McMindfulness
Page 18
He shows no emotion in relation to the act he is charged with, and explains his desensitized state as a result of meditation (Bushido = meditation to be able to show contempt of death), like other ‘Warriors’ for example Afghanistan soldiers and others who must do what they do (take lives).32
These examples illustrate the dangers of viewing meditation as simply a method for training attention. Decontextualizing mindfulness makes it more available to terrorists and killers. Yet whenever Kabat-Zinn is asked to address these important concerns about militarized practice, he responds with trademark flowery vagueness:
Woven into mindfulness is an orientation towards non-harming and seeing deeply into the nature of things, which in some way implies, or at least invites, seeing the interconnectedness between the seer and the seen, the object and the subject. It is a non-dual perspective from the very beginning, resting on an ethical foundation.33
He compounds this by claiming that mindfulness, as he imparts it, involves the cultivation of “affectionate attention,” and that it is therefore inherently wholesome.34
The idea of a solider showing “affectionate attention” towards an Afghan while pulling the trigger on his M-16 seems absurd. How exactly does training combat troops result in “non-harming” and “seeing the interconnectedness” between Marines and their targets? It seems very difficult to integrate ethics into military mindfulness, not least on account of the dubious nature of US missions and political objectives.
As noted by Matthieu Ricard, a French Buddhist monk, “there can be mindful snipers and mindful psychopaths who maintain a calm and stable mind. But there cannot be caring snipers and caring psychopaths.”35 Training soldiers to care while killing seems unlikely to change much, however sincerely people try. Rejecting the rationalizations of Kabat-Zinn, John Dyckman suggests learning from Japanese Zen Buddhism, which is still suffering from its enthusiastic collaboration with militarism. “We need to be very careful in separating the ‘techniques’ of Buddhist practice from the context of non-violence lest we repeat the same shameful history,” Dyckman warns.36
Proponents of military mindfulness call it a form of “harm reduction.” They say it improves working memory capacity and emotional self-regulation, preventing soldiers in war zones from overreacting. These are not empty statements, and it is obviously better to distinguish combatants from children. However, focusing on such benefits shifts attention away from the broader ethics and politics of using mindfulness to make trained killers more effective. “Attention control” for soldiers needs to be differentiated from Buddhist right mindfulness — where the aim is not improvements in marksmanship, but to develop compassion, wholesome mental states, and skillful (non-harming) behaviors, which are put in the service of all sentient beings, including those perceived as “enemies”.37
This is far from the objectives of MMFT, MBAT or any other form of military training in concentration skills. A few moving vignettes about soldiers avoiding snap judgments that could have killed civilians does not amount to evidence that these practices have ethical benefits. Perhaps in the circumscribed world of “military ethics,” this counts as a breakthrough. But it means very little when the US invades other countries without justification, dismissing the authority of any institution to charge it with war crimes.
The US military is a highly organized system of violence and institutionalized ill will. Killing is its raison d’être. It is a little known fact that 75-80% of soldiers did not fire on exposed enemies in World War II, which caused US generals great concern. By the height of the Vietnam War, the firing rate had been increased to nearly 95% as a result of enhanced psychological techniques in boot camp.38 These are now well established, using desensitization, operational conditioning and the defense mechanism of denial. Recruits are systematically trained to inflict harm when ordered. Mindfulness just makes them more resilient. If that decreases the chances that they return home and kill themselves, or commit violent crimes, then perhaps that counts as harm reduction. But it is really a very far cry from the Hippocratic Oath, and its principle of starting by doing no harm, which is the context in which MBSR was originally developed.
There is nothing in the Buddha’s discourses to justify the intentional killing of another human being — civilian or enemy. Scholars such as P.D. Premasiri and Laksiri Jayasuriya assure us that the concept of holy war — or even a “just war” — cannot be found in the early Buddhist canon.39 40 Although the Buddha did not deny the inevitable reality of human conflict, he avoided cozying up to armies and teaching their soldiers to be more resilient. Instead, he advised kings and generals to avoid violent means, counseling them to examine the genesis of conflict and to identify skillful behaviors to resolve them.
If MBSR is, as Kabat-Zinn claims, an expression of the “universal dharma that is co-extensive, if not identical, with the teachings of the Buddha,” then the mindfulness community has a clear choice. Either it should state clearly that military adaptations are not in accordance with Buddhist teachings, or it should acknowledge its own complicity in US militarism, confronting ethical dilemmas with courage and honesty, not platitudes and doublespeak.
chapter thirteen
Mindful Politics
After winning a third term in the swing state of Ohio, Congressman Tim Ryan was stressed. He signed up for a mindfulness retreat with Jon Kabat-Zinn, and had an epiphany. Freed from the pressure in his head, he felt a sudden urge to share the benefits of mindfulness with everyone. “Why didn’t anyone teach me this when I was a kid?” he reflects in his book A Mindful Nation. “I wanted to teach it to my two-year-old nephew, to my brother, to my mom.” Quickly realizing that he’d got “a little carried away,” his buttoned-down self took charge. “I decided I would advocate in Congress and on the Appropriations Committee for integrating mindfulness into key aspects of society.”1
Kabat-Zinn was delighted. “Each one of us could influence the world by taking a degree of personal responsibility for developing our own unique ways to embody mindful awareness,” he writes in a foreword to Ryan’s book. “That may well be one of the most profound ways we can contribute to the wellbeing of the larger society and the planet itself.”2 This is Kabat-Zinn’s revolutionary vision: changing the world, one individual at a time. “The shift in consciousness that mindfulness involves really is a radical act, in the sense of going to the very root of our problems with suffering and its human causes,” he says.3 All we have to do is search inside ourselves, and the world will be transformed. So the only thing we need to do materially is train more mindfulness teachers.
However, what if Ryan had a different mission? When he marveled at his mindful moment with a raisin (“Have you ever just looked at one?”), what if he had seen it from a broader perspective than his self-centered view? Never mind how the raisin looks, feels, smells and tastes to a privileged congressman, what if Ryan had contemplated the farm where the raisin was grown by Hispanic migrants doing back-breaking work in the San Joaquin valley, earning a cent for every two-hundred grapes harvested. Reflection on the raisin could call to mind units from US Immigration and Customs Enforcement rounding up workers like cattle and deporting them. Might Ryan be cognizant of the smog where the raisin was grown? What about the water shortages, or the fossil fuels burned to transport raisins from central California to his Catskills retreat? What about the grocery store staff that unloaded, unpacked and stocked raisins on the shelf? Would Ryan be mindful of the fact that the CEOs who run large agribusiness and grocery chains earn hundreds of times as much as store clerks?
Needless to say, his book raises none of these questions. Instead, Ryan hawks a form of “mind cure” that stems from nineteenth-century New Thought, which taught that positive mental training could rid individuals of disease. It is unsurprising that his early inspiration was Deepak Chopra, a purveyor of Hindu mysticism dressed up as science. “I think I listened to the Seven Spiritual Laws of Success a million and a half times driving back and forth to law school,” Ryan
recalls.4 A former high-school quarterback, he got interested in mindfulness when he learned that Phil Jackson, the legendary NBA coach, had taught Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls to meditate. If it helped them compete, it must really be powerful. No wonder Ryan wants to share it with everyone; winning is the name of the game in the neoliberal world in which he thrives. When he was elected in 2002, aged twenty-nine, he was the youngest congressman. Now he thinks mindfulness will help him work better with Donald Trump — and maybe even beat him.5
Politics as Therapy
Many of the people whom Ryan represents are far from winning. His district includes the rust belt city of Youngstown, whose decline was immortalized in song by Bruce Springsteen. Once known as Steeltown, Youngstown has lost more than 60% of its population since manufacturing collapsed, depriving it of thousands of well-paying jobs. Plagued by high rates of poverty, unemployment, crime, domestic violence, and mental illness, the city hovers near the bottom of the Gallup Wellbeing index, and in 2014 was officially the most miserable place to live in the United States. How might mindfulness help the survivors in a town that resembles a bombed out war-zone? Will a more positive mental attitude bring back jobs? Are inhabitants to blame for their stress and anxiety? Is there more to being mindful than stoically accepting a dire situation?
Not apparently for Ryan, or Kabat-Zinn. Both men are congenital optimists, seeing the issue as restoring hope by building character. As the subtitle of Ryan’s book puts it, mindfulness can “recapture the American spirit.” The sky is literally the limit. “The mindfulness movement is not quite as dramatic as the moon shot,” Ryan writes, “or the civil rights movement, but I believe in the long run it can have just as great an impact.”6 Exciting stuff! So, what does it consist of? The usual inward focus, of course, letting go of painful thoughts: that way, the downtrodden of Youngstown can “rediscover their American values that lead to a prosperous life.”7
Kabat-Zinn is more overtly depoliticized, having already reduced mindfulness to an “ideological opiate,” to quote Craig Martin’s term in Capitalizing Religion.8 Kabat-Zinn’s psychologized version tells individuals to reframe their experience, ignoring what caused it — or engaging politically to change those conditions. “Mindfulness is not a matter of left or right, Republican or Democrat, liberal or conservative,” he writes in the foreword to Ryan’s book. “Ultimately, it is about being human, pure and simple.”9
He seems to be suggesting that this pure human nature arises from nowhere, so anyone can be freed of their social conditioning, as long as they are mindful enough to tune out of it. And if that means accepting that the odds are stacked against them, then so be it.
This hyper-individual religion has policy outcomes. Ryan sits on both the House Appropriations Committee and the House Budget Committee — two powerful arbiters of federal expenditures. Ryan’s vision of mindfulness does not involve changing economic priorities to make society less brutally competitive and unequal. Instead, he aims to help people cope with these painful conditions by improving access to privatized mindfulness training in schools, corporations, government and the military.
Although Ryan is a Democrat, his idea of a “mindful nation” is conservative, making individuals responsible for their own welfare. Self-help rhetoric cloaks the realm of political struggle — undermining solidarity and quests for social and economic justice. Everything else is subordinate to personal efforts to be more mindful. “We don’t need to move to the left or to the right,” Ryan writes. “We all need to go a little deeper.”10 This well-intentioned “politics of depth,” with its hope for a kinder, more compassionate world, stands little chance against the daily realities of neoliberal culture.
Like organic food and commodified yoga, mindfulness has wide appeal but no political affiliation. Moreover, argues Matthew Moore, a professor of political science: “Because mindfulness seems unlikely to change people’s fundamental values or beliefs, wider practice of mindfulness would not be likely to bring otherwise unsympathetic Americans closer to the left.”11
This is a missed opportunity. Stress is demonstrably linked to social hierarchies, and researchers such as Nancy Adler at the University of California San Francisco have shown that perceived socioeconomic status is a robust predictor of a range of ailments, including cardiovascular disease, hypertension, diabetes, arthritis, stress and depression.12 Meanwhile, the quality of social relations depends on adequate material foundations. In The Spirit Level, Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett observe that “the scale of inequality provides a powerful policy lever on the psychological wellbeing of all of us.”13
None of this is mentioned in A Mindful Nation. Instead, Ryan claims that the issues afflicting society are caused by our distraction from our authentic inner selves. His diagnosis is flawed and misguided. He might even use it to run for the presidency. In the summer of 2018, he was said to be targeting “yoga voters.” James Gimian, a friend of Ryan’s who publishes Mindful magazine, calls this constituency “the kind of folks who realize that while they grew up with their mom saying ‘Pay attention,’ nobody trained them in how to pay attention and use their mind to focus on what’s important.”14
What’s important for Ryan is turning inwards. He started a “Quiet Time Caucus” on Capitol Hill, gathering a handful of Democratic staffers and members of Congress for a meditative time out. The benefits seem to boil down to being less judgmental. If we are more mindful, “we may be just a little less critical of others, and of ourselves,” he says. “We may more easily forgive the people who have hurt us. We may sit down and have civil political conversations with those who strongly disagree with us.”15 Or we may just tune out, like the Google executives confronted by protestors at Wisdom 2.0. Either way, his revolutionary slogan seems no more inspiring than “can’t we all just get along?”
This is unsurprising, since he borrows so heavily from Kabat-Zinn. Ever the guru, Kabat-Zinn prefers mystical waffle to taking a stand that might narrow his audience. His goal is to make people mindful. If enough of us practice, a critical mass could be attained. If politicians join us, they might become kinder, and engage more fruitfully. Perhaps they can even lead us to the promised land of milk and honey. But the last thing we need right now is a political agenda, as Kabat-Zinn tells us in Coming to Our Senses:
Cultivating greater mindfulness in our lives does not imply that we would fall into one set of ideological views and opinions or another, but that we might see more freshly for ourselves, with eyes of wholeness, moment by moment. But what mindfulness can do for us, and it is a very important function, is reveal our opinions, and all opinions, as opinions, so that we will know them for what they are and perhaps not be so caught by them and blinded by them, whatever their content.16
Perhaps. This is one of Kabat-Zinn’s favorite disclaimers. His hopeful assertions are littered with qualifiers like “might” and “may,” but he asks us to take them on faith. When pushed for supporting evidence, he effectively shrugs and says: “who knows?” As he puts it himself in a scholarly article: “I love the whole notion that it may be too early to tell.”17
Make America Mindful Again
Ryan and Kabat-Zinn seem to confuse their advocacy of being fully present in the moment with particular forms of political consciousness. Being present is not a guarantee of being just. There is a naïve assumption that spiritual practice develops a “progressive” point of view, so examples of practitioners with different perspectives are dismissed with the claim that they must have practiced wrongly. Yet Heinrich Himmler, the head of the Nazi SS and master architect of the Holocaust, was a fan of yoga and meditation — he even planned retreats for elite SS members at a medieval castle.18 He thought yogic practice could internally arm soldiers for battle and help death camp guards to process stress.19
Unconvinced by Kabat-Zinn’s conjectures, the political scientist and Buddhist scholar Matthew Moore argues that mindfulness might even harden our opinions:
If through my mindfulness pract
ice I notice that many of my beliefs and dispositions are variable and unstable, but two or three beliefs are consistent and ever-present, I may conclude that those beliefs are not merely central to my experience but true. To the extent that this happens, mindfulness may have the effect, contrary to the hopes of Ryan and Kabat-Zinn, of making me less humble, less flexible, less tolerant, and less willing to engage with people who believe different things.20
Ryan seems unwilling to engage more fully with workers’ interests. Even though one of his districts swung Republican in 2016 after losing nineteen thousand manufacturing jobs, he is wary of speaking the language of class struggle. “You’re not going to make me hate somebody just because they’re rich,” Ryan told moderate Democrats in 2018, distancing himself from socialists like Bernie Sanders. “I want to be rich!”21 If he were to run for president, Ryan would prefer to speak to yoga practitioners, who are estimated to number tens of millions. He might find this turns workers off. For now, he’s trying to sell himself to both. “I think once you meet me, you realize I’m not necessarily some soft yoga guy,” he says. “I’ve been in the union halls. I’ll drink a Miller Lite with you.”22
Perhaps, as Kabat-Zinn might say — but it doesn’t stop Ryan’s agenda furthering priorities that disempower workers. Under the prevailing neoliberal consensus, economic policy serves the interests of capital. Individuals bear the brunt of the consequences, and are told to treat their wounds with the practice of mindfulness. The practice also teaches self-discipline, so they mindfully learn to compete for opportunities. This is presented as freedom, and social solidarity is framed as a burden. As Sam Binkley notes in Happiness as Enterprise, the whole neoliberal project, supported by mindfulness, is “a privatization of workplace angst and the suppression of its collectivizing potential.”23