That was a little too much thinking; I brought myself back to the present moment.
Blaming the Victim
After our sitting meditation, the MBSR teacher excitedly passed out photocopies of “The Mindful Revolution” — the Time magazine cover story I discussed in Chapter One, which features a youthful white blonde woman with her eyes blissfully closed. But as I gazed across the room, this iconic image of spiritual perfection didn’t jibe with the atmosphere. If this was the face of the so-called revolution, it wasn’t happening here. Instead, I had become even more mindful of the expressions of alienation, the forlorn, and the weary, as well as bodies beaten down by the daily grind, and minds numbed by the incessant demands of a digital economy. As the course progressed, my gnawing sense of unease did not abate. In fact, it got worse.
The dominant narrative of MBSR just didn’t sit right with me. Although people were clearly getting helpful relief from their stress-related symptoms, the message that was meant to empower them had troubling undertones. If fMRI scans from neuroscience suggested that suffering takes place in the mind, the solution was to tune out of thoughts about the past and the future, attending mindfully to the present moment. However, if misery is self-created in this way, I only have myself to blame for being mindless.
As time went on, I had a hard time determining whether I was being trained in a scientific method or a political ideology. Maybe it was both. The etiological explanation sounded just a little too convenient: the stress people were experiencing supposedly had nothing to do with actual material conditions (e.g. loss of income), nor the unreasonable demands of workaholic corporate cultures. The noxious features of neoliberal capitalism were nowhere to be found on the mindfulness radar. Stress was a private, subjective and interior affair — a problem for individuals to deal with. David Smail calls this philosophy “magical voluntarism,” in which relief from distress depends entirely on acts of will (also known as the choice to practice mindfulness), not on changing the causal conditions.1
Reflecting on this ethos of self-responsibility, I began to feel a sense of déjà vu. As a young, idealistic undergraduate in Northern California in the late 1970s, I was a student of humanistic psychology, immersed in works by Carl Rogers, Abraham Maslow, and Fritz Perls, along with existentialists, depth psychologists and other human potential gurus. Self-improvement seminars like Werner Erhard’s EST were all the rage, and the neoliberal priorities of the Thatcher-Reagan era were taking shape. Feeling self-righteous after jumping ship from a behavioral-experimental “rat” psychology program in the Midwest, I enthusiastically drank the Kool-Aid, believing change, self-actualization, and transformation came from within — all within the power and agency of an autonomous subject. Self-mastery was a heroic journey of the individual.
The promise of humanistic psychology has been reincarnated as the mindfulness movement. Instead of earlier quests for the authentic self in the farthest reaches of human nature, one just has to search inside oneself with “pure awareness.” By shifting from the “doing” mode to “being,” one can find authenticity by practicing mindfulness. And while it might be hard to hang out in the “being” mode if you have to spend seventy hours each week executing trades on Wall Street, there is always the prospect of taking time out for a short daily mindful process of de-stressing.
I tried to stay in the present moment — really, I did — but this “mind-wandering” seemed to be leading somewhere, connecting dots, yielding “ah-ha” moments. First, like humanistic psychology, mindfulness makes subjectivity sacrosanct. Second, both eschew any need to pay attention to social and historical contexts of distress, to power structures and monetary interests. The therapeutic-mindfulness industry may have created its own conformist psychology — complicit in maintaining the status quo of corporate capitalism and neoliberal government.
Better-Adjusted Cogs
I felt conflicted. Here I was, sitting with a community of strangers, all of whom were suffering in some way from modern vicissitudes. Each week, I was observing and hearing how MBSR was helping them cope, offering them tools so that they could adjust to their less-than-ideal working conditions, even building up their resilience. How could anyone be critical of such beneficence? Doing so would seem to make the perfect the enemy of the good. And much that was happening was good. But at the same time, I knew that in a few weeks the MBSR class would come to an end. These folks would soon be back in the trenches and in the firing line of corporate life, still contending with grueling hours in their cubicles, or for some, pounding pavements in search of employment — basic survival. Yes, hopefully the skills they learned would help them cope a little better. But these observations were fueling the discomfort in my gut: was this “mindful revolution” just about coping, fine-tuning our brains so that we can dutifully perform our roles more efficiently — becoming better-adjusted cogs in the capitalist machinery?
Could it even be that mindfulness had gained mainstream acceptance because it ensured a snug fit between individuals and social institutions? Was it a useful accomplice in maintaining social control by regulating our unruly desires, downgrading thought, and teaching us to accept “what is” while retreating into comfortable depths of subjectivity? Is this non-judgmental flight to direct sensory experience (slowly eating a raisin, taking a deep breath before sending off that difficult e-mail, etc) propagating a sophisticated form of anti-intellectualism, throwing us a few breadcrumbs of stability at the expense of mindlessly accepting injustices, just as they are?
By now, some may think I want to drown the baby, never mind throw it out with the bathwater — I do not. The walking wounded, those with chronic stress — like childhood obesity, black-lung disease, and victims of industrial accidents — still need to be treated, and MBSR admirably serves its intended purpose in this regard. But what is missing in this picture, and from mindfulness discourse, is that chronic stress — like most chronic diseases and occupational accidents — has a social and political content. Such insights are not new. Erich Fromm, who himself launched a critique of the orthodox psychoanalysis of his day, pointed out that our distress and anxieties can never be fully understood nor alleviated if the social origins of suffering are ignored.
One of the main reasons that mindfulness programs have gained widespread acceptance among psychologists, clinicians and administrators is because they resonate so strongly with, and even give stronger credence to, the therapeutic ideology of “magical voluntarism.” Historical and material conditions are concealed by therapeutic discourse. Through the reductive explanatory narratives of psychologism or biologism, psychic and mental disturbances are depoliticized. What remains is an individualistic view of human distress, with the underlying premise that those who suffer are dysfunctional. However, working conditions within a corporation, for example, and the socio-economic structures of capitalist society are taken as given — even as normal — and critical inquiry is discouraged.
The anti-capitalist scholar Joel Kovel has gone as far as saying that the US mental health industry has proliferated and grown exponentially because the diagnoses of individual disorders and their treatments are part of the same social process.2 Writing before the mindfulness boom, Kovel observed that the mental health industry had been handsomely rewarded because of its institutional role in smoothing over and masking the growing contradictions of advanced capitalist societies. This took place despite the lack of much conclusive evidence for treatments, scientific progress or mastery over mental illness and psychological disorders. As Kovel puts it: “A purely psychological view of human difficulties is a handy way of mystifying social reality, and it requires no feat of imagination to comprehend capitalist society would come to reward the psychiatric profession for promoting a special kind of psychological illusion.”3
Social Amnesia
Back on the MBSR course, the next exercise was “mindful movement,” or basic yoga. Being more of a Tai Chi practi- tioner, I sat this one out until they got to the end, a supine postur
e on the floor. Relaxing, I couldn’t help but think about how mindfulness interventions have a Puritan obsession with controlling emotions, especially anger, that is cloaked in new psychological and neuroscientific garb. The labels for dysfunction change over time — immaturity, hysteria, neurasthenia, nervous breakdowns, lack of emotional intelligence, problems of emotional self-regulation, mindlessness — but the fundamental model stays constant, based on a cult of subjectivity.
Many popular therapeutic movements require a collective form of forgetting, characterized by the intellectual historian Russell Jacoby as “social amnesia”.4 This can only function by maintaining an illusion that social context and its institutional structures are either natural or unchangeable. Mindfully fixating on the present means tuning out of thoughts about the past and the future. Thinking is considered a distraction, detrimental to “being” in the here-and-now. This is ironic, because “mindfulness” derives from a word that means “remembrance” (sati in the Pali language used to compile the Buddha’s discourses). In its original Buddhist context, mindfulness involves an awareness of what leads to insight, and what to avoid. However, by fetishizing the present moment “non-judgmentally,” modern mindfulness accelerates what Jacoby calls “a forgetting and repression of the human and social activity that makes and can remake a society”.5
One way to think about a fetish is along the lines of Marx’s notion of reification: fetishes mask the truth by keeping people fixated on, or fascinated by, unreal objects. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the original meaning of fetish derives from the Portuguese word feitiço, connoting a “charm” or “sorcery,” and referring to talismans once thought heretical. A broader reference to the worship of objects originated in the anthropological work of Charles de Brosses, whose writings Marx was familiar with.6 The modern figurative meaning was well established by the nineteenth century, defined by Oxford lexicographers as “something irrationally reverenced.”7
In this respect, there seems a strong link between the political quietism of the mindfulness movement and its present moment fetish. If practice is reduced to “being present,” I could be mindful of my experience, but unaware of the causes and conditions that constructed it. If I am feeling resentful, exploited and stressed-out at work, and I am instructed simply to focus on the present, how will that change the conditions that have helped to produce my agitation? It won’t. I’ll just retreat into watching the breath, letting go of passing thoughts and emotions, and settle into a non-judgmental attitude. Just pay attention to one thing at a time. The present moment is imbued with a magical power to assuage, heal and tolerate. Inquiry, critical thought, or investigation into the nature of experience yields and surrenders to the personal. It’s certainly calming, which might make space for clearer thinking. But this is subtly discouraged. Instead, the focus is the magical present, the subjectivized moment, that banishes thoughts — instilling, as Jacoby puts it, “an immediacy that stills reflection.”
The injunction to “rise above” all the turmoil of human experience to a detached perch of objectivity resembles the Stoics’ goal of apatheia — from which the modern meaning of apathy is derived.8 No doubt, this prescription offers a nice respite from my boss who is threatening to fire me, or the market logic behind his decision. But this is a little like watching a sleight-of-hand artist: you watch carefully — mindfully — because you don’t want to be tricked, but you don’t know what to look for, so you get fooled again by the causes of discomfort. And you get more skilled at tuning out as a result.
Once again, Jon Kabat-Zinn is on hand to put a positive gloss on this passive state. He calls it an immersion in a “body-centered field of awareness that doesn’t have to have a narrative or doesn’t have to believe its own narrative or take it seriously. It’s more in what you could call a domain of not-knowing.” He then provides an example of how “not-knowing” served him well in his encounter with a homeless person:
I was walking by somebody who was panhandling, and that happens a lot where I happen to be at the moment, but he wasn’t actually panhandling. He didn’t say anything. I just passed him by. But there was something about the feeling of moving past him that I felt like I did not want to pass him by. So I went back and put some money in the cup that had there and he said, “Thank you.” The way he had said “thank you” had so much dignity in it. I mean, it has so much — I felt so badly for this guy.
I mean, we’re in such a bad economic situation that people are out there on the streets in so many different degrees of depravation. And many of the people who panhandle are actually quite aggressive. But the way this person just said “thank you,” it just really moved me. And my impulse was to want to be his friend and give him more money and take him home. None of which I did. But there was that moment where I really saw this guy and it was its own thing. It didn’t need another thing to happen. It was just a beautiful exchange.9
Yes, quite beautiful. Nothing further needed to happen, and both of them got to feel better about themselves. All Kabat-Zinn had to do was to let the present moment be his guide without passing judgment.
Perhaps the moment can move us to act in other ways, but a little more context might make that more likely. Otherwise, the immediacy of Kabat-Zinn’s precious “I-Thou” encounter just teaches a passive sort of humanism, based on the assumption that dispensing with narratives leads to the good. Such “not-knowing,” however, is “social amnesia” in action — forgetting that the world we live in is a narrative. How it is told, and thus how we live, is contingent on power and special interests, on the social and political environment, and economic structures which have warmly embraced modern mindfulness as a new form of opiate for the masses.
Back in the warm embrace of the “mindful movement” class, I realized that I had drifted off into a pleasant nap. But nobody around me was judgmental, or seemed to care, so I left the room without embarrassment.
chapter seven
Mindfulness’ Truthiness Problem
There is a simple explanation for the popularity of mindfulness, and its clinical acceptance — “The reason is the science,” says Jon Kabat-Zinn.1 The scientific enterprise, with its demands for replication and quantifiable outcomes, has produced an avalanche of formulaic studies seeking to prove, in various ways, that “mindfulness works.” Reframed as a tool for improving one’s health and achieving goals — from workplace efficiency to bedroom performance — mindfulness provides things to measure, and thereby yardsticks for scientization.
However, despite the claims often used to sell mindfulness programs — like the ubiquitous idea that its benefits are proven scientifically — contemplative neuroscientists are more circumspect. Although brain scans show some of the active networks involved in situations where mindfulness helps, the underlying mechanisms that explain how it “works” remain unclear. In an unusually forthright statement, a recent review of research by three prominent neuroscientists describes our understanding of brain changes due to meditation as “trivial,” with “more methodologically rigorous studies” needed to unravel it.2 Many of the articles published so far have major flaws, including a lack of replication, a bias toward positive or significant results, the absence of elaborated theories, and post-hoc conclusions, among other drawbacks, the article noted.
The Dalai Lama’s interpreter, Thupten Jinpa, is also cautious. An outstanding scholar in his own right — with a PhD from the University of Cambridge, and the highest academic qualification in the Gelugpa tradition of Tibetan Buddhism — Jinpa says: “The scientific study of meditation and its effects is very rudimentary.”3
As observed by Jenny Eklöf, a researcher at Umeå University in Sweden, public outreach by contemplative neuroscientists can be confusing. Although pronouncements suggest that mindfulness helps promote wellbeing, health and happiness, and even brain fitness, “the cultural and social impact of this field is often taken to be a sign of its prior academic validation,” Eklöf warns.4 In contrast to their conservati
ve tone in journal articles — like the review cited above — more popular communications by scientists claim that their field is making “cutting-edge discoveries,” or that they are on the brink of a revolutionary shift that could save our culture.
A notable example is the article “Mindfulness Can Literally Change Your Brain” in the Harvard Business Review, which ironically shares a co-author with the skeptical study of other people’s studies. Rather than hedging, as careful scientists do, the article makes bold claims:
The business world is abuzz with mindfulness. But perhaps you haven’t heard that the hype is backed by hard science. Recent research provides strong evidence that practicing non-judgmental, present moment awareness (a.k.a mindfulness) changes the brain, and it does so in ways that anyone working in today’s complex business environment, and certainly every leader, should know about.5
There are many things wrong with the headline and what follows. Both parrot a theme much beloved of mindfulness advocates, and their neuroscience allies, yet their message is empty. It reduces the mind to the brain — despite the lack of evidence for this assumption — while glossing over the fact that almost any repetitive practice has similar effects, from playing the violin to driving a taxi around the streets of London. And as the cognitive neuroscientist Fernando Vidal points out: “since the mind is said to be what the brain does, all that is being claimed is that brain activity changes brain activity.”6
Mindfulness was recast as science to meet Western needs, and to circumvent cultural resistance to meditative practices borrowed from Buddhism. Putting mindfulness to work, like a well-trained mule carrying someone’s burden, reflects the focus on results that dominates mindfulness-related discourse. Rather than reviewing and critiquing the scientific literature on mindfulness, I am more concerned with exposing the assumptions, exaggerated claims, and purported truths produced by the process of scientization.
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