On Immunity: An Inoculation

by Eula Biss

Purity, especially bodily purity, is the seemingly innocent concept behind a number of the most sinister social actions of the past century. A passion for bodily purity drove the eugenics movement that led to the sterilization of women who were blind, black, or poor. Concerns for bodily purity were behind miscegenation laws that persisted more than a century after the abolition of slavery, and behind sodomy laws that were only recently declared unconstitutional. Quite a bit of human solidarity has been sacrificed in pursuit of preserving some kind of imagined purity.

Our cynicism may be justified, but it is also sad. That so many of us find it entirely plausible that a vast network of researchers and health officials and doctors worldwide would willfully harm children for money is evidence of what capitalism is really taking from us. Capitalism has already impoverished the working people who generate wealth for others. And capitalism has already impoverished us culturally, robbing unmarketable art of its value. But when we begin to see the pressures of capitalism as innate laws of human motivation, when we begin to believe that everyone is owned, then we are truly impoverished.

Feeling responsible for everything and powerless at the same time is also a good description, I think, of the emotional state induced by citizenship in this country. Our representative democracy endows us with empowered powerlessness. This is a problem of governance, but it is also, as Rachel Carson would suggest, something else. “For each of us, as for the robin in Michigan or the salmon in the Miramichi,” she writes, “this is a problem of ecology, of interrelationships, of interdependence.”

Those of us who have lived most of our lives in the kingdom of the well may find our imaginations already placid. Not all of us think of health as a transient state that we may be exiled from without warning. Some prefer to assume health as an identity. I am healthy, we tell each other, meaning that we eat certain foods and avoid others, that we exercise and do not smoke. Health, it is implied, is the reward for living the way we live, and lifestyle is its own variety of immunity.

When I was a child, I asked my father what causes cancer and he paused for a long moment before saying, “Life. Life causes cancer.”