I'd like to tie together the posters that discussed soap and enhancements in sports and industry. I think both of them show how a culturally accepted norm can suddenly jump to the wrong side of the fence and be considered culturally unacceptable.
I'll start with soap. We've all heard the wonderful stories of people bathing once a year and the disgusting conditions in which some of our earliest surgeons worked in. The soap group gave us all sorts of great historical background on this and certainly made me appreciate the cleaner world in which we live now. In this case the scientific discovery of germs and all the bad things they can do led to a cultural revolution. Before we knew all the creepy things crawling on every surface could make us sick there weren't companies like Clorox and PineSol and the list goes on and on. Through the effects of semantic contagion this knowledge spread like wildfire. Advertisements for these products talked about the good American housewife using this cleaner, that detergent, and as time goes on we see advertisements depicting all the nasty germs crawling on a lego block as the unsuspecting toddler goes and grabs it, effectively spreading it to his friends and family. Unfortunately, science has begun to tell us we've taken things too far, that by using certain products too often we are building supergerms that are immune to all our defenses! But we're at a point now where this science is hard to accept based on our current cultural state of mind.
All of the various enhancements discussed in the next poster also follow a similar trend. There are obvious enhancements like taking steroids to break records and the like, but the thing I found most impressive were the day to day things that many average people have. Things like corrective lenses give someone who is potentially blind to the world the ability to see the world as clear as possible, if not more clearly. We obviously can't deny our fellow humans this sort of opportunity, but as their one example showed, excellent vision could give Tiger Woods the advantage he needs to start winning lots of PGA tournaments. Much like our friends with the soap, we see the effects of semantic contagion. One guy gets this done, tells his buddy who says "hey I could benefit from this" and the enhancement spreads. Suddenly you have dozens of baseball players on growth hormones and steroids. Drugs that take away our nerves so we can perform in a no stress environment. All of these scientific breakthroughs, while (mostly) noble in intentions, have certainly been taken too far, even to a greater extent than our love of soap. We now have to start using our cultural beliefs and the human side of our sciences to determine how much is enough? How much is too much?
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Setting limitations while welcomed, is also a complicated endeavor. It raises questions of authority, legitimacy, and enforcement: who decides when enough is enough? Why is their decision legitimate? And through what apparatus--political or otherwise--are these limitations to be enforced. There is simply no magic number or place in history that we can point to in order to determine the limitations of artificial enhancement. Moderation and restraint in the case of soap and artificial enhancement at times, seem to be eclipsed by the allure of economic, and political gains. Unfortunately, the guys who do decided when enough is enough, are the ones reaping the benefits of exploitation and extremism
ReplyDeleteI agree with Ryan, too much of anything is never a good thing, but the "too much" doesn't exist until it happens. When the creators of antibacterial hand soap launched their product, do you think they thought the public would eventually go overboard with sanitizing..? The only wat to figure out what is too little or too much, is to have it happen. It would be difficult to set limitations on products that seem to have only benefical results.
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