A Meta-Critique of Mindfulness Critiques: From McMindfulness to Critical Mindfulness
Online magazines and blogs are attempting to translate mindfulness into the cultural mainstream, but online discussions often reproduce assumptions and patterns of thinking which are divisive, leading to an increasingly polarized debate. This chapter pres
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Zack Walsh
Meta-Critique or: A Critique of Ideological Critiques Critiques of mindfulness have now become so popular that they compete for the public’s attention alongside regular reports of mindfulness’ purported benefits. In just the last two years, commentators declared 2014 the year of mindfulness (Robb 2015; Gregoire 2014), then a popular backlash emerged (North 2014), and now, commentators seem poised to critique the critique (Delaney 2015; Gregoire 2015; Drougge 2016). However, as Mary Sykes Wylie (2015) argues in her historical account of these trends, critics who employ Buddhist ethics to critique secular mindfulness assume a reactionary position that is fated to produce its own antithesis. Religiously based ethical critiques produce deeper ideological trenches between critics and apologists, without advancing a process for their reconciliation, because by imposing an interpretive frame from outside, these critiques produce nothing but endless cycles of future critique between contrary religious and secular perspectives. Rather than engage a tired debate over the potential benefits and drawbacks of mainstream
Z. Walsh (&) Claremont School of Theology, 1325 N College Ave, Claremont, 91711 CA, USA e-mail: [email protected]
adaptations of mindfulness, this chapter will outline the terms of that debate in an attempt to curtail the proliferation of online commentaries that lack self-reflexivity and suffer from a poor understanding of opposing viewpoints. By offering a critical summary of online critiques, this chapter will analyze how secular, scientific, religious, economic, and political ideologies attribute certain characteristics and prescribe certain values to mindfulness, in order to produce particular representations that are somehow more authoritative and valuable than their alternatives. The guiding assumption of this meta-critique is that neither secular mindfulness nor critiques of mindfulness are value-free. The semiotics of mindfulness reflects particular ideologies and their associated values. As Payne (2014) argues, mindfulness, like all tools, “are ideologies—they exercise the values of their makers and instantiate those values in their users” (para. 13). Using mindfulness in schools (Forbes 2015), the military (Purser 2014), or Occupy Wall Street (Rowe 2015) and marketing it to stock traders (Dayton 2011) or people who want mind-blowing sex (Marter 2014) each affirm particular ideologies and sets of values that inform mindfulness practices, whether that includes an ethic of caregiving, a sensitivity to economic injustice, a drive for profit, or a desire for satisfaction. One assumption underlying many online critiques is that as Western culture, secularism, and science transform meditation into mindfulness, it
© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016 R.E. Purser et al. (eds.), Handbook of Mindfulness, Mindfulness in Behavioral Health, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-44019-4_11
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becomes uncritical of how mindfulness is refashioned into a tool for ideology. Though this line of
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