McMindfulness

by Ronald Purser

  conclusion

  Liberating Mindfulness

  As mindfulness is currently taught, its revolutionary rhetoric is a myth. Even if it helps us feel better, the causes of suffering in the world remain unchanged. To understand why, let’s consider Donald Trump. Ever since this clown from reality TV took the global stage, I’ve been perplexed about the source of his undeniable appeal to millions of voters. I’ve read many accounts by political pundits, and none are fully persuasive. So I’d like to offer one of my own. Most of us have traits of dishonesty, hypocrisy, arrogance, greed, shortsightedness, racism, hatred, fear, self-centeredness, and stupidity. We are prone to feeling guilty about ourselves as a result, which is part of the endemic low self-esteem in modern culture. Trump not only displays these tendencies without a trace of conscience, he unabashedly flaunts them, encouraging his followers to embrace and celebrate vice as virtue. Denying the dangers of climate change and rampant inequality, he tells the public to focus solely on their personal security, reeling off lists of scapegoats to blame for their problems. Whatever our defects, we want to feel good about ourselves. Trump suggests that we can, while flinging morality to the winds.

  Despite the apparent sincerity of his intentions, Jon Kabat-Zinn does something similar. Having secularized mindfulness to help patients face chronic pain, he sells it as a global panacea. We are simply told to focus on the present, ignoring the long-term effects of our behavior. Abstaining from being “judgmental,” we are invited to abandon ethical discernment. Just like Trump, the mindfulness movement promotes moral ambiguity to help us feel better. Both reflect the triumph of narcissism in modern American culture.

  Wait-and-see-ism

  There are traces of this in Kabat-Zinn’s analysis, particularly when touting his mindful revolution. “What’s the point of not being optimistic?” he tells an interviewer, when asked about the absence of evidence for mass transformation:

  If I fall into despair, you know, and I think it’s all going in the direction of greater delusion, and now even mindfulness is falling into the black hole of delusion, well, I might as well kill myself now, do you know what I’m saying? It’s like, what is the point? So why not see the beauty in human beings and then create maybe even laws that regulate how businesses are done so they don’t destroy people in the process, and we have legislators who are trying to do that.1

  The depth of delusion displayed by such comments is difficult to fathom. Sure, it might help to “create maybe even laws” against corporate excesses, and actually enforce them, but this is not his message when addressing CEOs or politicians, never mind the public, who could conceivably be mobilized for structural change. As for the notion that “we have legislators who are trying to do that” already, the lack of prosecutions of senior bankers for fraud since 2008 speaks for itself.

  Instead of combining mindfulness with meaningful steps towards “revolution,” Kabat-Zinn prefers to bask in the glow of the present moment, dazzling audiences with fuzzy abstractions like “the beauty in human beings.” After all, as he likes to remind us, “it is way too early to tell what the likely fate of humankind will be.”2 This whimsical comment is borrowed from Zhou Enlai, the first Premier of Communist China, who was asked about the impact of the French Revolution (though he thought this meant the protests of 1968). Kabat-Zinn likes to pepper his speech with Asian references, dropping hints at Buddhist wisdom — in the form of Zen koans, or traditional terms such as dharma — to add spiritual cachet to secular mindfulness. By cloaking it in cryptic mystique, he generates interest in his brand. But unless his rhetoric about authenticity is converted into teachings on ethics or interconnection, he might as well be hawking Happy Meals with toys.

  In an interview about his promotion of military mindfulness, Kabat-Zinn recalls meeting the Zen master Harada Roshi, who gave him a poster saying: “Never forget the one-thousand-year view.”3 Does it really take that long to grasp that giving soldiers “a kinder, gentler machine gun hand” — as Neil Young puts it — is unlikely to dismantle the military-industrial complex, or end its pursuit of perpetual war? The United States already spends more on weapons than the next ten countries combined.4

  I’m unconvinced that humans will exist in a thousand years without radical changes. It seems foolhardy to assume that watching one’s breath will have any systemic effect on climate change, biodiversity loss, pollution, or mass environmental devastation. As for changing the pluto- cratic control of government, finance, and the media by corporations — or ending unemployment, inequality, homelessness, substance abuse, or white supremacy — it seems almost mean to suggest that paying attention will wave magic wands.

  Ironically, Kabat-Zinn’s ideas about future deliverance distract us from what the present most requires of us: political engagement. As the University of Chicago’s Lauren Berlant notes: “Optimism is cruel when the object/scene that ignites a sense of possibility actually makes it impossible to attain the expansive transformation for which a person or a people risks striving.”5 Dissent is often stifled by fixation on the moment, letting go of “doing,” and thoughts about action. Instead, we are told to retreat to unstable conditions, indulging in what Berlant calls “conventional good-life fantasies.” Mindfulness is all very well as a basic coping device, but as a revolutionary strategy it seems empty, tempting its adherents with the comforting impasse of passivity.

  A life of mindful moments is one at risk of “cultural infantilization,” warns the educational scholar and critic Henry Giroux. “Thoughtlessness has become something that now occupies a privileged, if not celebrated, place in the political landscape and the mainstream cultural apparatuses.”6 Unless it is combined with more liberating teachings, mindfulness just makes oppressive systems work more gently. Echoing the neoliberal message of self-management, Kabat-Zinn shies away from advocating cures, preferring instead the ambiguities of “healing.” As he puts it in his magnum opus, Full Catastrophe Living: “Healing, as we are using the word here, does not mean ‘curing,’ although the two words are often used interchangeably.” Rather, “healing implies the possibility that we can relate differently to illness,” by “coming to terms with things as they are.”7

  Calling this a theory of social change, as Kabat-Zinn does, is not only misleading, it encourages people to bury their heads in the sand. By giving up on action so the present feels bearable, they are “permitting the present to fully to colonize the future,” writes Eric Cazdyn in The Already Dead: The New Time of Politics, Culture and Illness.8 Of course, no one is mindful all the time, but accepting that it might be desirable is disempowering. It acts as therapy for “realists” who have swallowed the idea that “there is no alternative” to the market logic of Margaret Thatcher. The best we can hope for is palliative care in a neoliberal nightmare, adapting to the brutal forces that afflict us. This is a morally and spiritually bankrupt way to imagine human lives.

  Waking Up

  Mindfulness could still be revolutionary, but it has to be taught in different ways. Much of this book has effectively shown how not to do it. It has also shown how resistant its leading proponents are to critics. When I draw attention to the flaws of mindfulness programs at conferences, in articles, or online, I’m usually accused of “being negative.” For example, Ted Meissner, an MBSR teacher who runs The Secular Buddhist podcast, once asked on Facebook: “Are you going to do anything other than be a crank?”

  And Michael Chaskalson, a UK corporate mindfulness consultant, stood up at the end of my presentation at the Bangor mindfulness conference, demanding: “Well, what is it you want us to do differently? What solutions do you have for us?”

  It’s tempting to say: “You’re the ones peddling this crap. Why not stop it?” However, that would be churlish. Besides, unless promoters of mindfulness want to look more critically at what they do, no amount of clarifying is likely to change it. For now, asking challenging questions is important, particularly related to mental conditioning that goes unacknowledged. Perhaps this
should even be part of a mindfulness program: sitting with difficult questions, without expecting easy answers. Who or what is privileged when this sort of questioning is shut down? Because most of the time, that’s what happens.

  In 2015, the veteran activist Angela Davis pressed Kabat-Zinn to confront the limitations of his approach. Teaching individual police officers to be mindful wouldn’t stop policing from being a racist institution, she said. “Totally agree,” he replied, before throwing it back at her. “If mindfulness can easily be coopted in that way or just kept at a level where it doesn’t really change the structural sort of grid or lattice of our institutions because they are self-preserving, then what do you see as an effective alternative?”9

  Well, one could start by admitting that mindfulness practice alone is insufficient. There is no radical blueprint in paying attention. If the aim is to effect social change, then methods of pursuing it need to be taught. Calming the mind might help these sink in, but it’s just a prelim- inary. By failing to focus on anything but momentary experience, while spouting utopian prophecies of peace and harmony, modern mindfulness is a messianic con trick. The movement’s underpinnings are deeply conservative and American: a naïve belief in progress, idealism, and rugged individualism, with all of us free to get lost in a romantic hybrid of Whitmanesque wordplay and ersatz Buddhism.

  If promoters of mindfulness are seriously interested in change, they should start by acknowledging the problem: their own complicity in managing systems that naturalize suffering. Instead of channeling people’s frustrations into critical questioning of political, cultural, and historical conditions that cause unhappiness, they want to help us endure them. In The New Prophets of Capitalism, Nicole Aschoff explains how calming us down with an optimistic myth serves neoliberal capitalism. For it to endure, she writes, “people must willingly participate in and reproduce its structures and norms,” and, especially in times of crisis, “capitalism must draw upon cultural ideas that exist outside of the circuits of profit-making.”10 Mindfulness fits the bill perfectly. Kabat-Zinn is its prophet, joining the ranks of capitalist apologists such as Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg, the media mogul Oprah Winfrey, billionaire Bill Gates, and John Mackey, CEO of Whole Foods.

  It is probably no coincidence that Kabat-Zinn — like other mindfulness gurus — traded his activism for meditative quietism fifty years ago. From his comfortable perch, it might make sense to be a passive observer of human afflictions, just “radically accepting” unwholesome conditions. But commoditized impotence is not very helpful to those on the economic precipice, facing a shrinking welfare state, and other disadvantages from xenophobia to cultural trauma. Kabat-Zinn’s chief cheerleaders disagree. “Whether you are struggling to put food on the table or you’re on top of the world,” insists Arianna Huffington, another multi-millionaire, “mindfulness is something that helps you connect you to yourself.”11

  But what do you do after that? If you simply bliss out and accept injustice, how is this different from being a drug addict, sedated into zombified oblivion? Kabat-Zinn likes to talk about “dropping in” to the ever-present wonder of the moment, mindfully enjoying a sunset, washing the dishes, smelling roses, or not missing a baby’s smile. This mantra sounds like Timothy Leary’s acid catchphrase: “turn on, tune in, drop out.” Neoliberal mindfulness wants us to “turn off” critical inquiry, “tune out” of the material world, and “drop in” to a private realm of isolation, reinforcing the cult of the individual. Whatever one might think about psychedelic drugs, at least they dissolve attachment to the self.

  Breaking Free

  In theory, mindfulness should do something similar — at least in its traditional Buddhist context. As described by Deborah Orr, a York University philosophy professor: “The potential result of this practice is the experiential realization that the self is a construction, we in the modern West would say a social construction, which can foster a delusional self-understanding.”12 The lack of a fixed sense of self is one of Buddhism’s core characteristics, along with impermanence, and the dissatisfaction this induces. “Like all those other people and things out there in the world, I, too, am nothing but a mental construct, a phantom’s mask covering the reality of change,” explains the scholar of Buddhism, C.W. Huntington. “Behind the facade there is no such self, only the ceaseless, ungraspable stream of events that spontaneously emerge and disappear.”13 This revelation can be deeply unsettling unless introduced in a broader context. Our fears and desires tend to make us deny it.

  To this extent, some of our suffering stems from personal delusion, and has to be addressed at the individual level. In his final words, the Buddha is said to have urged his disciples: “Strive to attain the goal by diligence.”14 However, the goal includes seeing all things as being connected: the insight of interdependence known as pratitya-samutpada. So while some of our delusion is in our heads, tuning out of the conditions that cause us to suffer is also delusional from a political point of view. In Buddhist terms, Huntington notes: “To be somebody — anybody — is to continually suffer.” Yet even if we grasp that, we live a world full of needless suffering, some of which we can alleviate by changing conditions produced by delusion, greed and ill will. These mental poisons are said to be diminished by Buddhist “right” mindfulness, allowing wholesome conduct to prevail. This can also be combined with attempts to do the same at a social level.

  When asserting his Buddhist credentials in academic journals, Kabat-Zinn sometimes alludes to these ideas. “The non-trivial question of ‘Who am I?’ points to wakefulness itself, and non-separation, to the mystery of lived experience and sentience, and the artificial separation inherent in subject/object duality,” he pontificates,

  Taking the non-dual perspective into account suggests that it is important to thread the intrinsic complementarity of the instrumental and non-instrumental dimensions of mindfulness together from the beginning both in one’s own practice and in one’s teaching.15

  If this means talking about “interbeing” — to use the non-dual language of Thich Nhat Hanh, whom Kabat-Zinn cites — few teachers do. MBSR tells individuals to focus inward on themselves. Yet it is said to impart Buddhist ethics without ever teaching them. “The mainstreaming of mindfulness in the world has always been anchored in the ethical framework that lies at the very heart of the original teachings of the Buddha,” Kabat-Zinn says,

  While MBSR does not, nor should it, explicitly address these classical foundations in a clinical context with patients, the Four Noble Truths [of human suffering, its source in desire, and Buddhist teachings that help to remove it] to have always been the soil in which the cultivation of mindfulness via MBSR and other mindfulness-based programs is rooted, and out of which it grows.16

  What he means is that teachers mean well, so compassion is implied, and nothing needs to be said. This is about as absurd as Kabat-Zinn’s suggestions that CEOs might decide to be nice and stop maximizing profits, without being compelled:

  There may be a new way of defining business, so that even banking could rest on an ethical foundation. All sorts of business could actually reexamine what their ethics are, what kind of added value they contribute to the world and then align themselves with that as the absolute foundation for not only any kind of mindfulness programs that they bring into their business but actually the bottom line of how they conduct themselves in the world and what their mission statement is.17

  His wishful thinking is extreme. If he really wants such things to happen, he needs to begin by liberating mindfulness from its neoliberal shackles. Unless it raises awareness of the social origins of suffering, mindfulness is merely self-management, locating problems in the heads of individuals. This makes the collective solutions we need a lot less likely.

  Turning Inside Out

  The liberating power of mindfulness is being snuffed out. Experts like Kabat-Zinn impose scientific methods, argues William Davies in The Happiness Industry, as “a basis to judge the behavior and mentality of peop
le, rather than the structure of power.”18 We don’t have to follow them. Instead of mindfully smothering unhappiness, while ignoring its sources, we should learn to “see things as they are,” to quote a meditative truism. “It is often said that depression is ‘anger turned inwards’,” Davies observes. “In many ways, happiness science is ‘critique turned inwards,’ despite all of the appeals by positive psychologists to ‘notice’ the world around us.”19

  Our suffering is often a guide to what needs changing — in the world as well as how we respond. Turning critique back outwards removes the intellectual cover that the mindfulness movement offers capitalism. Privatizing stress as a personal problem, and using science to affirm this agenda, mindfulness turns individuals on themselves. Not only does this blame the victims of cultural dysfunction, it drives a spiral of narcissistic self-absorption. Of course, it’s important to feel less stressed, but this has to be combined with empowering insights, not pacification. Truly revolutionary mindfulness is liberating, social, and civic. It depends on critical thinking not non-judgmental disengagement.

  Modern mindful elites like Kabat-Zinn reduce social ills to a personal “thinking disease,” caused by excessive rumination and outmoded biology from the Stone Age. MBSR draws a simple distinction between being mindful and being mindless, just as neoliberalism divides society into winners and losers. Nowhere is it suggested that our “attention deficit disorder” may have social and political causes, or that connections exist between poverty, lack of adequate housing, and social inequities and the prevalence of mental illness, stress, behavioral problems, and learning disabilities.