The benefits of mindfulness have received a lot of press (e.g., see the Huffington Post ). Mindfulness boosters frequently cite scientific studies to support the case for mindfulness as a kind of cure-all for the ills of the modern age.
Per Teun A. Van Dijk in Politics, Ideology and Discourse, the “ideological square” is pervasive in ideological discourse: 1) Emphasize Their bad things; 2) De-emphasize Our bad things; 3) Emphasize Our good things; and 4) De-emphasize Their good things
Ok, so mindfulness discourse is full of warnings about the sheer awfulness of life without mindfulness, consistent with one quarter of the ideological square: Emphasize Their bad things.
The next few posts will be looking at mindfulness as an ideology. According to Teun A. Van Dijk in Politics, Ideology and Discourse – an entry in the Elsevier Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics (2005) – the following “ideological square” has been found to be pervasive in ideological discourse: Emphasize Our good things; Emphasize Their bad things; De-emphasize Our bad things; .De-emphasize Their good things.
The assertion that a religious experience is incommensurate with a “regular’ experience is common to believers of many persuasions. To be incommensurate is to be on a different level altogether. When two things are incommensurate, they don’t share a common measure and so cannot be compared. The rules that apply to one side are irrelevant to the other.
By way of quick review: In Varieties of Religious Experience, William James defines religion as “…the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine” (p.38), with the ‘divine’ being “such a primal reality as the individual feels impelled to respond to solemnly and gravely, and neither by a curse nor a jest.” (p. 45). According to Clifford Geertz, religion creates “an aura of utter actuality. It is this sense of the ‘really real’ upon which the religious perspective rests” (Interpretation of Cultures, p. 112; my italics).
Ideology and religion are somewhat contested and fuzzy terms and their meanings vary depending on whom you’re talking to. The definition of ideology I will be using borrows from Robert Jay Lifton and Willard S. Mullins: an ideology is a relatively comprehensive and coherent set of convictions (a “vision”) about how humans and the world works, which is powerful enough to influence one’s thinking, feelings, evaluations, and actions. In this sense, I consider mindfulness as an ideological movement.
These posts will also be part critique of the mindfulness movement. Per Wikipedia, a critique “is a method of disciplined, systematic analysis of a written or oral discourse…. and in the philosophical tradition it also means a methodical practice of doubt.” A critique is not just descriptive but implies evaluation of merit. The questions of merit I’m most interested in relate to the truth-value of assertions made in the name of mindfulness as well as possible effects of mindfulness discourse and practice.
Mindfulness enthusiasts may reject the comparison of mindfulness with New Age movements. Perhaps this has to do in part to the common association of New Age with being light-weight and faddish, whereas mindfulness is deep and steeped in ancient wisdom.
In the last post, I provided a very general and rough definition of mindfulness as “a more or less cohesive set of propositions about what is and what matters, along with various practices associated with those propositions.”
Approaching the mindfulness movement as a form of discourse reflecting a broad array of influences (cultural, historical, ideological, religious) and employing various rhetorical strategies to boost its appeal is not to say that the insights or wisdom associated with mindfulness are without merit or foundation in reality. A lot of things constrain and influence how we see the world and how we see the world may still reflect, more or less accurately, what is the case.
It would seem that awareness is related to what psychologists call “metacognition”. Metacognition is not one thing. The metacognitive system is composed of distinct anatomical and functional parts. So metacognition encompasses a lot of different things, including declarative knowledge about oneself, as well as anticipatory and emergent self-awareness – meaning anticipating and monitoring one’s environment, responses and behavior as the world unfolds.
All hail the engineer’s approach to problem solving! Recognize a need...Define the problem, the objectives and the constraints...Collect information and data...Generate alternative solutions... Evaluate the consequence of different solutions...
“What is the core, immutable quality of science? It's not formal publication, it's not peer review, it's not properly citing sources. It's not "the scientific method" (whatever that means). It's not replicability. It's not even Popperian falsificationism... Underlying all those things is something more fundamental. Humility.”
The Copenhagen Consensus Center does research on the costs and benefits of various policy approaches to global problems and provides information on which policy targets will do the most social good relative to their costs – acknowledging that factors other than cost/benefit ratios are also important.
Move your right foot in a clockwise circle. Now move your right hand clockwise on the table at the same time your right foot is moving clockwise…. Pretty easy....
Acknowledging that ecosystems are in constant flux doesn’t mean all change is good. But it does change our conception of what’s at stake. It’s not about preserving a biological moment in a specific locale. It’s about saving species.
In “The Age of Wonder”, Richard Holmes writes that “the idea of the exploratory voyage, often lonely and perilous, is in one form or another a central and defining metaphor of Romantic science.”
The technocrat is often perceived as uninspired, narrow-minded, overly focused on details, a competent underling. The opposing construct is that of the visionary: charismatic, impassioned, focused on the Big Picture, confident of his vision, a leader.
When the parts of a system are constantly changing, at what point do you say that the system is no longer itself? That may be easy to answer when the system is a living organism, which is either alive or dead. But ecosystems aren’t single organisms, so the either/or approach doesn’t really apply.