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flipside of the disembodied will. Those who are hostile to the body can see it only as a
source of mindless sensation. Pole dancers and prostitutes are bodies stripped of meaning
and value, reduced to brute materiality. People who pour booze into themselves all night
long see their flesh simply as a convenient container. This is logical enough if one regards
material things not as meaningful in themselves, but as imbued with meaning only by the
human will.
For another thing, bare flesh is big business, and to the puritan mind making profit can
be a sign of God's favour. It may be that when the Creator urged us to make use of our
worldly talents, he did not exactly have pole dancing in mind. Even so, prospering on earth
may be a foretaste of flourishing in heaven. This, as it happens, is not the case for the New
Testament, which tells us in traditional Judaic spirit that we shall know God for who he is
when we see the poor being filled with good things and the rich being sent empty away.
The only problem is that those who seek to act on this information might end up with a
bullet through the head. This is not a problem over which Mormons and right-wing Evan-
gelicals in the States lose an excessive amount of sleep.
The idea that the flesh is just meaningless matter is a peculiarly modern one. For an older
style of thought, the human body is inherently meaningful. In fact, human meaning is in
the first place carnal meaning. To watch a small child reaching for a toy even before it can
speak is to see this in action. The meaning is inherent in the physical gesture, like the lining
in a glove. On this view, the world, which includes our bodies, is significantly organised. It
is true that this built-in significance will come to fruition only when we give it voice. The
creative human word is an essential part of how things become themselves. But it is not
just an arbitrary imposition on them. It must respect the inherent natures of things. It cannot
just make what it likes of them, rather as humanity cannot make what it likes of itself.
Among other things, this is because we do not own ourselves, as some modern thinkers
seem to imagine. I can use my Victorian paperweight as a door-stopper, but I cannot make
what I like of my passions and desires. My body is not my property. There may be some
good arguments for abortion, but the belief that the body is one's private possession is not
one of them. For one thing, I can give my property away, but I cannot give my body away.
I do not have a pain in the same sense that I have a chain saw. I am not monarch of my
own flesh. On the contrary, it is my body, derived as it is from the bodies of others, which
proclaims how dependent I am on creatures of my kind. To try to shuck off the body—to
regard it as no part of one's real self—is to deny this dependence in the name of an ethic of
self-ownership.
If the body is offensive to this ethic, it is because it represents the “outside” of oneself
that one can never fully master. At some point in the future, it is going to give up on me
whether I like it or not. In this sense, the cosmetic surgeons are playing a losing game. The
American dream of immortality sounds like the fantasy of those so deeply in love with life
that they cannot bear to relinquish it. In fact, it reflects a virulent hostility to human exist-
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