McMindfulness

by Ronald Purser

  The weekend-long event claims to bring “wisdom, purpose, and meaning” to social media and technology corporations. Integrating wisdom is “not a nice extra,” say the organizers, “but an absolute necessity to a vibrant and sustainable society.” They define wisdom as “learning to focus, to truly connect, to empathize,” a hazy definition that anyone can, quite literally, buy into — through the distraction-providing sponsors.

  On the morning of Saturday 15 February 2014, at the start of a panel on “3 Steps to Build Corporate Mindfulness the Google Way,” a group of activists, called Heart of the City, took the stage. They unfurled a banner that read: “Eviction Free San Francisco,” alluding to the city’s housing crisis. The leader of the protest, Amanda Ream, distributed bright-yellow flyers to attendees, saying: “Thank you for your practice. We invite you to consider the truth behind Google and the tech industry’s impact on San Francisco.” Another protestor, Erin McElroy, used a bullhorn, chanting “Wisdom means stop displacement! Wisdom means stop surveillance!”

  Ream, a member of the Buddhist Peace Fellowship, was effectively teaching “Wisdom 101.” The tech elite has colonized San Francisco, driving up rents and inflating a property bubble that entices landlords to evict low-rent tenants. Add to that the issue of commuting — many tech employees like to live in the city but work in the duller confines of Silicon Valley — and corporate shuttle buses were being physically attacked as proxies for this exploitative relationship. Ream was asking Google and other corporations to look at the problems and address them, by paying for the impact on housing and infrastructure. Heart of the City’s demands included funding for affordable housing, public transit, and eviction defense support, as well as an end to for-profit surveillance of the sort exposed by Edward Snowden. What was the response from the wise, empathic, compassionate, mindful sages onstage? Meng sat cross-legged in his Tai Chi costume.

  Bill Duane, the senior manager of Google’s Wellbeing and Sustainable High Performance Development programs, jumped in with an impromptu meditation. He instructed the audience to — you’ve guessed it — search inside themselves: “check in with your body,” he said, and “feel what it’s like to be in conflict with people with heartfelt ideas,” while security forced the protesters off the stage.16

  A beefy guard engaged in an embarrassing tug-of-war with one activist banner-holder, who won. As Heart of the City said: “Google and conference leaders proceeded to talk about ‘wisdom and mindfulness’ but failed to address the grievances of Bay Area communities or the company’s own hypocrisy in purporting to be ‘mindful’.” One could actually argue that it showed very clearly what mindfulness means in corporate terms. The interruption was a mere passing thought, to be observed and let go without judgment — mindfully rising above conflict, or sources of discomfort in the outside world, while taking care to pacify our world.17

  Wisdom 2.0 later congratulated Google for its mindful “leadership” in handling the protest “with incredible grace and compassion,” allowing others to express their views, and being comfortable with hearing disagreement.18 As long as we don’t have to consider what they’re actually saying, or that it might feel uncomfortable because it’s demanding something just, while our pseudo-wise views might be mistaken. According to Wisdom 2.0, “Google demonstrated (not just talked) about how important it is to develop your own practice, then bring that sense of wisdom and compassion out into the world.” A Google manager also talked about developing practice in the workplace, saying meetings now started with two-minute meditations. Apparently, one staffer who had started out skeptical was now converted, saying: “I don’t know about the rest of you, but I’m a better person for those two minutes. So I’m all for it.”19 Self-improvement in two minutes — just think of the possibilities! Of course, Google already has. For them, “a better person” is someone who buys into the corporate culture — and feels good about it.

  The condescending meditation at Wisdom 2.0 was effectively used as a form of censorship. The protesters and their message were mindfully managed out of meaningful existence. If we just breathe and keep calm and centered in the present moment, they will all go away and we can return to business as usual. However, mindfulness is not merely a passive and nonjudgmental acceptance of the status quo. When infused with wisdom, it’s used to inquire whether wholesome states of mind are being developed — in other words, compassion and empathy need to be more than ways to feel better about oneself.

  The Google emissaries showed corporate mindfulness is a privatized spirituality, encouraging passivity and dissociation. Techie hipsters like Google’s Bill Duane think the early embrace of meditation by anti-establishment types is simply “woo-woo” hippie bullshit. Their replacement is “neural hacking” and present moment escapism. Wisdom 2.0’s Gordhamer has swallowed the “here-and-now” philosophy wholesale. He defines stress as “fighting or non-accepting what is true in a given moment” and says: “stress relief, then, is accepting and allowing our experience, no matter what it is.”20 Radical acceptance, without judgment, can easily be turned into “Don’t Fight The Man” — at Google, he pays pretty well, and that helps soothe stress.

  Ironically, Wisdom 2.0 participants should have been prepared for some critical questions about their role in social suffering. The previous year, one of the presenters — Marianne Williamson — peppered her talk with some scathing critique. She asked why a spiritual teacher should “come here and be a dancing monkey to help a bunch of rich capitalists talk about the fact that they can have a more compassionate workplace” while ignoring the poverty outside it, to which they contribute. “Only in modern America could we come up with some ersatz version of spirituality that gives us a pass on addressing the unnecessary human suffering in our midst,” Williamson said.21 She went on to quote Martin Luther King: “Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.” For now, it seems Google and Wisdom 2.0 prefer keeping silent.

  Five years on from Williamson’s tirade, little has changed. At the start of the 2018 conference, Wisdom 2.0 attendees were warned about homeless people outside the venue. “Not that they are dangerous,” the moderator said, but “to ensure your safety we have security personnel visible in stations both inside and outside the hotel.” He wasn’t done. “If you are heading towards Union Square just be mindful of your personal belongings. Should you choose to go into the Tenderloin for theatres, restaurants, or galleries it does have a quirky, vibrant community” — pause for giggles from the audience — “you may want to take a cab, Lyft or Uber back to the hotel.”22 Basking in white privilege, Wisdom 2.0 is like a gated community where smug elites spew feel-good sound bites. Meanwhile, the technologies of distraction and addiction they produce cause widespread suffering, while their companies contribute to widening inequality.

  For all his talk about compassion and acceptance, Soren Gordhamer still bears grudges. In 2012, the journalist Richard Eskow published a critique of Wisdom 2.0 in the Buddhist magazine Tricycle, under the headline “Buying Wisdom.”23 Furious with the lampooning of his event, Gordhamer tried to discredit the story. He demanded corrections to minor errors — which were amended at once — complaining: “we have never witnessed such little regard for accuracy and basic common decency in journalism.” Eskow’s reply is insightful: “Mr. Gordhamer also expresses anger that I accepted ‘free’ admission and then made critical remarks. If he thinks a press pass guarantees favorable coverage, we really do have different views of journalistic ethics.”24

  Many in the mindfulness and Buddhist communities seem to be seduced by what Google and the Wisdom 2.0 crowd are doing. After all, it’s mindfulness, so it might make people kinder, and corporations could even act nicer. However, mindfulness has been cut loose from moral moorings. Without a principled anchor, it is a renegade technology that helps people rationalize unethical conduct. The conspicuous absence of an explicit ethical component to corporate mindfulness programs reflects the fraught relationship that these businesses a
lready have to social and environmental responsibilities.

  chapter eleven

  Mindful Schools

  With its promise to reduce mental health problems while improving emotional self-discipline, concentration, and “executive brain function,” mindfulness is popular in schools. Although the materials used are different, the framing of the programs is the same as elsewhere, touting support from neuroscience and distancing the practice from religion. Instead, there is a general focus on results — particularly raising test scores and easing the stress caused by constant pressure to achieve. There are also claims that mindfulness can help the disadvantaged to become more resilient in the midst of poverty, crime and racial violence. However, these external conditions are not discussed. As usual, the emphasis is on individuals looking inside themselves, instilling a neoliberal mindset in young people.

  The missionary zeal — and humanistic rhetoric — with which the benefits of mindfulness are promoted in schools masks an underlying authoritarian tone. Popular images of students sitting calmly in the classroom, focusing tamely on the task at hand, suggest they have been saved from distracting emotions and unruly impulses. However, they are also regarded as victims — fragile, vulnerable, dysfunctional, and “at risk.”

  Although there is some truth to this — with apparently increasing rates of anxiety, depression, and self-harm — schools teach children to handle problems by self-pacifying. The issue is how they react, not the conditions to which they react. This therapeutic approach is conserv- ative, directing attention away from the outside world. Mindfulness could be an empowering and emancipatory practice, exploring ways to change social conditions and priorities. Instead, it maintains the status quo. Students are taught to meditate away their anger and accept their frustrations (non-judgmentally, of course). This might help them focus on work, but unless they also learn about the causes of stress in social, economic and institutional structures, links between education and democracy are severed.

  Meanwhile, a political orthodoxy has emerged around the idea of a mental health crisis, despite many ambiguities in how “emotional disorders” and “mental ill health” are defined. Mindfulness in schools could not have become as popular as it has without the cultural norms of a therapeutic culture, effectively telling us we need help — which we’ll get, whether we like it or not, along with training in obedience.

  Consider the Mindfulness in Schools Project (MiSP) in the United Kingdom, which has trained over 4,500 teachers, aiming to bring “face-to-face quality mindfulness” to one million children within the next five years.1 The MiSP curriculum, dubbed “dot-b” — which is shorthand for “Stop, Breathe and Be!” — was conceived by two educators, Richard Burnett and Chris Cullen (now at Oxford). It likens mindfulness for students to disciplining pets. “Attention is like a puppy,” says the scripted syllabus, “It doesn’t stay where you want it to.”2 It also “brings back things you didn’t ask for [and] sometimes it makes a real mess.” Therefore, “in training our minds we have to use the same qualities of FIRM, PATIENT, KIND REPETITION that are needed in order to train a puppy.”

  Mindfulness to the Rescue

  In the United States, mindfulness in education comes with government funding and media attention. The Mindful Schools non-profit organization in Oakland, California, runs trainings for teachers who are said to have “impacted” two million students.3 Their programs came to national prominence via the documentary Room to Breathe, aired on PBS with enthusiastic media coverage. Raving about the film, the Washington Post called mindfulness “the fastest-growing technique in classrooms for teaching self-control.”4

  Room to Breathe follows Megan Cowan, the co-founder of Mindful Schools, as she spends several months teaching mindfulness to “troubled kids” at Marina Middle School in San Francisco, known for its high rate of disciplinary suspensions.5 The trailer shows students — primarily of color — shouting, pushing and hitting each other. The words LOUD, CHAOTIC, and OUT OF CONTROL flash onscreen before cutting to Cowan striking a Tibetan singing bowl in the classroom, and suddenly… all is… calm.

  The film itself has a fairly predictable savior narrative. Despite being confronted at first by defiance, Cowan’s devotedly selfless service wins students over. After learning mindfulness techniques, they report the usual benefits: feeling calmer and better able to concentrate — which, on the face of it, is surely a good thing. But, as noted by the activist scholar Jennifer Cannon, Room to Breathe “reinscribes a racialized discourse about ‘troubled’ youth of color and introduces a white mindfulness instructor as the teacher-hero.”6

  Gentle, benevolent, and patient, Cowan plays the part effortlessly. She tells the students that mindfulness is unqualifiedly good for them; as a form of self-discipline, it will help them succeed in school and work. As with most programs in schools, we do not see anything in the curriculum that turns mindful attention and critical inquiry to social and economic context. Could their behavioral problems, poor academic performance and stress be related to living in impoverished and crime-ridden neighborhoods, or being the victims of institutional racism? Evidently not, from the mindful teacher’s point of view.

  This is part of the problem. School mindfulness programs mostly shy away from what David Forbes, a Professor of Educational Counseling at Brooklyn College, calls “the critical cultivation of awareness, appreciation, and employment of the cultural context and cultural capital of both students and educators.”7 In other words, there is a glaring absence of the sort of liberating critical pedagogy that might educate people out of oppression. That omission, Forbes explains, contributes in itself to reinforcing “racist systems within education that in turn reproduces racism in the larger social structure.”

  At one point in Room to Breathe, Cowan’s inner authoritarian is revealed. She seems ill-equipped to handle disruptive students in a class of thirty who show no interest in mindfulness. As Cowan says to the camera: “If there were five of them that weren’t in there, then the majority of them would be trying, would be participating.” One of those is Diego, a Latino who tells her “it’s boring.” Losing her patience, she orders four students to leave her class. “It’s like hitting a brick wall,” she says. “I just am frustrated, and kind of hopeless. The defiance is so deliberate and I don’t know if I can work with that in this large a group.” Following this incident, Cowan consults with the Assistant Principal, who gently admonishes her, reminding her that “this is a public school, and we take everyone. Excluding students, that’s a paradigm I don’t want to set up.” However, it seems that she stuck to her decision — the disruptive students do not appear again.

  Instead, the wisdom of the mindfulness teacher is valorized, along with her status as disciplinarian. Rather than exploring the strengths and talents of the young participants in her class, the film mostly highlights their defects, until Cowan transforms them into a room full of docile meditators. The audience gets a warm glow, and can feel optimistic about the potential for improving urban education — perhaps even making a donation to Mindful Schools. However, without also making radical investments in social change, all this does is focus attention on individuals, reforming students and not the system that trains them, let alone the broader social problems it reflects.

  Much of the rhetoric in Mindful Schools’ literature depicts students of color and those from poor working-class communities as dependent on welfare, and lacking agency and power — and therefore in need of saving. Thankfully, the civilized mindfulness teacher — most often white and affluent — has the agency, cultural capital, and goodness of heart to instruct the benighted in emotional etiquette. Parallels with Christian missionaries are not accidental — a sentimental “do-gooding” mentality is deeply ingrained among the privileged, whose blindness to the causes of injustice stems in part from how they benefit.

  “The white savior supports brutal policies in the morning, founds charities in the afternoon, and receives awards in the evening,” writes Teju Cole in The Atlant
ic. “The White Savior Industrial Complex is not about justice. It is about having a big emotional experience that validates privilege.”8 The sincerity of well-meaning efforts makes it hard to critique their general naïveté, but unless outsiders are seeking to learn from the people they “help” — particularly about systemic solutions to their problems — then they may well make things worse by applying the calming balm of mindfulness.

  There is an unspoken taboo in the mindfulness movement regarding such criticism. It is tantamount to blasphemy to question the impact of teachers and their programs, since they all believe so evangelically in their goodness. And since mindfulness seems to bring relief, it is thought to be pointlessly “negative” to start picking holes in what teachers are doing, or the motives behind it. Those teaching mindfulness in schools are not usually afflicted by the socio-economic inequalities driving the problems they address. Sure, their hearts may be in the right place, but we can’t say the same for their critical thinking skills.

  Cognitive Capitalism

  Mindful school advocates seem to be especially oblivious to how their programs serve the prevailing social order. Mindfulness doesn’t exist in a political vacuum; it’s shaped by neoliberal ideas, which influence us all unless we consciously resist. Children are schooled to prepare them for roles in an increasingly competitive capitalist system. Mindfulness is therefore a way to boost resilience, producing young subjects who can manage their emotions and deal with the stress of a market-based world. Since schools are increasingly subject to market forces — think privatized charter schools and voucher schemes in the US and academization in the UK — they seek to prove their performance with measurable outcomes. Mindfulness helps improve test scores and student behavior, both of which make managers look good.