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Mindfulness
Does Mindfulness Mold Conformity?
Inner peace or dangerous pacification?
Posted December 15, 2019 Reviewed by Devon Frye
You can’t go far these days without hearing about the benefits of mindfulness. In venues as diverse as mental health, education, athletics, the corporate world, and prisons, mindfulness practice is embraced as a means to an end, whatever that end may be. Because the core concept underlying mindfulness—the art of being fully present, without judgment, in the here and now—can arguably be made useful in almost any societal context, an entire industry has arisen around it.
The ubiquity of mindfulness, however, should not be mistaken for unanimity. Just ask Ronald Purser, author of McMindfulness: How Mindfulness Became the New Capitalist Spirituality, a scathing critique of the modern-day gurus and institutions profiting from the mindfulness industry. Today’s mindfulness complex is far from revolutionary, he argues, but instead should be seen as a tool of the existing power structure.
Mindfulness practice, such as focusing on one’s breathing while meditating, might be helpful as a coping mechanism in today’s stressful world, says Purser, but this allows the underlying causes of stress (many of them socio-economic) to escape scrutiny. Without accompanying ethical values that encourage some kind of outward engagement, such inward-directed mindfulness practice is little more than a conformist psychology. “Instead of setting practitioners free,” Purser writes, “it helps them adjust to the very conditions that caused their problems.”
Though not the first to voice such criticism, Purser’s indictment of contemporary mindfulness, with particular attention to its iconic leader Jon Kabat-Zinn, is lucid and powerful. He criticizes Kabat-Zinn’s popular Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) as a form of victim-blaming. By suggesting individuals should deal with anxiety and other mental health issues by turning inward in an attempt to change their brain patterns, MBSR discourages critical thinking that would question social, political, and economic factors that are actually generating the problems. As such, while some call mindfulness liberating, Purser sees it in this context as pacifying.
This criticism, if followed logically, can lead to other questions that Purser doesn't explore. If socio-economic factors are contributing to your neuroses, is any coping mechanism desirable if it distracts you from engaging outwardly (politically or otherwise) to change those factors? After all, many coping mechanisms, from recreational activities to religious practices to medications, might inhibit social-political activism in one way or another. Should these be discouraged by those seeking change in an unjust society?
Purser doesn’t ask such questions but instead is more focused on exposing the mindfulness industry for what it is—an industry that, contrary to its own public image, does more to reinforce the status quo than to change it.
This segues to another prong of his critique. Just as he is concerned that mindfulness practice might be disempowering its practitioners, he also objects to establishment institutions, such as the military and Wall Street, embracing the practice for their own not-so-blissful missions. This demonstrates that mindfulness practice, stripped of a solid ethical foundation, can be not just amoral, but immoral.
Purser seems most dismayed that the power structure reinforced by mindfulness practice is the neoliberal, capitalist system that dominates our society and most of the world, a point he repeats continuously throughout the book. This is a valid point, but his insightful critique might have found a wider audience if his choice of rhetoric had not been so doctrinaire. Some who are even just a step or two to the right of Purser on the political spectrum might agree that injecting mindfulness practice into our schools and military is undesirable, but Purser’s constant sorties against “capitalism” and “neoliberalism” are likely to repel many of them before they get to such points.
If so, this is too bad, because the questions Purser raises are relevant in many contexts beyond the modern "neoliberal" and "capitalist" experience. Given the reality that our imperfect species has never constructed a truly “just” society, perhaps we should question the institutional adoption of mindfulness practice in any society?
Purser, who identifies as a Buddhist, spends little time considering how to properly apply mindfulness practice or other meditation techniques in modern society. In fact, he devotes considerable space to debunking much of the so-called “scientific” grounds (such as colorful brain scans) cited by the promoters of mindfulness. He nevertheless concedes that mindfulness can be an effective method of “basic concentration training,” but he comes back to the point that it lacks values and discourages social and political engagement in its modern Western context.
One could argue that Purser underestimates the ability of mindfulness practitioners to complement their sound minds with sound values. Being “fully present without judgment” is not really absolutism that makes outward contemplation impossible, nor is inner peace necessarily demotivational. If one appreciates justice and other humanistic values and is determined to work for them, it’s hard to see why mindfulness practice should derail such efforts. Rising from the meditation cushion, relaxed and in a fully-present mindset, one can then go off to work for a better world.
That said, it’s hard to argue with Purser’s disdain for the utilization of mindfulness for militarism, corporate power, and other malevolent purposes. Even here, however, the real issue isn’t the mindfulness practice. Yes, there’s something unsettling about a technique for finding inner peace being used to make more effective warriors. But is the real problem the mindfulness practice itself, or society’s perpetual state of war? That’s something worth contemplating.
