I am sure that pretty much everyone has heard the term ‘mindfulness’ being bandied about in the media. While it has its roots in Buddhist meditative practice, it has been taken to mean that, at least in its most drastically simplified form, it involved ‘living in the moment’, that one should pay full attention to what one is doing at any given time and not be trying to do many things at once. i.e., it is the opposite of multitasking. For example when you are driving, focus on where you are going and how you are driving and don’t try to talk on the phone, text, read or daydream.
That seems fairly straightforward. But like most good ideas, it has been packaged and commercialized and now Ronald Purser, professor of management at San Francisco State University, has written a book McMindfulness: How Mindfulness Became the New Capitalist Spirituality that critiques what has been done to the idea. In an interview with New Humanist magazine, he explains what he dislikes about the widely-marketed version that he labels ‘McMindfulness’, that it is “actually reinforcing the neoliberal status quo and that corporations, schools, governments and the military have co-opted it as technique for social control and self-pacification”, by ignoring the moral and ethical conduct that constitute the foundational elements of the practice.
I felt there was an urgent need for a book presenting an explicitly critical account of mindfulness, not least to balance the positive presentation of mindfulness in popular self-help writing. So, my book is meant to be a “public intervention” – a wake-up call – not only by critically questioning the hype, hoopla and exaggerated claims of the so-called “mindfulness revolution,” but also exposing the ways mindfulness has been selectively appropriated and refashioned into an instrumental technique for personal gain.
I also wanted to expose how wealthy, white, Euro-Americans created an elite social movement that took what was once a practice aimed at spiritual liberation from selfishness and greed and turned it into a highly individualistic, do-it-yourself self-help technique. I wanted to provide an account of why “mindfulness” has become such a buzzword and popular practice in contemporary times. The book is meant for those who have a healthy skepticism towards self-help techniques, the ideology of happiness and wellbeing, and capitalist spirituality.
…Promoters saw the utilitarian value of mindfulness in terms of providing individuals therapeutic benefits. However, in order to make mindfulness widely accessible to secular audiences, these promoters had to mystify mindfulness – covering up the fact that they selectively extracted and uprooted mindfulness from its grounding in a religious tradition which was informed not only on a foundation of morality and ethics, but which is motivated by liberation from the story of being a separate self and cultivating a compassionate commitment to act for the welfare of all sentient beings. It is this process of mystification that also accounts for the widespread misconception in the West that Buddhist practice is synonymous with mindfulness meditation.
McMindfulness represents then a quick-fix for the anxieties of late-capitalist society. Lacking an ethical and moral framework, McMindfulness can be deployed for instrumental aims – improving productivity and career success, better decision-making among hedge fund managers on Wall Street, creating better test-takers or military sharp-shooters.
I have never been much into things like yoga or mediation even though I realize that they provide benefits for practitioners, so am not really in a position to evaluate things like mindfulness. But readers who know more about this may better appreciate Purser’s critique.
I guess that’s one aspect of the idea — although definitely not what I think of — but “don’t multitask” (basically) isn’t what appeals to conservatives/”centrists” who are interested in defending the status quo.
That comes from a different set of ideas, that being “mindful” of your present experience is about accepting it for what it is, not allowing it to have certain negative effects on you.
In certain cases, that can be sort of therapeutic. If you’re stuck traffic, you may feel impatient about that. So, the basic idea is that you can think to yourself something like “I’m feeling impatient about being stuck in traffic.” You’re mindful of that, in the sense that you are aware that the feelings aren’t about being angry with your loved ones, thinking of yourself as a failure at life, being worried about your own mortality, or whatever else. What you do is point out to yourself (or remind yourself) that the feeling is just about being stuck in traffic.
So although it is a negative experience, you won’t let it affect you like it would if you were preoccupied with those other types of negative thoughts. Maybe you can temper your emotions a little or have more stoic attitude about the situation. Also, you may not overreact as much, take your frustrations out on others, etc. In that kind of situation, this sounds okay, and it may help people to some extent. With practice, it may eventually come a little more naturally to you, and depending on your personality, it might just be easier for you than it is for others.
Anyway, just under the surface, there’s trouble: not all experiences/situations are like that. So when should you apply this kind of idea? It’s not a rhetorical question, and answering it well is not at all easy or intuitive. But I’m going to use another type of example below, where the contrast isn’t hard to spot and the problems become clearer. (Also, note that stoicism has run into these same issues for millennia; I’m not suggesting much of it’s new or that it’s specific to Buddhism.)
If, for example, you see in the news that a cop shot yet another unarmed black person, or that we’ve started bombing yet another country somewhere, etc., then it’s not good to minimize the emotional impact of that. You shouldn’t simply accept it as an experience and let it wash over you like a gentle afternoon breeze. You shouldn’t just be mindful and tell yourself that “yep, I sure am seeing a piece of horrific news right now. This is fine.” That kind of news really does matter, you should be upset about it, and it should be affecting lots of your thoughts/behaviors/relationships/etc. in ways that wouldn’t be appropriate in the traffic example above.
However, if you’re an aloof, privileged, selfish asshole, then it’s still a perfect fit for you: don’t give a shit about it, merely accept/ignore/forget it, don’t do anything about it, move on with your own personal life, brush all of it away like it doesn’t matter, and so forth. You just take the somewhat-helpful idea, but one way or another it goes totally off the rails. Of course, that’s what makes it attractive to all of the conservative/centrist know-nothings and fence-sitters and unhinged loons out there.
Multitasking has always and always will be a moronic concept. Every. Every. Every psychological study shows switching tasks has a cost. I guess some people have smaller costs than other. Anyone asking for multitasking is just asking, “May we overwork you, such that you spend many hours not on the clock, so that we don’t need to hire as many people are actually needed?”
However, in order to make mindfulness widely accessible to secular audiences, these promoters had to mystify mindfulness
Shouldn’t that be demystify mindfulness? Those I know personally who do yoga and/or meditation do them for secular reasons without swallowing any mystical woo -- or if they do, they haven’t told me. Should I be worried?
If meditation is what I’ve been told it is, basically a training of your focusing skill, mindfulness would seem to be a perfectly apt description of it. No mysticism required.
Sam:
Huh. I can walk and talk at the same time.
(Also, multitasking connotes concurrence, not switching)
‘ If, for example, you see in the news that a cop shot yet another unarmed black person, or that we’ve started bombing yet another country somewhere, etc., then it’s not good to minimize the emotional impact of that. You shouldn’t simply accept it as an experience and let it wash over you like a gentle afternoon breeze. You shouldn’t just be mindful and tell yourself that “yep, I sure am seeing a piece of horrific news right now. This is fine.” ‘
This is true, but it is not a new feature of Western mindfulness. Similar ideas have been used in Zen Buddhism to justify atrocities of samurais and Japaneses military (Zizek of course has plenty to say about this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qkTUQYxEUjs). An alternative view is a that you should not be happy with horror. You should reject hateful events, and you should work and peacefully fight for a better world. However, if you do rebel, it may just be the case that the oppressors will find a way to get back at you for your disobedience. In that case, mindfulness should make you better prepared to the consequences of your actions. Mindfulness practice would help you develop a stoic attitude in the face of the bullying that may follow your disobedience. In the most extreme case, monks have rejected colonialism to the point of bearing with equanimity their own being burned alive. The point is not that we should be ready for suicide, but that mindfulness may just make us just a little bit more ready to bear stoically the consequences of standing up for justice.
John @#4,
What Sam is saying is that multi-tasking that requires more than one conscious cognitive activity is what is ineffective. So the walking and chewing gum example does not apply since those can be done unconsciously. Also, cognitive ‘multi-tasking’ always involves switching because we cannot think of two things at the same time. I discussed the research of Clifford Nass on this question some time ago.
Also check out the McGurk effect.
Well, if it’s limited to cognitive activities, perhaps.
Though: Chinese girl writes with both hands simultaneously.
Re the McGurk effect, it certainly works on me — but that’s about perception, not conscious cognitive activity. Interesting.
From the link:
First, it seems very suspicious to count a number of thoughts. I’d have to learn more about how their experiments are designed, but it’s not clear what’s being identified as “one thought” as opposed to “multiple thoughts.” What exactly are they counting, or what’s measured when they do it? Maybe there are good answers, but I’m not so sure.
Anyway, Nass’ result is apparently that it can be done, when different parts of the brain are involved, not that it can’t be done and is a myth. It’s kind of a strange point to make…. If a “part of the brain” were a neuron, let’s say, then clearly that neuron isn’t in multiple states at the same time. It doesn’t seem like you’d need behavioral experiments to support this, because we’re not dealing with superpositions or whatever, so of course a system like that is just in one physical state at a time.
Regarding the McGurk effect video: I just heard “bah bah bah” every time, even when the visuals suggested an F. If I hadn’t been listening closely, wasn’t already familiar the effect, etc., it may have worked on me then.
Also, it probably helps a lot that I’m a composer/arranger. Part of the job is disregarding a lot of visual cues that can be misleading. I’m definitely used to the fact that what I’m hearing doesn’t always match the notation I’m reading or what I see in a performer’s movements. It could be a live performance, a video recording, computer graphics … it doesn’t seem to make a difference. But of course, the kinds of small nuances we’re talking about aren’t usually important to most people in everyday life. Vision is generally playing the more dominant role, and it’s just not necessary to notice when it’s feeding you something illusory or whatever.