In the US, most men are routinely circumcised at birth. For the medical
profession it is lucrative work. Post-natal circumcision is the country’s most
common operation. The reason, it turns out, is quite extraordinary: unlike
Europe, where circumcision is only performed on religious grounds, circumcision
in the US—like the first breakfast cereals—was intended to help
control masturbation and reduce the sex drive. The operation began in the 1870s.
Before then, “secular” circumcision was virtually non-existent.

In his 1877 book: Plain facts for old and young: embracing the natural
history and hygiene of organic life, physician John Harvey Kellogg (co-inventor
of the cornflake) wrote: “A remedy [for “self-abuse”] which is almost always
successful in small boys is circumcision . . . The operation should be performed
by a surgeon without administering an anaesthetic, as the brief pain attending
the operation will have a salutary effect upon the mind, especially if it be
connected with the idea of punishment, as it may well be in some cases.”

During the Second World War, various branches of the US military strongly
encouraged circumcision among their men. Sometimes it was an order. A kind of
medical McCarthyism ruled and servicemen were threatened with court martial if
they refused surgery. US military medical records show that operations to remove
foreskins were the most common surgical procedure at the height of the war.

The excuse for circumcision gradually shifted to hygiene and disease
prevention. An extensive literature exists in medical journals. Yet unambiguous
proof of medical benefits from the practice remains elusive. Research is
bedevilled by the fact that individuals are not randomly allocated to
circumcised and intact conditions, so circumcised and uncircumcised populations
cannot be simply compared.

Earlier this year, the American Academy of Pediatrics admitted that the
evidence is “not sufficient to recommend routine neonatal circumcision”. But
instead of concluding that circumcision was specious, the academy argued that
parents should make “an informed choice”. But how can it be ethical—even
legal—to amputate normal tissue from a normal person without their
consent?

Circumcision on purely religious grounds by itself is difficult to
rationalise—did God make a design error? And what of the belief that God
made man in his own image? But the irrationality of routine medical circumcision
in supposedly the most advanced country in the world is an astonishing and
appalling phenomenon.

For centuries, physicians bled people or poisoned them with compounds of lead
and mercury—confident that they were doing good—before medical
knowledge revealed that such procedures were harmful. Thousands of American
babies must endure excruciating pain for no good reason. Why persist with this
unjustifiable mutilation?

Seven minutes later, you are asked to do something similar. The water is
again at 14 °C for 60 seconds, but then it is warmed by 1 °C for another
30 seconds. Though not quite so bad as 14 °C, 15 °C is still distinctly
unpleasant. Which of the two experiences would you like to repeat? Princeton
psychologist Daniel Kahneman has shown that most people choose the longer trial.
As the long trial includes all the pain of the short one and then some more,
overall they are opting for more pain. So what on earth is happening?

Kahneman’s theory is that the duration of an experience is severely neglected
by your memory. Instead, memories of such episodes are unduly influenced by the
most intense moments and by the endings. In hindsight, suffering 90 seconds of
pain which ends less unpleasantly is recollected as a better overall experience
than suffering just 60 seconds.

Such results (and there are others in the same vein) suggest that human
memory has certain inbuilt biases: it compresses time and gives undue weight to
peak moments and to the way an experience ends.

This could explain a thing or two—like why we take holidays even though
they’re often tedious and stressful. You’re being ripped off and you can’t speak
the language. Yet we look back on these experiences with fondness. Presumably
the long periods of low-level stress or boredom are swamped by recollection of
the happy extremes. The endings also tend to be better than the rest: by then,
at least, you have learnt how to cope.

Prison could be similar. Indeed, one of the popular movies of the 1990s,
The Shawshank Redemption, featured one long-term convict who was terrified
at the idea of leaving prison. If prisoners adjust with time, and evaluate their
experience by reference to its ending, long sentences would be less of a
deterrent than short ones.

Distorted memories might even be responsible for keeping mountaineers
mountaineering. Their diaries consist of endless complaints about how unpleasant
the whole (entirely voluntary) escapade is: they are usually cold, wet, hungry
and soon fiercely loathe their accomplices. They miss their families and swear
that they will spend more time with them in future. Still, the expedition
usually has a peak experience—literally. Within a few weeks of returning
home, they are usually planning their next expedition.

All of which raises some curious ethical dilemmas. Should dentists
deliberately add some minutes of spurious low-level pain to the end of painful
procedures to induce less phobic recollections? Should short, increasingly
unpleasant prison sentences, be introduced to counter the rosier recollections
that come with adjustment to longer sentences ?

As Kahneman suggests, there’s also a metaphysical dilemma here. What should
one live one’s life for? To maximise the quality of one’s experiences, or to
maximise the quality of the memories of one’s experiences? Before you rush to
decide, remember: memories last longer than the experiences they recall.