git.alexw.nyc

<html>
  <head>
    <meta charset="utf-8">
    <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width">
    <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="../style.css">
    <link rel="icon" type="image/png" href="../icon.png">
    <title>alexw.nyc</title>
  </head>
<body>
  <header>
    <table><tr><td><a href="../index.html"><img src="../icon.png" width=20 /></a></td>
			<td>alexw.nyc</td>
			<td><a href="../index.html">home</a></td>
			<td><a href="../about.html">about</a></td>
			<td><a href="//git.alexw.nyc">git</a></td>
			<td><a href="../garden.html">garden</a></td>
		</tr></table>
  </header>
<main>
<h1>McMindfulness Book Review</h1>
<em>2024-01-07</em>
<p><em>McMindfulness: How Mindfulness Became the New Capitalist Spirituality (2019) by Ronald Purser</em></p>

<p>Mindfulness, as characterized by Ronald Purser, himself a Buddhist
practitioner, has a strange relationship with the Buddhist spiritual practices from which it derives.
Practitioners such as John Kabat-Zinn (the primary antagonist of this book)
will in some contexts emphasize their connection to Buddhist Dharma, while in
others distance themselves from it, leaning on "objective" science and
research. In any case, Purses views mindfulness as lacking the social
and ethical component of Buddhism as a practiced religion, reducing it to a
specific, individualized practice of personal well-being, and a disciplinary
practice that reinforces an unjust capitalist system. This lack of an ethical or
religious core allows for mindfulness to be mis-applied as a technique for
corporate discipline and military effectiveness.</p>

<p>The best part of Purser's book are the scathing critiques of these
mis-applications, where mindfulness teachers, themselves sometimes
practicing Buddhists, use bizarre and twisted logic to justify why teaching
mindfulness techniques to tech CEOs and military generals is actually an
authentic expression of the Dharma. He also makes interesting points about mindfulness as a social and
disciplinary practice, for example, considering slow, relaxed, equanimous
speech and mannerisms as a mark of a well-disciplined subject. However, Purser goes
into this only at a shallow level, instead building a moral critique,
explaining mindfulness is "bad" and "wrong". This is a recurring problem
throughout the book: Purser's ideological agenda (which I am broadly sympathetic with)
is at the forefront, and a more objective, critical analysis of mindfulness as a
political and social institution, while present in some parts, are not expanded
upon, and are only treated secondarily.</p>

<p>Unfortunately, it's not actually clear what Purser's ideological argument
actually <em>is</em>. At times he is conservative, arguing that mindfulness
lacks the ethical context and learned wisdom of Buddhism itself as a practiced
religion. Other times he is liberal, arguing that mindfulness should be
reformed to be more "engaged" with social and political issues. And sometimes,
he is more radical, viewing mindfulness as a sort of false consciousness, which
only seeks to pacify ourselves to systems of injustice that could be confronted
head on.<p>

<p>Purser's approach is to throw every critique at the mindfulness industry that he has,
with no real consideration for saying something more nuanced and specific. While
he tells interesting historical stories about, for example, the development of
the concepts of "stress" and "stress management" coming out of the neoliberal instability
of the 1970s, or the hypocrisy of mindfulness practitioners in public schools,
his actual argument is poorly fleshed out and inarticulate.  It is hard to
argue with his point that mindfulness is a watered-down Buddhism,
or that mindfulness classes fail to address social inequities. But does that
make them <em>harmful</em>, as he seems to say? Is there any problem with
mindfulness as a merely therapeutic technique? Is he even saying this, exactly?</p>

<p>Ultimately, his argument is unconvincing. Referencing Foucault, Purser
refers to mindfulness in schools as a "disciplinary practice". But Foucault's analysis of
discipline is not a moralistic one. Teaching students to read, write and do
arithmetic are "disciplinary practices" in a Foucauldian sense, but whether
they are right or wrong is a separate question. Purser is not merely critiquing
mindfulness in the sense of understanding how it came to be and why neoliberal
capitalist institutions find it so compelling (a book which does this with
greater rigour would be a far more interesting one than Purser's), he is
writing a polemic <em>against</em> mindfulness practices and institutions, and
the polemic nature of his argument muddles the critical one.</p>

<p>At the end of the day, is there anything wrong with doing a 5 minute <a
	href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7WnZisfYMsE">Kabat-Zinn</a>
meditation? Mindfulness itself may lack an ethical or political component, but
could not one bring an activist political core to one's mindfulness practice?
Could not mindfulness, even in its "apolitical" form, be something that an
activist political subject find value out of, something that empowers them to
be more effective community organizers? I think that for Purser's
argument to hold, he would have to argue that mindfuless actively dulls or
diminishes one's sensitivity to ethical, political and social convictions. At
times, Purser attempts to make this argument, but his conclusion ends with the
"liberal" form of his argument, calling for a more "socially engaged"
mindfulness. If at the end of the day, this is all that he is seeking, rather
than something more radical (politically or spiritually), despite all his
incisive rhetoric, is there really that big of a gap between
him and someone like his enemy Kabat-Zinn after all?</p>
</main>
<footer>
<a href="/tech/infra.html">live</a> from beautiful brooklyn, new york
<a href="mailto:alex@alexwennerberg.com">email</a>
<a href="https://merveilles.town/@aw">mastodon</a>
</footer>
</body>
</html>