Meet Ronald E. Purser, and read an excerpt from his new book, “McMindfulness: How Mindfulness Became the New Capitalist Spirituality”
Interviewed by Marlena Trafas
Note from Susan
Thanks to those who reached out to me about this shout-out profile of Ron Purser and his new book McMindfulness. I got some grief for posting it, but that's okay; I appreciate everyone's email and have learned from them. I would be remiss if I didn't mention that I also got a strong positive response. To allow people to reply publicly, we've made it possible to post moderated comments on all the blogs and shout-out profiles on our website, including this one. If you’re curious about my personal view, I weigh in on reader response, here.
Editor’s Note
Ronald E. Purser Ph.D. earned his doctorate in organizational behavior from Case Western Reserve University. He has taught management in undergraduate and graduate programs at San Francisco State University in the College of Business for the past twenty-four years. Before that he taught at Loyola University of Chicago. He has co-authored and edited eight books as well as over sixty academic journal articles and book chapters. Professor Purser’s work engages critical perspectives on mindfulness in society and how it can become a reflective pedagogy for social and political change towards a more just society and inhabitable earth.
His mindfulness journey began in 1981 when he started attending classes and retreats at the Tibetan Nyingma Institute in Berkeley. Soon after, he began his formal Zen training under Koshin Ogui Sensei at the Cleveland Zen Center. Now he is an ordained Dharma instructor in the Korean Zen Buddhist Taego order and co-hosts the Mindful Cranks podcast with David Forbes, Ph.D., where they cover topics related to individual and social change.
Below, he discusses mindfulness as a tool of corporate social control, how human suffering is tied more to social circumstance than individual mental health, and how the white savior dynamic is strongly a part of mindfulness school curricula.
an excerpt from “McMindfulness: How Mindfulness Became the New Capitalist Spirituality”
Mindfulness is mainstream, endorsed by celebrities like Oprah Winfrey, Goldie Hawn and Ruby Wax. While meditation coaches, monks and neuroscientists rub shoulders with CEOs at the World Economic Forum in Davos, the founders of this movement have grown evangelical. Prophesying that its hybrid of science and meditative discipline “has the potential to ignite a universal or global renaissance,” the inventor of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR), Jon Kabat-Zinn, has bigger ambitions than conquering stress. Mindfulness, he proclaims, “may actually be the only promise the species and the planet have for making it through the next couple hundred years.”
So, what exactly is this magic panacea? In 2014, Time magazine put a youthful blond woman on its cover, blissing out above the words: “The Mindful Revolution.” The accompanying feature described a signature scene from the standardized course teaching MBSR: eating a raisin very slowly indeed. “The ability to focus for a few minutes on a single raisin isn’t silly if the skills it requires are the keys to surviving and succeeding in the 21st century,” the author explained.
I am skeptical. Anything that offers success in our unjust society without trying to change it is not revolutionary. It just helps people cope. However, it could also be making things worse. Instead of encouraging radical action, it says the causes of suffering are inside us, not in the political and economic frameworks that shape how we live. And yet mindfulness zealots believe that paying closer attention to the present moment without passing judgment has revolutionary power to transform the whole world. It’s magical thinking on steroids.
Don’t get me wrong. There are certainly worthy dimensions to mindfulness practice. Tuning out of mental rumination does help reduce stress, as well as chronic anxiety and many other maladies. Becoming more aware of automatic reactions can make people calmer and potentially kinder. Most of the promoters of mindfulness are nice, and having personally met many of them, including leaders of the movement, I have no doubt that their hearts are in the right place. But that isn’t the issue here. The problem is the product they’re selling, and how it’s been packaged. Mindfulness is basic concentration training. Although derived from Buddhism, it’s been stripped of the teachings on ethics that accompanied it, as well as the liberating aim of dissolving attachment to a false sense of self while enacting compassion for all other beings.
What remains is a tool of self-discipline, disguised as self-help. Instead of setting practitioners free, it helps them adjust to the very conditions that caused their problems.
Your critique of modern mindfulness is an extension of common critiques about neoliberalism. I was surprised to see you are a business professor as I normally don’t associate business with critiques of neoliberalism (oftentimes I see those things going hand in hand). How has studying business influenced your understanding and critiques of neoliberalism?
While I am a professor in a college of business, I have actually never taken any course in business in my academic career. I can’t even use Excel spreadsheets. I am a misfit in my college and department. My doctorate is interdisciplinary – in the field of Organizational Behavior – and my graduate education was steeped in the workplace democracy movement. Before attending college, I worked as an industrial electrician and laborer at numerous unionized manufacturing plants on the South Side of Chicago. My first-hand experience as a unionized tradesperson was formative in shaping my outlook on corporate capitalism, management, and eventually neoliberalism. I also spent fifteen years in management consulting, so I know that world very well; my graduate school training was in Organization Development.
During that period, I was very idealistic and optimistic that behavioral science interventions could actually change corporations to make them more humanistic, democratic, and socially responsible. However, after being in the trenches, that hope and idealism dwindled as I witnessed how management wasn’t really interested in sharing power and authority with employees or labor. Consultants offered trendy window-dressing that masked managerial interests. I decided that I would no longer be a servant of power for corporations.
Business schools, in my opinion, are corporate enablers. Even the modern university has come under the dominion of neoliberalism where education is no longer valued as a public good. Higher education is being transformed into vocational feeder schools, producing compliant and docile workers that will accept the dictates of corporate capitalism.
The book explains how stress has been privatized to the individual because western mindfulness focuses on solving personal stress rather than the greater socioeconomic systems that cause our stress. However, mindfulness has also been privatized in the business sense of the word as private industries profit from the commodification of stress (i.e. wellness workshops, apps, books etc). I’m curious what you think of the idea of public mindfulness campaigns that are sponsored through the government/the public sphere?
I would be suspicious of such public campaigns. We have to critically examine their implicit ideological message. I really don’t see any significant differences between the forms of mindfulness being offered in the private versus the public sectors. Both forms are the typical psychotherapeutic, individualistic and ethnically-neutral variety of interventions. Let’s take the United Kingdom’s Mindful Nation government sponsored initiative, also known as the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Mindfulness (APPGM). Both in the media and in formal government briefings, the rise of depression, anxiety and mental illness are dramatically emphasized to position mindfulness interventions as a public policy cure. As Guardian reporter Madeline Bunting exclaims, “mindfulness has unlimited applicability to almost every healthcare issue we now face – and it's cheap.” And in the midst of austerity measures and cuts to the NHS and public services, mindfulness is politically attractive.
While promoters are careful to give lip service to the caveat that mindfulness may not be suitable for everybody, in the same breadth they wax exuberantly about its benefits for every sector of society. But such rhetoric is typical of neoliberal mindfulness. Mindfulness is sold and promoted as a way of modifying behaviors to fit the demands of a neoliberal political economy. It’s not only mindfulness either. Governments have latched on to other neoliberal remedies – “happiness,” “resilience,” “positive psychology,” and one of the latest fads, “grit.” Mindfulness is positioned as a method for enhancing mental focus and productive behaviors, whether in schools, corporations, or in government.
The mindfulness boosters not only ignore the fact that the concept of mental health is a social construction, but they seem to be oblivious that mental disorders are shaped by political forces and the corporatization of medicine. Mental illness and stress are presented as mysteriously divorced from social, economic, and political contingencies, framing such conditions as self-contained personal pathologies that can be treated with the scientific “evidenced-based” mindfulness brand.
Along those same lines, this privatization of stress depoliticizes it. How do we intersect mindfulness with political activism as a way to change systematic causes of our stress?
What may have begun as an emancipatory spirit for radical change has become coopted by experts colluding with, and acting on behalf of, institutional interests and power. The so-called “mindfulness movement” is deeply conservative and has been led by upper class elites.
Psychoanalysis took a similar trajectory once it had become Americanized. Prior to this shift, European psychoanalysts, such as those at Berlin Institute were Marxists and Socialists. These neo-Freudians viewed neuroses as a social disease. Personal troubles could not be divorced from the historical and social context of the individual. As Robert Hattam points out in his book, Awakening Struggle, Eric Fromm was dismayed by how “psychoanalysis lost its ‘original radicalism’ because ‘instead of challenging society it conformed to it.” So far, the mindfulness movement has been immune to self-critique. If the McMindfulness critique was taken seriously, rather than summarily dismissed, the so-called movement would have to contend with how it has succumbed to the spirit of capitalism.
Contrary to Jon Kabat-Zinn’s cultural diagnosis, our social ills are not simply the result of a personal “thinking disease” caused by our mental ruminations and outmoded biology. Will Davies, in his seminal book The Happiness Industry, describes how unhappiness and suffering offer opportunities for challenging the status quo and building solidarity with others. A critical-civic mindfulness illuminates how a great deal of personal suffering is linked to social, economic and political contexts. This requires critical pedagogies that reorient practices toward examining the causes and conditions of social suffering and oppression, collective experiences of cultural trauma, systemic racism, and other forms of marginalization and displacement that cannot be reduced to the psychological.
This means that mindfulness curricula cannot be confined to private spaces nor limited to methods of self-management. Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) and other mindfulness training programs were developed as therapeutic methods for self-management, not for social transformation and collective healing. Such manualized and scripted programs were not designed to address the entangled nature of social suffering. Restoring insight into these complex linkages also requires heightening awareness of how power and privilege among mindfulness teachers has resulted in complicity with a neoliberal ideology.
Although mindfulness, practiced more collectively as opposed to privately, has the potential to influence our systematic stresses, social change is usually a generations-long, uphill battle (put simply, it’s easier to change ourselves and learn to cope within a difficult system than it is to change the system). What is your perspective on this mindset that mindfulness can/should be used to find individual happiness and peace within an oppressive system (even as you perpetuate it) because otherwise you stay hopeless and sad?
That option may be available to those privileged enough to feel 10% happier and still go about their business as usual. Indeed, let’s face it: mindfulness has appealed to the white, middle-to-upper class who, as Slavoj Žižek puts it, wish to retain their appearance of mental sanity while functioning more optimally in the capitalist system. Substantive social and political change has always involved struggle and sacrifice. Can you imagine a civil rights movement having come into being by telling African-Americans they could find happiness and peace within an oppressive system by practicing individualistic therapeutic mindfulness? What sort of happiness are we really talking about? Perhaps we could take our cue from Frederick Nietzche who preferred meaningful suffering to shallow happiness. Seeking a shallow form of happiness vis-à-vis mindfulness sounds like a form of craving and avoidance of pain, something the Buddha observed when he expounded on the Second Noble Truth.
Additionally, if mindfulness is mostly an elite movement distorted in middle-to-upper-class white-collar contexts, how will critiquing it help those who are most economically vulnerable in the neoliberal marketplace—people who may have never even been introduced to/marketed the idea of mindfulness?
Well, in public schools, mindfulness programs have been targeting the most economically vulnerable, namely disadvantaged youth of color. I find that problematic for a number of reasons. The popularity and warm reception of mindful school programs appeals to what neoliberal policy makers deem of value: adherence to high-stakes standardized tests, arbitrary standards, micro-management, surveillance, and scripting of classroom lessons—all the while those stressors continue to lurk in the background, unnamed and unchallenged.
Mindful school curricula are scripted and delivered without any invitation for collaborative inquiry into the systemic causes of students’ suffering. Serving neoliberal ends of responsibilization and self-discipline, is as education scholar Edward Sellman puts it, adds lemon juice to poison “as it encourages students to accept and cope with oppressive structures partially responsible for suffering in society rather than develop the deepened awareness necessary to challenge and transform them.” As therapeutic interventions, we have mindfulness in education, but not mindfulness as education. This trend coincides with the political interest in “emotional intelligence,” “happiness,” “resilience,” “grit” skills which are critical to an economy where psychological and emotional engagement are the valued currency of cognitive capitalism.
Questions of power and agency are rarely entertained. Who decides whether particular student populations need mindfulness training? Why is mindfulness in schools programs so prevalent in communities of color? Do so-called “defiant” students also have agency in mindful school curricula, or is such training a compulsory banking model of education in disguise? To what extent do white mindfulness teachers serving students of color have the necessary cultural competency and antiracism training that could help to mitigate the White Savior syndrome? Why are antiracism, anti-oppression, critical and social justice pedagogies glaringly absent from mindful schools curricula?
As a professor and author, what appealed to you in starting your Mindful Cranks podcast? How does the format of a podcast lend itself to different discussions than in a book or classroom?
That’s a funny story. In response to my critiques, a very prominent promoter of mindfulness began trolling me on Facebook in quite an unmindful way. He called me nothing more than a “crank,” so that stuck with me. I decided to appropriate that term as a badge of honor. I am a podcast fanatic. At the time, I realized there really wasn’t any podcast devoted to a critical perspective on mindfulness and secular Buddhism, and I wanted to give voice to a growing number of scholars, teachers and activists that share my concerns. Plus, it forces me to read a lot more books of authors whom I admire. It’s also a way to build a network and explore ideas in a dialogical format.