few decades ago, and still kicking about in more American right-wing circles, the discussion of ‘bioethics’ took on national proportions. George W. Bush himself initiated a President’s Council of Bioethics, stacked with then-rockstar intellectuals such as Michael Sandel, Francis Fukuyama, and Leon Kass. The general message was, predictably, “No!”—with more or less embarrassed Biblical footnotes. ‘Transhumanism,’ one of the concerns of these bioethicists, is probably less a concept than a rhetorical device or the name for a vague cultural atmosphere, much like ‘globalism.’ The recent TERF wars have sparked renewed interest in the body and its malleability. J.K. Rowling is certainly an able rhetorician, and Mary Harrington has written what is almost a natural theology of the anatomy, even seeking to recast the post-war consensus on the pill.

There is likely little more exciting to 20th and 21st century political theorists than words like ‘embodied,’ ‘subjectivity,’ or ‘intersubjectivity.’ One really must control oneself. And it is certainly dramatic to write about transhumanism or cyborgs in Blade Runner-sounding jeremiads. What I want to present in the following is not more conceptual weed-killing. Rather, I want to suggest, in very undramatic terms, why technology—in the much more limited, much more Greek sense of craftsmanship—might be not only harmless, and be not merely useful, but be a help to being ourselves.

The knife and fork are not simply miniature swords and tridents, for protecting the realm or for staging little Poseidon nativity plays, but matters of style. “Style,” as not Oscar Wilde but Georges Louis Leclerc Buffon said, “is the man himself.” There are lots of ways of taking this, assuming one is like me and hasn’t actually read Buffon. The way which interests me is the emphasis on ornamentation. Knives and forks change the way we look to each other, so much so that we cannot bear their absence. And, looking backwards, at their first introduction into our Western European corner of the world they received notoriety. The 11th century Italian monk Peter Damian, speaking for the Church, said that man already had “natural forks” in his fingers. We have the eastern princess, Theophanu, wife of Otto II, to thank for luring us out of our poor taste.

To take a larger example, consider something like Crossness Pumping Station. This is, not so appetisingly, a sewage station. It isn’t the first place one thinks of for the hosting of cocktail parties or of posh functions. And yet it looks magnificent, as so many in fact do. Crossness Pumping Station is, I think, like a larger version of the knife and fork. The point of its architectural beauty is the painting over a natural necessity. We have to go to the loo, so why not do so in style?