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20th century, Aśvaghoṣa, Glenn Wallis, Jon Kabat-Zinn, Margaret Thatcher, Rick Repetti, Ron Purser, Ronald Reagan, Siddhattha Gotama (Buddha), war
The scattershot application of “neoliberalism” is at its worst when the term gets applied to mindfulness meditation. We saw before how Ron Purser described mindfulness meditation as “neoliberal”. What is that supposed to mean? Modern meditation is frequently described as “neoliberal” in the Handbook of Mindfulness, which Purser coedited, and especially the closing essay by Glenn Wallis (which responds to a thoughtful defence of mindfulness by Rick Repetti in the same volume). Wallis’s piece is a good illustration of how a concept with some legitimate and meaningful uses can get bandied around so casually that it becomes completely specious. Here is Wallis:
You don’t have to look too closely to see that Mindfulness’s most recent progenitors are, of course, Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. As I mentioned earlier, Mindfulness has the same DNA and was raised on the same values that undergirds today’s neoliberal, consumer capitalist social structure (acceptance, resilience, self-help, etc.). So, of course Jon Kabat-Zinn [the creator of secularized and medicalized mindfulness meditation] cozies up to corporate CEOs and American military generals. (Wallis 499)
“Mentioned” is the right word, because there’s only one passage earlier in Wallis’s article where he tried to claim anything even like the point that modern mindfulness “has the same DNA and was raised on the same values” as a consumer-capitalist social structure (let alone Reagan and Thatcher) – but apparently he considers that point obvious enough to merit an “of course”. So let’s take a close look at the earlier passage. There Wallis is responding to Repetti’s justifiable view that mindfulness shouldn’t need to change unjust social structures, any more than gardening or dentistry should; “Meditation typically helps individuals process the stresses that accompany encounters with the rough edges of reality…” (Repetti 479) Wallis responds that what strikes him about Repetti’s argument is “its valorization of the neoliberal subject, and hence, his argument’s reactionary stance.” In what way?
In brief, Repetti seems to assume a subject that has no choice but to accept the “unjust world,” adapt to the “rough edges of reality,” and engage in practices that foster resilience. Repetti could not paint a clearer portrait of the diminished neoliberal subject. It is a subject that is perpetually vulnerable in the face of global, financial, environmental, political, ad infinitum insecurities. It is a subject that is racked by a degree of stress and tension that debilitates the real possibility of robust agency. These characteristics—vulnerability together with the necessity of acceptance, resilience, and adaptation—are classic neoliberal assertions about the human subject. This stance, of course, raises the possibility that Mindfulness is simply an unrepentant ally of neoliberalism. (Wallis 497-8)
These bare assertions are all that Wallis gives us to support the claim that modern mindfulness “has the same DNA” as “today’s neoliberal, consumer capitalist social structure”, let alone that its “most recent progenitors” are Reagan and Thatcher! So let’s examine them carefully.
First, let’s ask what should be the obvious question: what subject was ever not “perpetually vulnerable in the face of global, financial, environmental, political, ad infinitum insecurities”? When the hell was that? The socialist economies of modern Scandinavia have probably done the best of any societies in history at providing basic human needs and economic security. Yet are we to believe that the citizens of Norway and Finland, which share a border with Russia, are not perpetually vulnerable to political insecurity? That their coastal cities are not perpetually vulnerable to environmental insecurity? Wendy Brown and I admire the welfare states of the 1950s and 1960s, before Reagan and Thatcher devastated them as a consequence of their genuinely neoliberal ideology – but does Wallis expect us to believe that the world of the Cuban Missile Crisis and air-raid drills was not perpetually vulnerable to global insecurity? Hunter-gatherer societies sometimes had an enviable level of leisure, but they were far more vulnerable than contemporary Americans or Brits to environmental insecurities that caused starvation.
And those are the best cases – the cases that we might take as the most exemplary societies, the ones that in significant respects have done a much better job at providing for human needs and security than the contemporary neoliberal US or UK. Yet even their subjects clearly were and are perpetually vulnerable to a variety of threats. And most human beings have lived with far less security and far more vulnerability than that. It should be patently clear, then, that “a subject that is perpetually vulnerable in the face of global, financial, environmental, political, ad infinitum insecurities” is not merely “the diminished neoliberal subject”, but simply the human subject as such. To be human is to be vulnerable. And Wallis gives us no reason whatsoever to think otherwise. If he believes that his political outlook can make us bulletproof, the burden of proving that claim is on him.
Wallis’s additional claim about “stress and tension” is something of a non sequitur. It is not clear to me that “stress and tension” debilitate the possibility of political agency – it is hard for me to imagine the 1930s labour movement or the soixante-huitards as free of stress or tension! But if it were the case that “stress and tension” debilitate political agency, then that should then be reason for someone like Wallis – who professes such concern for that agency – to cheer modern mindfulness on, since part of the reason for Kabat-Zinn’s success is the demonstrated efficacy of mindfulness meditation in relieving stress.
And these flimsy arguments, it seems, are the best Wallis can do – the most evidence he can muster for the smear that “of course” modern mindfulness’s progenitors are Reagan and Thatcher. I guess there’s also the point that Kabat-Zinn consorts with and advises the powerful – just as the Buddha consorted with and advised the kings of his day, or so many stories of him tell us. I suppose one could therefore refuse on principle to follow the Buddha’s example, in order to retain some sort of purity and immunity from neoliberalism – but if you’re going to refuse to have anything to do with powerful people, good luck in achieving any meaningful sort of social change.
As far as I can tell, then, Wallis’s refusal to accept any vulnerability or “rough edges of reality” is naïve to the point of absurdity. What it is not, though, is unfamiliar. The sad and quixotic dream that one can make oneself or others invulnerable is a dream that repeats throughout history. Aśvaghoṣa famously tells the story of how King Śuddhodana tried to prevent his princely son from becoming a monk by giving him every luxury, shielding him from all vulnerability and all rough edges of life. Naturally, the strategy failed miserably: soon enough the prince saw an old man, a sick man and a dead man, and those sights shocked him into realizing that he was indeed perpetually vulnerable in the face of insecurities, as all human beings are. He knew that no amount of political agency, even the supremely robust agency of a king, could prevent his vulnerability to the insecurities of sickness, old age and death. It was that realization of his own vulnerability – the same realization that Wallis tries in vain to portray as belonging only to the “diminished neoliberal subject” – that led the prince to become the Buddha.
Good series on the way the term “neoliberalism” is used. I have often also been bothered by the very broad and undefined usage of this term in scholarly work.
On the human subject, there does seem to be a common idea that if people were free of neoliberalism, capitalism, racism, and all the other “isms,” they would also be free of suffering. I think it is this belief that ought to be challenged when it appears among people who call themselves “Buddhists” given that core Buddhist teachings indicate that the sources of human suffering are not the “isms” but are much more fundamental, and would remain no matter how many “isms” were abolished…
Absolutely. I’m generally of the opinion that economic sources of suffering are far greater than racial or gender ones; it is important to me to be able to use women’s public bathroom when I’m out en femme, but that need itself would look like great privilege to the many human beings who have no access to any bathroom at all. Yet even a society like the one Martin Hägglund proposes, which would offer welcome fixes to these gross economic inequalities, would nevertheless leave us exposed to the many basic forms of suffering that constitute human life.
I agree with you on your weighing of different sufferings, and this is one reason why I tend to see class as more important than race or gender in driving inequality. (For example, I am happy Ketanji Brown Jackson is confirmed, but the idea that she, with her elite background, is somehow the voice of the marginalized I find absurd). Overall, I would see your final sentence as the crucial one–that even if there were no isms and complete economic equality, we would still suffer. A Buddhist would say that is because we are always under the power of karma and delusion, but even without these factors (for those who don’t believe in them), there is a reality that (1) humans are simply unable to stop making themselves and others unhappy, and (2) as you say, there are basic forms of suffering like sickness, old age, and death that cannot be entirely defeated… It is thus utopian to think that ending isms will end suffering. Indeed, I think we would just get different isms!
Amen to all you just said. But also, the Purser critique of mindfulness-based programs suggests these programs encourage passivity and non-engagement in the face of stresses we have some ability to actually amerliorate through active intervention. in my recent article in The Humanistic Psychologist (2021) I wrote, “While on internship at Kabat-Zinn’s Center for Mindfulness, we were taught a recursive four-step process of 1) Showing Up, 2) Paying Attention, 3) Telling Your Truth/Doing What’s Needed, and 4) Letting Go/Being informed by outcomes rather than attached to them. This was a recipe for wise action rather than passivity. Similarly, when studying at the Cambridge Insight Meditation Center, I heard Vipassana teacher Larry Rosenberg say that if a truly mindful person was meditating in a burning meditation hall, he wouldn’t be sitting on his cushion calmly noting, “warm, warmer, warmer still” to himself. He would be the first person helping others out to safety. When mindfulness is taught as a means of obtaining the clarity for wise action rather than as merely a relaxation or stress-reduction technique, there is no inherent conflict between being mindful and taking effective action on behalf of one’s values. While mindfulness employs the language of “non-judgmental attention” and “acceptance,” it is not suggesting we operate without values or without the need to make wise choices. On the contrary, it is simply suggesting that accepting our experience “is what it is” is always the first step in making wise choices and taking wise action.”
I think that this is right and I find the Serenity Prayer ever more valuable for that reason. I’ve noted lately that Śāntideva in the seventh chapter of the Bodhicaryāvatāra stresses the great urgency of the task of liberation, urging us against a complacent acceptance of those mentally harmful states that it is in our power to change.
Question, Seth: in your own book there is a point where you speak of “radical acceptance of the way-things-actually-are”. Is there a Buddhist text you’re drawing that idea, or something like it, from? I’ve been suspecting that the idea of acceptance is more pronounced in East Asian Buddhism than South Asian and have been wanting to follow that up more deeply.
The term “radical acceptance” was, I believe, coined by Tara Brach who is a psychologist and Insight Meditation teacher. She has a book with “radical acceptance” in the title. The term is widely used within the mindfulness community.
I can’t think of a seminal Asian Buddhist text that is a source for the term, but it is clearly related to the idea of observing each dharma arise without attachment—letting phenomena arise and pass without attachment or aversion—which lies at the heart of vipassana practice—think of the mental noting practice that is part of the Mahasi Sayadaw system of vipassana. This kind of “letting be” and “gelassenheit” also lies at the heart of Zen shikantaza practice.
It is also related to the idea of suspending engaging secondary emotional reactions that arise in response to stimuli—the kind of train of “mental proliferation” that can follow an initial thought or emotion or other mental state if one is not careful during meditation. So for example, if one notices anger, one just notes it is there, but one doesn’t nurture shame in response to it, deny it, or engage in thought processes that justify or accentuate it.
Thanks. I’ve been meaning to read Brach and will likely do so soon. You’re right that it is tied to the kinds of awareness cultivated in meditation practice, especially of the sort that John Dunne calls nondual; I was wondering whether the idea of acceptance per se had an equivalent term in East Asian languages, as I don’t think it really does in South Asian ones. Possibly the receptivity (xū 虛) that one finds in Zhuangzi?
I’m not sure about Zhuangzi’s use of “虛”—a good person to ask would be history of Chinese philosophy scholar Tao Jiang over at the Center for Chinese Studies at Rutgers University who has been a big fan of the Zhuangzhi for many years. If anyone would know he would.
I think the terms we usually translate as patience, patient endurance, and so on (kshanti, khanti, bzod-pa etc) in some contexts can be translated as “acceptance.” Geshe Thupten Jinpa, HHDL’s main English translator, told me once that he thought this would often be a good translation for these terms, altho because the Asian words have a broader scope than each possible English translation, “acceptance” would not always be the right translation. Depends on context.
I think it’s apt that Glenn Wallis’s chapter that Amod discusses in this post is titled “Criticism Matters”. Criticism certainly matters to Wallis; some years ago I used to glance at his blog occasionally, but at some point I tired of it, since it seemed that criticism was all that mattered to Glenn. What about all the other values and activities that I aspire to practice and experience, like empathy, compassion, gentleness, humility, gratitude, awe? Many of these values are listed as the main categories in the sidebar of Amod’s blog, and Amod continues to surprise readers with fresh contemplations on a broad range of human values, so it’s no surprise that I’ve stuck with Amod’s blog but not Glenn’s.
What I especially found to be missing from Glenn’s blog was an emphasis on empathy and trying to sympathize with the way other people see things (not necessarily to agree, but to deepen emotional understanding). In contrast, empathy is present even in the name of Amod’s blog, “Love of All Wisdom”, which implies finding wisdom in the perspectives of others, not just reveling in relentless criticism.
So I’m not surprised that Amod would eventually find himself discussing how Glenn criticizes mindfulness as “simply an unrepentant ally of neoliberalism”. I see the encounter here between Amod and Glenn as more than an example of criticizing the scattershot application of “neoliberalism”. It also seems to me to be an encounter between two very different sensibilities (or, at least, different public personas): Glenn’s narrow focus on critical analysis versus Amod’s broad focus on the full richness of human goods. That seems to be part of the story of why Glenn needed to find some reason, however specious, to criticize mindfulness, whereas Amod can give (what I would call) a more well-rounded view of it.
Thank you, Nathan. Many years ago I engaged with Glenn’s work, specifically his Buddhist Manifesto, in a far more sympathetic way. I was quite disappointed to see the line of reasoning he took up in the Handbook of Mindfulness, which seems to go in quite the opposite direction. When he refers to his newer perspective as “non-Buddhism“, that seems to me quite apt.
Thanks for your engagement with my work, Amod! I appreciate it. Interested readers can find a fuller (better?) account of my Mindfulness-Neoliberalism-nexus argument in A Critique of Western Buddhism, particularly in the section “Neoliberal Subject Are Us–Wise and Well.” This book is now open access, so can be read for free: https://www.bloomsburycollections.com/book/a-critique-of-western-buddhism-ruins-of-the-buddhist-real/
I have also further fleshed out the argument in my tract How to Fix Education. Though the connection to Buddhism in the tract is opaque, a careful reader will see the connection.
Onwards!
Glenn, thank you for this response. When I write strongly worded criticisms I do worry that I might be burning bridges, and I’m glad to see that that’s not the case here. I am glad that you are interested in further dialogue and I look forward to reading the fuller argument in your book. Though, I’m not seeing a “Neoliberal subject[s] are us” section in the ToC and I don’t find it on a search – would you be able to specify where in the book that is?
It’s a sub-section of Chapter One… Long live strong language! Also (to your readers): please keep in mind that everywhere that I critique what is called “mindfulness,” I am critiquing (upper case) “Mindfulness”–the ideological frameworks within which (lower case) mindfulness, the banal cognitive function, is placed. My view is that neoliberal values (largely those stemming from the belief in a vulnerable/resilient atomistic self) are in the very DNA/genealogy of Mindfulness for similar (inevitable?) reasons that, say, Confucianist values arguably permeate early Ch’an, or Shinto values arguably permeate early Zen, or Enlightenment-Protestant values arguably permeate German Theravada, etc.
Thanks for the reference, Glenn. The clarification is probably useful too; I tried to specify that you were referring to “modern mindfulness” or “mindfulness meditation”, but that doesn’t necessarily come out in the quotes.
As you will expect, I disagree entirely with your last sentence, for reasons expressed in the previous post as much as this one. But I look forward to reading your more detailed presentation of it.
I am happy to read this exchange. I am especially happy to see that Amod has defended the view of mine in the Handbook on Mindfulness that Glen critiqued. I’ve been meaning to respond to Glen’s critique, but my ever-growing list of projects has eclipsed that, for a while now. but perhaps here is a place where a small response may be easy to craft, easier, at least, than a journal-ready article. I hope to return here soon with a thoughtful response.
My short reply, for now, to Glen’s critique of my chapter in the Handbook on Mindfulness is that his critique was largely a critique of a host of positions he superimposed on mine, not my actual position. That’s the better part of why I have not been motivated to respond to it: it doesn’t actually engage with any of my central claims, so to devote serious thought to it would be to dignify something that did not actually engage with my work. That sort of unfair assault should not be rewarded with oxygen. The targets of his critique were selected from among a standard list of targets for Marxist, post-modernist, and/or related anti-neo-liberal / progressive / woke thinkers: there is no such thing as an autonomous agent (only collective identities and power relations matter), anyone who thinks otherwise is a non-reconstructed individual operating with false consciousness, advocates of mindfulness outside an activist ethic are shills for corporate capitalism, and so on and so forth. The bulk of Glen’s article consisted in these sorts of accusations, embedded within a narrative that reads like a passage from Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals. But accusations are not arguments, and accusations about things I did not advocate for are even less relevant. The bulk of the Handbook involved critical objections to elements of mindfulness, and my chapter was the only one that offered straightforward arguments to defend mindfulness. Glen’s chapter was so obviously a hit piece, but one that didn’t hit the target at all. I’m surprised it’s taken this long for anyone to call him to task for it.
Thank you, Rick. I was also disappointed that, after including your piece as the only one defending modern mindfulness, the Handbook of Mindfulness followed it up with what I think you fairly describe as a hit piece. I have a large number of criticisms of that book in general, many of which I’m refining for the book I’m now working on myself.
Thanks for this! I look forward to reading your book. What is it on, and when do you think it will be out?
It’s called The Case for Buddhist Serenity, and I’m hoping to have a first draft ready by June. If you’d be interested in reading the draft I’d be delighted to send it to you and hear your comments.
Thanks! What is your book on?