The tendency among mindfulness practitioners to revere masters goes hand-in-hand with appeals to authority and status that are commonplace among boosters within the movement.
One way the mindfulness movement reflects a religious sensibility is in the reverence shown towards sacred texts: the sayings of individuals thought to have achieved enlightenment.
Using practice tests as a teaching tool has been criticized for emphasizing memorization over reasoning and for being narrowly focused on knowledge goals rather than the learning process. No doubt practice tests can be misused, overused, or poorly designed. But they are also one of the most effective ways to reinforce knowledge and improve our ability to think about that knowledge.
We cannot escape risk, because we cannot stop change. So what was a safe bet before becomes a risky bet, because the variables keep shifting.
There are two ways we dehumanize others: focus on their machine-like qualities or stress their animal nature. Mechanistic dehumanization characterizes people as unemotional, cold, and rule-bound, like robots or automatons. Animalistic dehumanization portrays people as overly emotional, impulsive, and childlike.
Rewilding is typically conceived as an act of restoration: bringing back species (or their proxies) that used to inhabit an ecosystem. Like cheetahs and mammoths (well, elephants) in North America. It’s ok, because they used to be here.
Helping people in the short term may lead them to make decisions that harm them in the long run. No, this isn’t some cranky diatribe against the welfare state or an argument for tough love. It’s more a plea for activists and politicians to look beyond the intended impact of do-good laws and to seriously consider trade-offs and potential unintended consequences.
Parts of mindfulness practice may be useful, but does that mean you have to embrace the entire belief system associated with mindfulness practice – that is, an ideology with religious overtones?
Concern with status is part of our animal heritage. The regard of others is a scarce resource; therefore, we compete for it. Appealing and available mates are scarce: therefore, we compete for them.
Protecting biological communities in specific locales is a worthy goal. Saving endangered species and creating robust habitats for them to thrive is another worthy goal. These goals are not always in perfect harmony.
You think you have high standards for discerning the truth of the matter? Then you must be able to imagine counterevidence to your theories of how the world works. At the very least.
In a variation on the “Wason selection task”, students in a research study were asked to test the rule “if a card has D on one side, it has a 3 on the other”. They were then shown four cards, which had either a letter (D or F) or a number (3 or 7) on them, and were asked which cards they would turn over to validate the rule. The correct answer was ...
Trump supporters are often portrayed as economically stressed victims of globalization and the decline of US manufacturing, worried about job security and stagnating incomes. But as the last post documented, they do not appear to be plagued by trouble finding work. By and large, Trump Country has low unemployment rates.
Trump supporters have been portrayed as victims of globalization and the decline of US manufacturing, stuck in low-paid jobs offering little in the way of job security or earning potential. Angry and desperate, the story goes, they flocked to that champion of the scorned and neglected, Donald J. Trump, who would kick out the corrupt elites, restore hope, heal pride, and make America great again.
The narrative goes something like this: Trump supporters are a bunch of profoundly unhappy bigots, ill-educated country bumpkins left behind by the forces of globalization, plagued by job insecurity, battered down by inequality, worried sick about their future, consumed by resentment of the liberal elites and racist to the core.
For the sake of argument, let’s say that adopting mindfulness as a way of being contributes to happiness and physical health. Then again, belonging to almost any faith community increases happiness and physical health. That fact alone doesn’t entice me to convert or join. Truth-value matters.
Sometimes labeling, reducing (making little and laughable), and purposely ignoring complexity can be useful. We don’t have to give our full attention and cognitive resources to everything. We have to choose: does this matter enough?
As previous posts have amply shown, I'm not a big fan of mindfulness as a quasi-religious ideology. I’m not going to propose a specific counter-ideology. Sure, I have beliefs about what makes life worthwhile, what matters, the is and the ought.
One can benefit from mindfulness practice without believing that suffering is the main fact of life, desire is undesirable because it is the source of suffering, or that modern life is teaming with toxic elements.
Pace Jon Kabat-Zinn, who says mindfulness is a way of being that cannot be reduced to a set of techniques, I’m going to propose that mindfulness practice can indeed be considered as a bunch of techniques.