May is National Museum Month so I forced my 7-year-old son to
accompany me to the Museum of Human Frailty. Housed in a restored
factory building in a depressed mid-sized rust belt city in upstate New
York, the MHF’s promotional brochure describes the museum’s mission as
helping “children of all ages understand their own emotional and
rational contradictions and limitations.”
We started in the Hall of Memory. We walk into a crowded exhibit hall and start looking at maps of the brain projected onto the walls, when someone yells “pickpocket,” someone else runs for an exit, and chaos ensues. Afterward, we sit in small groups with museum facilitators who ask us to recount events and identify culprits from a line-up. We then watch a video of the actual event and see how our memory sought to make order from the chaos, in the process getting most of the crucial details wrong and leading us to make false accusations based on poor assumptions and prejudices.
In the Utopia Pavilion, visitors use computer simulations to try to solve real-world problems. You get to see how your well-intentioned choices lead to totally unexpected results because it is impossible to anticipate and assess all of the conditions of the situation at hand. For example, my decision to make the U.S. independent of foreign energy sources led to destabilization of several Middle Eastern governments and an explosion of regional conflict. Then I cured cancer and induced a collapse of the government health care programs that President Obama worked so hard to implement, because of the high price of miracle drugs and the rapid increase of life spans.
The Gallery of Power includes a virtual-reality version of a famous psychology experiment carried out at Stanford University in 1971. Museum visitors are put in charge of a room of holographic prisoners and asked by an authoritarian warden to keep the prisoners from misbehaving. Knowing little about the prisoners or the warden, visitors confront their own attitudes toward authority, and the limits of their own capacities to maintain moral integrity in the face of pressure to conform. Waterboarding is not an option, but I did put one particularly recalcitrant prisoner on bread and water, an act of weakness that now fills me with shame.
My son’s favorite exhibit (predictably) was the Kondratieff Wave, a roller coaster whose course mimics the spasmodic ups and downs of economic markets over the past 200 years. Construction of the exhibit was completed in 2004, so the ride ends with a steep climb to the culmination of the housing boom (right after a brief but nerve-jangling dot-com-bubble free-fall). The MHF is now seeking funds to add another steep decline onto the end of the ride. The whole idea seemed a little gimmicky to me until my son gleefully remarked that even though you can see the downhills coming “it’s still always a big surprise when it happens.” Following the ride, we watched a heart-wrenching video about the rise and fall of the once-affluent city that is host to the MHF, now a cemetery of empty factories. These curators obviously know what they’re doing.
After few hours at the MHF you wind up feeling a bit tired of your own limitations. Yet the museum is not a downer. Because I found myself confronting my own inadequacies just as hundreds of others were going through the same experience, I left the museum with a burgeoning sense of generosity toward the community of imperfect beings that constitutes humanity. What a bracing antidote to those sleek and engaging science and technology museums, those staples of the modern American city, those paeans to the power and control fantasies at the heart of modernity.
One hardly needs science museums to be convinced of the potency and
significance of human inventiveness. After all, if there is one thing
that humans manage to do well it is to advance technologically—to the
point that the history of our species is often described in terms of
this advance—from the stone age to the information age. On the other
hand, there are lots of things we seem to have persistent difficulty
with. If the current economic, environmental and geopolitical crises
facing America and the world teach us anything, it is that the
incredible human capacity for technical ingenuity and control are at
times no match for (and are all too often enablers of) human
behavioral, organizational and cognitive incompetence.
If we don’t understand—if we don’t embrace and even celebrate—our incompetence, it’s hard to see how we will ever learn to manage our incredible scientific and technological prowess. To match its science museum, every city needs its own museum of humility, ignorance, uncertainty and the human condition to help us better understand how to act wisely, prudently and compassionately in the world. Meanwhile, I highly recommend a visit to the Museum of Human Frailty. It’s not a perfect place—but then again, how could it be? (It’s also not that far from Cooperstown, so you can visit the Hall of Fame in the same weekend.)
About the Author: Dan Sarewitz is co-director
of CSPO.
