Two TV shows featuring people competing for plastic surgery are a symptom of society's inability to accept physical imperfection, writes Haydn Shaughnessy
Ever imagine waking up every morning with perfect eyebrows and perfect lips? It's a ladies-only question, guys, for now. When madam would rather have the make-up on before looking in the mirror, the world of plastic and cosmetic surgery can offer yet a new bag of tricks, the operable version of Estée Lauder or Lancôme.
On television this week two series on total body and face makeovers, Swan (TV3) and Extreme Makeover (Living TV), will haunt us with proof that the dictates of how we should look have displaced the old-fashioned notion that we can be loved or admired for what we are.
A clinic in Galway, Bodybenefits, offers permanent cosmetics as part of the regular beauty salon portfolio. Who wants to be permanently beautiful, even when asleep?
"Women who are active in sports should consider permanent make-up," according to the website of Bodybenefits, which offers permanently attached eyeliner for €500, or lipstick to go, go, go for €450.
"It [the enhanced beauty] won't run off or sweat off during exercise," promises the blurb. Apparently busy working mothers who have no time for make-up but who have to look good in work, are prime candidates for permanently enhanced eyes and lips.
But Bodybenefits owner Jeanette Haynes regards these procedures as about the limit that people should aspire to in the relationship between technology and their looks. She handles much of the salon's work with post-operative scars and believes there is a role for cosmetic surgery at the fringes of how people feel about themselves. One of the biggest problems she encounters is "people's unreal expectations of what procedures can do".
As permanent enhancement technol-ogy improves it is becoming more appealing, even to men. Haynes says she already gets men asking for scars to be camouflaged and the salon's perma-cosmetic business has tripled in five years. The days when men go for a permanent lip lustre are nearly upon us. But part of Bodybenefits' business is also putting right some of the damage created by more extreme plastic surgery.
"The beauty norm has shifted," says medical anthropologist Nancy Scheper-Hughes. She is a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and is about to publish a book with the working title, The End of the Body. She mentions a few well-publicised examples such as Michael Jackson's white skin, but also a few private ones. She tells of an Asian research student of hers who, doctors said, could look more alert, and more employable, if those little eyes were a little less, well, slanty and if the nose was perked up a bit.
"I don't want to criticise people for modifying their looks but there is a denial here of a certain conception of dignity, or rather, people are defining dignity through their bodies," she says of the Nip/Tuck years.
It is the growing association between the body and technology that people such as Scheper-Hughes, are beginning to worry about. And the fact that enhancing one's looks is part of a continuum starting from a pre-plucked and glossed face and stretching to a variety of implants, from new knees to brain and skin implants that enhance the functions of our bodies.
The body and its limits, according to Scheper-Hughes, are becoming increasingly less relevant to human experience, and that decline is matched by a form of moral collapse. When technology resolves our blemishes and weaknesses there is no need for us, collectively, to agree what the limits of human dignity should be.
The philosophy of using technology in the drive for human perfection is called "transhumanism", meaning to go beyond the capabilities of our bodies. It is the merging of the human and technology. And it is driven by ideas about perfection and immortality.
This is the concept that Scheper- Hughes attacks. Not just because of the resources that a new emphasis on physical perfection absorbs. But because it is fundamentally a preoccupation with the physical at the expense of human ethics and what she calls the construction of dignity.
The transhuman project - the search for ways to outdo our imperfections and to fox mortality - is now a formal school of thought, as real as, say, economics or history. Its main focus is on the relationship between medical technology and living longer and being more beautiful. To survive longer and to stay younger-looking are core transhuman objectives.Though it represents an extreme, transhumanism reflects a new and more common line of reasoning: because we can, we should.
"The old saying to look beyond the defects at the real person has died out. We just don't do that any more," says Scheper-Hughes. "How we deal with our impulse to outcast people who don't fit a norm is an important civilising influence."
Now, we buy a way around it. The search for perfection is taking a wider variety of forms, even reaching into childhood. Children are not good candidates for the perma-cosmetic look (too many options up ahead) but, at seven grand a go, parents can - and some do - give the little ones a Hollywood smile.
Aubrey Sheiham, professor of epidemiology at University College, London, has another cure. "Parents should tell their children they have a beautiful smile." A little emotional support can go a long way, he advises. The transhuman ethos of moving beyond imperfection extends into most areas of the body. It is a driving force and intellectual legitimisation for a variety of transplant procedures as well as cloning, and for new research into computerising the ways our bodies communicate with the world. Most worrying from an ethical viewpoint is the collapse of debate around live transplant surgery. Transplants from live patients are increasingly accepted as not just permissible but as a right.
Following adverse publicity in Pakistan and Eastern Europe, the organ trade now sources kidneys from Brazilian ghettos. The average Brazilian labourer who sells a kidney has a life of considerable misery as he returns to work shortly after yielding a major part of his immune system.
But this too is a basic premise of transhumanism: that one person's right to a medical upgrade over-rides all other considerations. Our ethical focus has become the human as a patient. Rights are now phrased medically, Scheper-Hughes, who has researched the Brazilian organ trade, points out. Fifty years ago, rights reflected our roles in a shared economic system. Workers' rights ran alongside the rights of employers to manage their companies. For the past 20 years rights have been vested in how we act as (and what we want as) patients. The right of poor people to adequate income and, as a consequence, the right to physical integrity, does not register on this medical charter.
The link between those who sign up for transhuman lifestyles, between the cyronics expert and the girl looking to sort out a crooked nose, is the modern disdain for imperfection, that same strange compulsion that shames a woman into paralysing her face with Botox to disguise the first wrinkles of age.
The link is also a rejection of self- denial. In the 21st century self-denial has almost reached the status of a social taboo. Scheper-Hughes argues that this is driving us to reject the superior power of human dignity when faced with the imperfections of nature.
Faced by our fallibilities and weaknesses, she cautions, we now choose evasiveness at almost any cost. The day when dignity acted as an empowering and inspiring response to the inevitable is well on the wane - does anybody care?
