THIS IS WRONG

On Friday, November 22, at 11:00 AM I will be at the opening of the exhibit  Body Worlds: Vital at  Boston’s Faneuil Hall Marketplace  holding a sign that says "This is wrong." I hope you will join me. Body Worlds:Vital includes plasticized, real human bodies You will hear a lot of questionable claims about the benefits of seeing this exhibit. I will also call for a boycott of all stores and restaurants in Faneuil Hall Marketplace during this exhibit. There are better ways to attract customers.

How can something be wrong that is claimed to be and may actually be educational, not to mention fascinating and beautiful? We learn from everything we do and see. So these claims cannot justify anything. For example, in Auschwitz, the so-called Nazi doctors kept some of their victims from the gas chamber to perform hideous experiments. It is possible that something was learned, but those experiments were still wrong.

In the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, African-American subjects were not treated for syphilis long after a cure became available in a study that morphed from studying treatment options to studying the course of the untreated disease (without the subjects informed consent). This was wrong, even though something may have been learned.

If you visit this exhibit, you may learn something about the human body. What you are also learning is that it is permissible to plasticize real human bodies, display them in all sorts of poses for the titillation of the public, and allow the public to gawk at them for the price of an admission ticket.

You will learn how companies market something that is wrong by hiding behind claims of education, health, and science. You will learn how companies market something by claiming it has health benefits such as getting people to stop smoking or or refrain from overeating. (We are surrounded by real people dying from smoking and overeating, and don't learn from them.) There is contempt for the public in this kind of marketing. The attitude seems to be that the more outlandish and fantastic the claim, the more likely the public will fall for it.

There are some things that we know, instinctively, to be wrong. For example, it is wrong to commit murder. It is wrong to hurt other people's feelings. And it is wrong to show disrespect to other human beings. It is not necessary, and perhaps not possible to prove that these things are wrong. As the poet Lucebert said, "All things of value are defenseless."

The exhibit is heavily marketed as educational and suitable for schools field trips. These trips are no substitute for actual study which actually takes work. It would be worthwhile to study the marketing of the exhibit, the commercialization of the human body, and medical ethics. The educational marketings purpose is not merely to sell tickets. It is a shameless attempt to use children to lull the public into thinking this is about science and education.

Why is this exhibit wrong? Out of respect for the living, the bodies of the deceased should be treated with respect. By treating our bodies as mere objects like this exhibit does, we cheapen the value of life. As we reduce ourselves to objects, we open ourselves to the attitude that who cares if a few, or a few million, of these objects are damaged or killed. Hitler and Stalin both dehumanized their victims to make their destruction more palatable. The cost to human dignity of this exhibit is incalculable. Is that a price worth paying for things that could be learned just as well by other means? We don't need to see "real" plasticized bodies to know that human beings are complicated and fascinating. In fact we never need real objects to educate ourselves.I am not willing to pay the price. Are you?  Aaron Ginsburg aaron.ginsburg@gmail.com  https://sites.google.com/site/stopbodyworlds/home