The Wellness Industry
Health, AI, and the alternative of Membership
Photo by Jellybee on Unsplash
You’ve likely been lampooned by the promises of the wellness industry at the beginning of a new year. Whether it’s a new fitness regimen, a promise of supplements able to help you drop pounds, or facial yoga (yes, it’s a thing), you’ve likely been served up promises to make you well.
It’s curious, that word well. It’s a bit funny, isn’t it, that while we talk about the “wellness industry” or mental “health,” it’s often the case that these ways of thinking and going about in the world have much more to say about sickness and unhealth (all of which seems to be diagnosable) than a pathway towards health?
As I’ve been working my way through a number of books (Hunter’s Culture Wars1 most recently and continuing with Philip Rieff), I loved this bit from Rieff in his Triumph of the Therapeutic on well-being:
From its classical origins, sociological theory was interested in the relation between that sense of well-being which defines the health of the individual and the membership in the community.
From Plato and Aristotle, through Burke and De Tocqueville, the therapeutic implication of social theory is remarkably consistent: an individual can exercise his gifts and powers fully only by participating in the common life…The healthy man is in fact the good citizen.2
Well-being classically understood happens as the individual finds a meaningful place within a larger whole, within a common life. Today we’ve followed Rousseau’s path of the individual needing to be liberated from “common life” to find so-called freedom. The result is that we’re looking for health in all the wrong places and often must resort to the promise of capitalism to provide what only real community, civic-mindedness, and institutional identities can.
In other words, when we’ve unhooked the lynchpin between person and community, we seem to only be able to find health and wellness within products we can buy. (Cue the influencers, which I wrote about here!)
We fear mortality: buy anti-aging cream! We have trauma and emotional scars: buy a course with your favorite online guru! We desire to be seen holistically as body, mind, soul: join Soul Cycle! Perhaps we’re more enlightened than to envy the McMansions and the plastic trappings of the 80s and 90s, but we still buy mushroom coffee, probiotics, online workouts, ethically sourced food and clothes. We buy the newest version, blinded by the promises these new things make. These aren’t just products, they are symbols.
They are identity markers. And class markers. With each purchase of the wellness industry we proclaim that health is available not to the poor, but to the rich and privileged. We proclaim that our money is the door to health, satisfaction, and a meaningful life. We show ourselves enslaved to what Jesus called Mammon — the spirit of the age; for us, that appears to be late modern capitalism seemingly providing all we want: liberation from the constraints of community. (And yet when we are liberated from community, we find ourselves in the morass of our own making).
Yet, it’s only relatively recently that we’ve begun thinking in terms of the self vs. the community, self vs. the common good. Before, we found ourselves within that larger story, now we try to create a narrative outside the lines.
The Flip Side
We attempt to buy our way to health, while not exactly knowing what it is that constitutes the wellness we chase. We’ve disconnected self from society and so all we have is what each individual can afford. There’s a flip side too. The flip side to the health is of course, unhealth, and we see this dramatically at play in the sudden leap in AI technology.
The fears around AI and what it might come to mean, are also another manifestation of the disconnect between self and society. In this version we cannot appropriately put guardrails around technology, because to do so seems to limit our so-called freedom to do anything, be anyone, and do whatever pleases the self (the self apart from society). As a consequence, it’s likely that we will no longer able to discern what is real, true, or accurate.
The “Godfather of AI” has quit his job at Google to warn of AI dangers; the New York Times reported: “His immediate concern is that the internet will be flooded with false photos, videos and text, and the average person will “not be able to know what is true anymore.”3
What do we do? Regarding climate change and AI, another journalist writes:
And government regulation alone will not save us. I have a simple rule: The faster the pace of change and the more godlike powers we humans develop, the more everything old and slow matters more than ever — the more everything you learned in Sunday school, or from wherever you draw ethical inspiration, matters more than ever.4
Constraints and restraint may be the most human and democratic way we can offer.
Guardrails
For, what is the end to our pursuit of health or wellness? What is the end to which we are to put our creativities and our technologies towards? If it isn’t to be integrated into a common story and a common good, I’m not sure how our pursuit of wellness or technology are any different from an Enlightenment hierarchy of persons, where we must oppress in order to have power, or be oppressed.
Rieff gives us another zinger:
“In a highly differentiated democratic culture, truly and for the first time, there arose the possibility of every man standing for himself, each at last leading a truly private life, trained to understand rather than love (or hate) his neighbor. Within such privacies, can a man feel well?” (58)
Wellness is impossible when we cut ourselves off from our neighbor.
How do we begin to get back?
What both the quest for wellness and the careening off the cliff that the leaps in AI technology may need are some good guardrails. Guardrails restrict our freedom, but they also keep us from going off the edge of a cliff. Such restraint (and constraint) actually preserves life — and not just individual lives, but our collective lives too. We belong not to ourselves but to one another and to caring institutions.
Membership might be one way of thinking about goodness — not in the economic goods of wellness industry but in the belonging to something bigger than ourselves. Wendell Berry writes of this frequently in his novels (and, I found a recent lecture of his titled “Health is Membership,” so there you have the answer to the question of wellness).
In Hannah Coulter, Berry writes this exchange on membership:
One of the attractions of moving away into the life of employment, I think, is being disconnected and free, unbothered by membership. It is a life of beginnings without memories, but it is a life too that ends without being remembered. The life of membership with all its cumbers is traded away for the life of employment that makes itself free by forgetting you clean as a whistle when you are not of any more use. When they get to retirement age, Margaret and Mattie and Caleb will be cast out of place and out of mind like worn-out replaceable parts, to be alone at the last maybe and soon forgotten.
"But the membership," Andy said, "keeps the memories even of horses and mules and milk cows and dogs.”
The language of stewarding the self within places of institutional belonging (the family, the town, the nation, the church) and focusing on maturity as membership into a community seems a way out from wellness culture.
It’s easier to feel the god-like power from unlimited AI or the dopamine hit from purchasing something that promises to make us young, healthy, free, unlimited, and unencumbered. But ultimately neither seem very good or very human ways to live.
Rieff reminds us too: “Ultimately it is the community that cures” (57). Membership requires more. But it gives more too.
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James Davison Hunter introduced the term “culture wars” to modern discourse. His 1991 book, Culture Wars, is about the subject. On my podcast with Bryce Hales, we’re starting a whole series on the culture wars. We’ll hear from those stuck in the middle and what is the way forward for the church. Subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts. Find out more here.
Philip Rieff, The Triumph of the Therapeutic, 55, 56.
Cade Metz, ‘The Godfather of A.I.’ Leaves Google and Warns of Danger Ahead, NYT, May 1, 2023, https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/01/technology/ai-google-chatbot-engineer-quits-hinton.html
Thomas L. Friedman, NYT, May 2, 2023, https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/02/opinion/ai-tech-climate-change.html