more radical augmentations on the horizon will only be available to the rich, and occasionally used for oppressive means. As an exhibit organized and funded by a scientific body, Superhuman aims to quash public fears that could dissuade research grants, yet such rose-tinted predictions are at best naive and at worst reprehensible, for blithely ignoring the dangers only increases the likelihood of their coming to being.
It’s this unwillingness to address these darker, deeper and more radical aspects of enhancement that impairs Superhuman. As a collection of curios it can’t be faulted, but as an in-depth exploration of human enhancement, for all its blue-skies talk, it fails to soar to the heights.
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