Barbara Ehrenreich is “old enough to die,” she writes in her new book, Natural Causes: An Epidemic of Wellness, The Certainty of Dying, and Our Illusion of Control. With that realization, Ehrenreich abandons what she describes as “medicalized death,” the endless preventive tests, diets, and rituals designed to prevent aging, or to at least make one age well. “I will seek help for an urgent problem,” she writes, “but I am no longer interested in looking for problems that remain undetectable to me.” Instead of the “torment” of a medicalized death, or even a “medicalized life,” Ehrenreich advocates for a broader acceptance of death’s inevitability. In a series of linked essays, each of which could be expanded to its own book, Ehrenreich’s Natural Causes takes aim at the cultural practices that preach the concept of control—over both body and mind—suggesting that the inevitable is somehow unavoidable. “We are not,” she writes, “the sole authors of our destinies or of anything else.”
The refusal to accept that dying is an “achievement, not a defeat,” Ehrenreich argues, has led to a kind of pervasive cultural fiction of individual control over both the body and mind. Both are elements of another fiction at which Ehrenreich takes aim: Namely, the concept of the self, which, she argues, is little more than the religious soul rebooted for a secular age. Instead, in her characteristically blunt style, Ehrenreich deconstructs the practices that have grown to sustain these fictions, everything from wellness, mindfulness, fitness, anti-aging regimens, and diet fads.
The body is built for death, Ehrenreich plainly argues, it cannot be tamed by wellness or mindfulness or any other practices simply because it is a ‘battleground’ where ‘cells and tissues meet in mortal combat.’
In Ehrenreich’s hands, wellness, for example, isn’t just a trend, but a reflection of the interplay of class, power, and health (a word, she argues, that’s meaning is too class-based to be useful to wellness gurus like Gwyneth Paltrow). Wellness, she suggests, eliminates the appearance of “conflict…endemic to the human world, with all its jagged inequalities,” emphasizing instead the harmonious individual—a body and mind in complete accord. But, to what end? “To feel good, of course, which is the same as feeling powerful. Put in more mechanical terms, wellness is the means to remake oneself into an ever more perfect self-correcting machine capable of setting goals and moving toward them with smooth determination.”
Mindfulness finds similar disdain, rendered in the smart, provocative, and persuasive style that’s made Ehrenreich’s previous books (Nickled & Dimed and Bright-Sided) enduring classics. Even Ehrenreich’s own interests are subject to her critique. A self-confessed gym-rat, she explores the link between fitness and control, noting it’s logical, and sometimes ugly, consequences that can extend well beyond the gym. Conflated with morality, control over one’s body can be used to determine personal values or success. “[If you] can’t control your own body, you’re not fit, in any sense to control anyone else,” Ehrenreich writes.
Unconvinced by these practices, with their emphasis on control or the illusion that they can stave off death, Ehrenreich who has a Ph.D. in cellular immunology, offers a far more complex (if not dystopian) view of the body, centered around “intrabody conflict.” She leads us through recent research that shows that our immune systems turn on us, aiding—instead of preventing—the growth of cancer. She’s particularly interested in macrophages, a type of white blood cell that, given the opportunity, can become traitors to the very body it is supposed to protect, going over “to the other side.” The body is built for death, Ehrenreich plainly argues, it cannot be tamed by wellness or mindfulness or any other practices simply because it is a “battleground” where “cells and tissues meet in mortal combat.” Rather than toil at resistance—either by buying anti-aging products or conversion to the cult of Goop—Ehrenreich advocates “humility,” the acceptance that we “cannot control,” the body’s conflict. “And we certainly cannot forestall its inevitable outcome, which is death.”
Natural Causes is at once idiosyncratic, compelling, frustrating, provocative, and smart. Like all of her books, Ehrenreich asks hard questions that sometimes have hard answers, and sometimes no answers at all. I had the pleasure of speaking with Ehrenreich about her new book, as well as everything from wellness and Goop, to self-care, killing it in the gym, and mortality. Our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
JEZEBEL: I wanted to start by asking the obligatory first question: Why this particular topic at this moment?
BARBARA EHRENREICH: All my books, despite everything I write, are motivated by two things: anger at some kind of injustice and curiosity. I did feel a lot, I don’t know if I want to say outrage, but I couldn’t believe it when I got to a certain age and found that people my age, in an upper middle class demographic, were devoting most of their time to trying to prolong their lives. They were curating their diet. They were doing all of these preventative medical tests. They were fixed on the amount of exercise they were getting. I thought, “This is strange. What’s going on here?” That was part of it. There was also a scientific mystery here that I get into. I was interested in how cells of our own bodies turn against us no matter what we do. We have no way to control what is going on at the cellular level, unfortunately.
In this book, you reject medicalization—these things we’re told that we’re supposed to do to “age well” or to extend life. One of the arguments that I thought was interesting is that this idea is selling the fiction of individual control over the body or of death. This fantasy of eternal life isn’t particularly new, but it seems more pressing at this particular moment in history.
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
