NATURAL CAUSES: AN EPIDEMIC OF WELLNESS, THE CERTAINTY OF DYING, AND OUR ILLUSION OF CONTROL
By Barbara Ehrenreich
Barbara Ehrenreich wrote a book in 2007 called Dancing in the Streets that was about the expression of collective joy. I mention this only because it is such an outlier in what has been a delightfully gloomy corpus of bestselling cultural criticism: on trying to get by working low-wage jobs (Nickel and Dimed), on the futile pursuit of the American dream (Bait and Switch), on the false promises of the happiness industry (Bright-sided) and, in this latest broadside, on the challenge of facing up to our own mortality.
Having realized that she is now “old enough to die,” Ehrenreich has turned her attention to the inevitability and randomness of death. That may make Natural Causes sound like it’s going to be a bit of a downer, but it’s not. Instead it’s a snarl in the face of the long arc of history that bends toward personal and cosmic annihilation.
It may seem obvious to say that death is inevitable but that hasn’t stopped whole industries growing up dedicated to forestalling death as long as possible and even trying, in some cases, to deny it entirely. Indeed finding a “cure for death” has become a hobby of American billionaires. It seems unfair that people with so much money should still have to die.
Despite being a bit of a gym rat herself, Ehrenreich sees a lot of these projects as misguided. Wellness has its limits. In the case of the spread of some cancers, for example, our own cells may be working against us. Most of Natural Causes is taken up with a discussion of these matters, and how wrongheaded it is to think of our bodies as holistic systems whose malfunctioning can be cured with better programming or technology.
What Ehrenreich offers instead of pipe dreams of immortality is a program of “successful aging.” This turns out to be something almost spiritual: a wilful release of notions of the self and a submersion into something greater than the individual: a “larger human super-being” and a living universe.
If that sounds a little vague and even whimsical it is at least optimistic and represents a death that I think most of us could live with.
Notes:
Review first published in the Toronto Star July 13, 2018.
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