McMindfulness

by Ronald Purser

  Teaching neurological narratives to children is a form of discipline, through which their development can be molded. Having learned the language of neuroscience, they become more obedient to what it transmits. They do so voluntarily, focusing inward on emotional self-regulation, while also internalizing the norms of authority. Should this be in any doubt, consider what might happen if the language were used in other ways — no teacher would accept the excuse “but my amygdala made me do it!”

  In this respect, mindfulness in schools is part of a broader social structure forming neoliberal subjects. Students are taught to see themselves as entrepreneurial individuals, who can administer therapy to help them “flourish” at work. Although this is sold as an important skill, it makes children responsible for adapting to circumstances, not trying to change them. Can moments of mindfulness really mitigate the traumas of poverty, pending unemployment, a school-to-prison pipeline, racial profiling and police brutality, gang violence, and institutional racism? Is the problem just a matter of students being unable to “self-regulate” emotions? Framing it as such creates a moral panic, casting teachers of mindfulness as saviors. It’s sad that those who have so little are blamed for so much, and merely told to work on their “deficiencies.” Instead they could be taught about the underlying problems in society, and ways to address these as part of a broader civic mindfulness. Mindful school advocates present their curricula as being apolitical, non-ideological, and evidence-based, but such claims are illusory.

  chapter twelve

  Mindful Warriors

  In 1966, my uncle returned from his second tour of duty in Vietnam. He told me that on his next tour he would cut off an “ear from a gook” and send it home to me as a souvenir of the war. Disgusted at the time by this grotesque promise, looking back I feel compassion for what he must have endured. My uncle was already suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) due to the horrors he faced as a US Army Vietnamese interpreter, serving on the frontline of an extremely violent and unjust war.

  Up to a third of US soldiers now suffer from stress, trauma, and unimaginable pain from repeated service in Iraq and Afghanistan.1 I believe every effort should be made to ensure that soldiers, reservists and veterans receive the best available medical and psychological treatments for PTSD, including meditative practices. However, the military also uses these methods to “optimize warrior performance” prior to combat deployment.2 I have strong objections to the use of mindfulness to train better killers.

  As described in a statement on the latest research: “The US military has explored offering mindfulness training to soldiers as a low-cost tool to optimize soldiers’ cognitive performance and wellbeing.”3 The underlying study tracked one hundred and twenty elite Special Operations Forces troops, who were given a stripped-down eight-hour course in Mindfulness-Based Attention Training (MBAT), a modification of MBSR, like other courses used by the military. Stressing the combat relevance of developing “Sustained Attention Response” skills, the study says: “simulated small-arms engagements involve similar speed-accuracy compensation.”4 In other words, soldiers shoot straighter.

  The lead author of this study was Amishi Jha, co-director of the University of Miami’s Mindfulness Research and Practice Initiative. According to Jha, a worldwide authority on teaching mindfulness to soldiers, pre-deployment training acts as a form of “mental armor,” protecting against combat stress.5 This strikes me as another example of the military’s fondness for Orwellian doublespeak, or what Professor William Lutz calls “language that avoids or shifts responsibility, language that is at variance with its real or purported meaning.”6

  It discourages thought, like the euphemistic vagueness of such obfuscating jargon as “surgical strikes” (which often misfire), “collateral damage” (the foreseeable killing of civilians), or “laying down a carpet” (saturation bombing). Telling us that mindfulness is a prophylactic against “the stressors of deployment” is nothing but a smokescreen for the mission of killing.

  Let us not forget that the death toll in Iraq since the US-led invasion in 2003 is conservatively estimated at five hundred thousand. Nearly five thousand US soldiers have been killed, and the cost of the unjust wars in Iraq and Afghanistan — with no end to either in sight — had reached $2.4 trillion by 2017, according to the Congressional Budget Office. Civilian casualties in Afghanistan hit a record high in early 2018, averaging about ten deaths a day.

  Amoral Maze

  Back in 2009, Jha presented findings on military applications of mindfulness to the Dalai Lama. Describing herself as “very conflicted” as to whether her “science might be used for good or evil,” she sought approval, saying: “It seems to me that there’s a trust in these practices, assuming they’re taught properly, that is corrective, that the qualities that might be developed could lead to greater good.” Getting no answer, she followed this up by requesting advice. The response was curt. The Dalai Lama said: “Zero!” After a pause in which onlookers laughed, he added: “I appreciate your work. That’s all.”7

  Jha defends what she does as harm reduction. “Noncombatant or friendly fire injuries frequently occur when shooters misidentify their target or fail to appropriately inhibit pre-potent responses resulting in unintentional harm to noncombatants or allies,” her latest study says. “The chance to intervene against even a single attentional lapse or cognitive failure would be consequential if that failure contributed to unnecessary loss of life or the loss of critical mission objectives.”8

  Surely there are better ways to prevent loss of life than assisting the military with its objectives? The prospects of mindfulness being “taught properly” in this context are highly debatable, especially as programs scale up, while mainly teaching concentration. Jha has received more than $7 million in grants from the US Army and Department of Defense for her research, with a further $1 million from the Henry Jackson Society, a thinktank that promotes an interventionist foreign policy.9

  The military is spending heavily on mindfulness. The US Army alone has invested over $125 million in researching resilience as part of its “Comprehensive Soldier Fitness” (CSF) initiative.10 This controversial program awarded Martin Seligman at the University of Pennsylvania a $31 million no-bid contract to teach positive psychology to 1.1 million US soldiers.11 The CSF program offers training in emotional self-regulation skills, including mindfulness. And the Army Research Laboratory has given Valerie Rice nearly $1 million for related work on “Expeditious Resiliency.”

  Discussion of the context requiring resilience is taboo. The clinical psychologist John Dyckman recalls attending a meeting with CSF soldiers and civilian personnel. “As a ground rule for our discussion,” he says, “they insisted that we not engage in any discussion of the ethics of the ‘missions’ — i.e. the wars of dubious morality — that they were sent to.” When he objected, Dyckman was reminded that elected officials control the armed forces. As he was told: “It is with the government — and the people who elect it — that the moral burden lies.”12

  Meanwhile, scientists build amoral frameworks to militarize mindfulness. The original model — based on MBSR — was called Mindfulness-Based Mind Fitness Training, shortened to MMFT, or “M-Fit.” Offered to soldiers before combat deployment, it was based on “real-world examples from the counterinsurgency environment that show how mind fitness skills can enhance performance,” according to a study by Jha and Elizabeth Stanley, who created MMFT.13

  Early experiments with MMFT by the Naval Health Research Center’s Warfighter Performance Lab included the creation of a mock Afghan village near San Diego, where platoons of Marines were confronted by blasts and screaming actors to generate stress. “We’re giving you these emotions now so when it happens for real, you won’t be acting so crazy,” First Lieutenant Giles Royster told a team with minimal combat experience. “You’ll be able to calm yourself down.”14 The Marines dismissed the idea that they were misappropriating mindfulness: “Some people might say these are Eas
tern-based religious practices but this goes way beyond that,” said Jeffery Bearor at the Marine Corps training and education command in Quantico, Virginia. “This is not tied to any religious practice. This is about mental preparation to better handle stress.”15

  For MMFT’s purposes: “Mindfulness is a mental mode characterized by full attention to present-moment experience without judgment, elaboration, or emotional reactivity.”16 This is a paraphrasing of MBSR’s operational definition by Jon Kabat-Zinn, who has long been involved with teaching mindfulness to soldiers, still serving Jha as an advisor.17 In an interview from 2014, as quoted by Elizabeth Stanley, he briefly mentions opposing the war in Vietnam, before reflecting at length on recent hobnobbing with the military, including “a number of generals who were interested in at least talking about the value of greater mindfulness in their commands.” Meanwhile, Kabat-Zinn says:

  Col Brumage [an Army physician] invited me to come out to Oahu and conduct a two-day mindfulness retreat. Liz Stanley and I led it together for about two hundred people. It felt like we were probably doing more good than harm sowing these seeds. And those explorations continued with the Surgeon General of the Army, and with senior officers in the Navy and Air Force.18

  Whether or not this little trip to Hawaii was paid for by taxpayers, Kabat-Zinn’s collusion with military top brass raises ethical issues. His dislocation of mindfulness from its traditional framework makes it ethically neutral, whatever he “felt like” about “doing more good than harm.” The technocratic descriptions of MMFT as “attentional control training” or “stress inoculation” would not have been possible without Kabat-Zinn’s reduction of mindfulness to “bare attention,” leaving it vulnerable to decontextualized applications. Had the ethical aspects of mindfulness not been removed, such forms of training would not be compatible with the mission of the military, whose soldiers are indoctrinated from boot camp to inflict harm and pain on the enemy.

  Kabat-Zinn likes to imagine that mindfulness will somehow undo this, making warriors kinder. “Even if mindfulness is used by the banker or the soldier to improve their professional skills,” he once told Oprah Winfrey, “it will also nurture the innate compassion of their humanity.”19 There is really no evidence for this fluffy idea. The US military would surely have stopped investing in mindfulness if it turned trained killers into models of compassion, refusing to follow orders when their consciences objected. It seems that MBAT and MMFT simply do what they advertise: help soldiers to focus and deal with stress. If this stops them shooting frantically at innocents, I suppose that’s better than another My Lai, but it does very little to stop the mass killing that war entails.

  MMFT’s creator, Elizabeth Stanley, is more plainspoken. A former Military Intelligence officer, she comes from, as she puts it, “a long warrior lineage, with Stanleys having served in the US Army every generation since the Revolutionary War.”20 Her description of MMFT makes it clear that killing remains the soldier’s core objective:

  A true warrior must be able to still her body and mind to call forth strength; exhibit endurance during harsh environmental conditions; have awareness of herself, others and the wider environment so she can make discerning choices; access compassion for herself, her compatriots, her adversary and the locals where she is deployed; and show self-control during provocation so that she doesn’t overreact. And yet, if the moment demands, she must also have the capacity to kill, cleanly, without hesitation and without remorse.21

  As she reflects elsewhere, the basic teaching of MMFT — “paying attention to what’s happening” — is by no means new. “Warriors have been using these techniques for millennia before they go to battle,” she says. “Meditation may become as standard in the military as rifle practice, another way of making troops more effective and resilient.”22 She is not mistaken. When Buddhism has been closely allied with the state, it has also been used as an instrument of militarization. This is particularly likely when its ethical moorings are removed, as happened with Japanese Zen in World War II.

  Zen and the Art of the M-16

  In his book Zen at War, Brian Victoria exposes how both the Soto and Rinzai sects of Japanese Buddhism supported military imperialism.23 At the start of the twentieth century, Japan had won a famous victory over Russia — the first time an Asian power had defeated Europeans. Many apologists for the war attributed Japan’s fierce fighting spirit to the ancient code of Bushido, the Way of the Warrior. Warped interpretations of ideas such as “emptiness” (ku) and “no mind” (mu) fed a non-dual theory that acts of killing had no karmic effect. Takuan, a seventeenth-century Zen master, assured his samurai disciples: “The uplifted sword has no will of its own, it is all of emptiness. The man who is about to be struck down is also of emptiness, and so is the one who wields the sword.”

  This line was quoted by the influential scholar D.T. Suzuki’s Zen and Japanese Culture, first published in 1938. Better known in the West as an inspiring teacher in the 1950s, he also helped to rationalize death during World War II. The imperialist version of Zen revised Buddhist doctrines, and coopted meditation for the war effort. Incredible as it might sound, war was seen as an expression of compassion. Fighting, and even dying in battle, was a way to repay a debt of gratitude to the emperor, and Japanese warriors were considered “bodhisattvas,” fearlessly offering their lives to save the state.

  “The sword is generally associated with killing, and most of us wonder how it can come into connection with Zen, which is a school of Buddhism teaching the gospel of love and mercy,” Suzuki wrote in Zen and Japanese Culture.

  “The fact is that the art of swordsmanship distinguishes between the sword that kills and the sword that gives life.” As he sought to explain, “one who is compelled to lift the sword” has a higher calling than mere killing. Should he ever wield it mortally, “it is as though the sword performs automatically its function of justice, which is the function of mercy.”24

  This unity of Zen and the sword played a fundamental role in indoctrinating troops. Another widely cited teacher was Suzuki Shosan, whose seventeenth-century teachings had stressed the importance of samadhi, a Sanskrit term often translated as “meditative absorption.” The single-minded concentration of samurai warriors was the source of their power, Shosan explained. “The military arts in particular can’t be executed with a slack mind,” he said. “This energy of Zen samadhi is everything. The man of arms, however, is in Zen samadhi while he applies his skill.”25

  In particular, Shosan emphasized the need to practice tokinokoe zazen, or Zen meditation “in the midst of war cries.” This sounds rather like the modernized version of military mindfulness, with screaming actors drilling Marines to face battlefield stress. Consider Shoshan’s admonition to a warrior:

  It’s best to practice zazen from the start amid hustle and bustle. A warrior, in particular, absolutely must practice zazen that works amid war cries. Gunfire crackles, spears clash down the line, a roar goes up and the fray is on: and that’s where, firmly disposed, he puts meditation into action. At a time like that, what use could he have for a zazen that prefers quiet? However fond of Buddhism a warrior may be, he’d better throw it out if it doesn’t work amid war cries.26

  As Brian Victoria’s book explains, in World War II “cross-legged meditation (zazen) was the fountainhead of the mental power derived from samadhi, a power that was available to modern Japanese soldiers as it had once been to samurai warriors.”27 A similar one-pointed focus inspired special attack units of kamikaze (“divine wind”) pilots. The Soto Zen priest Masunaga Reiho even said their suicidal spirit was a “conversion of mind as the achievement of complete enlightenment.”28

  Contrary to these claims — as well as the modern idea that mindfulness is merely paying attention — traditional Buddhist teachings place a clear prohibition on intentionally killing living beings. This cardinal precept is found in many forms in Buddhist doctrine, but they all share a basic commitment to non-violence, non-harming of others and the culti
vation of good will towards all sentient beings.

  When separated from these ideas — or allied to political doctrines like militarist Zen, or the demonization of minority Muslims in modern Myanmar — spiritual practices such as mindfulness are easily perverted to justify violence. Because Elizabeth Stanley thinks MMFT is a just a way to enhance concentration, she sees no problem with using it to train mindful killers. In a chapter in Bio-Inspired Innovation and National Security, Stanley writes:

  The military already incorporates mindfulness training — although it does not call it this — into perhaps the most fundamental solider skill, firing a weapon. Soldiers learning how to fire the M-16 rifle are taught to pay attention to their breath and synchronize the breathing process to the trigger finger’s movement, “squeezing” off the round while exhaling.29

  The unity of mindfulness with firing a weapon is remarkably similar to Suzuki’s propaganda on Zen and the sword.

  Mindful Terrorists

  Japanese assassins used Zen samadhi power in the 1930s, killing the former finance minister, among others. As one of the killers explained when brought to trial:

  After starting my practice of zazen, I entered a state of samadhi the likes of which I had never experienced before. I felt my spirit become unified, really unified, and when I opened my eyes from their half-closed meditative position I noticed the smoke from the incense curling up and touching the ceiling. At this point it suddenly came to me — I would be able to carry out [the killing] that night.30

  A more contemporary example of something similar is the Norwegian far-right extremist and mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik. In 2011, Breivik detonated a car bomb in downtown Oslo, killing eight people. He then went on a shooting spree, killing sixty-nine others at a summer camp. As well as identifying as a fascist, a worshipper of Odin and a Nazi, Breivik compared himself to a Japanese banzai warrior seeking enlightenment. In a psychiatric evaluation, Breivik described how he used meditation to “numb the full spectrum of human emotion — happiness to sorrow, despair, hopelessness and fear.”31 Yet this taught him no empathy for his victims. A court psychiatric expert wrote in his report: