Suburban Seeker

News Brief: Mindfulness Conquers World

This morning I was sitting down to write a bit about why the current fad in America for all things “Mindful” drives me up the damn wall. Then I came across this piece which, while it isn’t exactly the point I was getting at, did highlight the fundamental problem I see with Mindfulness in America.

This problem is Mindfulness as something that can and should be utilized devoid of any larger practice, be it spiritual, religious, secular, or some combination thereof, that is devoted to living a good, moral life.

From the “news” story:

Standing before a banner proclaiming “Mission Accomplished,” Briss read from a list of activities of global importance that used to be done mindlessly but now have been brought into the full light of mindfulness. “Before, the President ordered drone strikes, but now he orders drone strikes mindfully. Before, corporate executives fired thousands of workers and raised their own salaries, but now they fire thousands of workers mindfully and raise their own salaries mindfully. The list goes on and on.”

While this is satire, the point it makes is spot on. Mindfulness is a wonderful tool. In fact it is one of the most powerful tools for living a good life because it can enable you to get a better sense of what is actually going on in your mind. But to be truly useful it needs to be a part of a larger practice.

Devoid of any context, mindfulness leads swiftly to selfishness. In fact it heightens one’s sense of selfishness. Being “mindful of yourself” places the emphasis on You: on the experiences you are having, on your own desires, and on your own needs.

With proper, diligent practice you can start to see and experience these desires and needs as being transient. You will likely find that it becomes easier to let go of anger and other destructive patterns of thought because you can see them for what they are: impermanent mental states.

Learning to let go of these impermanent mental states will enable you to live both a good, happy life and a more selfless, less selfish life. (I would argue the former is impossible without the latter.) You will find that what makes you you is the interconnectedness of the world, and not in any vague New Age-y Quantum Attracted Particles of Universal Law or Something way.

(For a small example of this interconnectedness, next time you are grumpy, watch how the people around you become grumpy too. Or consider that old saying, “The harder I work, the luckier I seem to be.” What you put into the world will directly affect your experience of it in a very real way.)

So within the context of trying to live a moral, reflective life, there are few better tools than mindfulness. But you can’t just be mindful of the things you do in your daily life and hope to be happy if you aren’t happy to begin with.

In a society in which we are already heavily conditioned to be consumers of media, experiences, and art created by others; in which we vote for people because we’re on this team and we don’t like that other team; in which cynicism reigns and morality and spirituality are largely laughed at and ignored, mindfulness will become just another means of consuming things and living in the world as we are used to it.

This is a shame because mindfulness can and should be used  as a tool for genuine personal and spiritual growth. However living your life that way takes more effort than mindfully eating dinner and saying, “My – I am very aware of how delicious this dinner is!” It takes seeing yourself as you actually are (your strengths and weaknesses) and then working with this information. It takes working through failures and set backs. It is hard.

Mindfulness, at least at the level it has permeated the mass consciousness of America, is not packaged this way. It’s packaged as another self-help fad. You want to feel good, right? I mean, who doesn’t? Try being Mindful! But the way to actually feel “good” is to become less focused on yourself and more focused on your family, community, friends, and the world around you. Being mindful of your life can help you live your life that way, but not on its own.

The Brain on Trial

When I was in college I initially pursued a degree in philosophy. (Save your jokes – I have never been a particularly career-oriented person.) What interested me most was epistemology and the philosophy of mind. However what I found as I studied these subjects was that most of the literature was not philosophy per se, but was instead scientific hypotheses without the necessary means of testing them.

I became convinced that, just as chemistry used to be considered a branch of philosophy until science developed far enough to take over, so too would the study of our minds be eventually transferred to the science departments of our universities. So I turned my studies to political science, which contrary to what its practitioners will tell you is in no way a science.

I became more interested in the study of mind from the inside, and this led me to the eastern meditative traditions. Western philosophy, aside from the occasional phenomenological movement, has never really appreciated the value of experience talis qualus. If it can’t be put into words by an objective third party, an experience or theory has no place in traditional western philosophy.

(“I think therefore I am” may seem the simplest and profoundest of truths, but it conceals a hugely hidden variable. What is this “I” that “is”?)

The breakthrough came for me in one epistemology lecture from the brilliant Paul Churchland. He was comparing various philosophical approaches to the study of knowledge and noted that they are all dependent on language.

This is interesting, because language is itself a learned ability. It is entirely possible to learn something (fire is hot) without needing any recourse to language. What this means is that words describing a mental state will not be a description of what is actually going on in the brain.

When we study the mind we have traditionally been using folk psychology. If I say that I am angry I am describing a specific mental state which is more accurately explained by the activation of different parts of the brain. Saying “I am angry” is like saying “the sun rose this morning” – you know what I mean, but what I am saying is not a scientifically accurate statement. The sun didn’t “rise” this morning. The planet we are on made one full rotation as it orbited its source of daylight.

The linked article develops along these lines. Our justice system has always presupposed the existence of free will, a concept that makes sense when used in conversation, but has never been even close to being settled. 

If a brain tumor causes a man to kill his family, can we hold him responsible? Clearly we cannot. If the nature of the tumor is such that it cannot be removed it would be irresponsible to release the man back into society since he will be likely to cause further harm, but at no point are we “blaming” him for his actions.

If it is discovered through further neuroscience research that other criminal acts are caused by biological functions over which the individual has no control, what shall we do? From the article:

As brain science improves, we will better understand that people exist along continua of capabilities, rather than in simplistic categories. And we will be better able to tailor sentencing and rehabilitation for the individual, rather than maintain the pretense that all brains respond identically to complex challenges and that all people therefore deserve the same punishments.

This is not to say that punishment has no place in society. But its purpose must be one of deterrence and prevention, not vengeance. And taking someone out of society should be done with the goal of rehabilitation, not with a desire for retribution.

And this, I imagine, is where things will get tricky, because it is fundamental to our concept of justice that bad people deserve bad things to happen to them. We love vengeance. It makes sense that evolution would give us this trait. Those that cause harm to the tribe must be removed from the tribe. It was bad enough dealing with water scarcity, other tribes, plagues, and saber-toothed tigers without having to deal with that asshole Fred who kept killing his fellow tribesmen.

When we describe a human as simply being “bad” or “evil” we are using folk psychology to describe something that is much more complicated. A person may very well fit our definition of evil, and he may very well need to be removed from society for his or our own good, but the world – and the people in it – are never as simple as words make it seem.