The Ascendancy of the Mindful
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ORTHOGONAL ROTATION IN CONSCIOUSNESS
The Ascendancy of the Mindful Jon Kabat-Zinn 1
# Jon Kabat-Zinn 2020
The former New York Times war correspondent Chris Hedges calls patriotism, in its conventional guise, a “thinly veiled form of collective self-worship.” He points out that in the twentieth century alone, over 62 million civilians perished in war, nearly 20 million more than the 43 million military personnel killed. When there is talk of bloodletting, it is all too literal. And for what? Aren’t the events leading to war so often the result of blind attachment to deranged and increasingly selfintoxicating views that become perpetrated, as Hedges points out, as national myths that cannot be gainsaid during the spasm of conflict and the time leading up to it, but which afterward everyone on both sides can agree appear as madness, as folly, as potentially preventable, as an endemic disease of cataclysmic proportions? Consider overall German behavior in World War II. Systematic aggression, genocide, murder, and mayhem, bureaucratized on an unprecedented scale, orchestrated as if they were accountants keeping track of inventories, as if they had no moral scruples or human sensibilities. Was it the “evil” of all Germans, or merely their understandable timidity and retreat into denial and grotesque compartmentalization and rationalization in the face of what began as a violent and ruthless minority perpetrating a myth many Germans in that day somehow perhaps wanted to believe, a myth of their own greatness and the inferiority of others to the point of dehumanizing them and systematically trying to eradicate them that secretly resonated in and warped their very humanity, perhaps, in some cases at least, despite their instincts and better judgment? Now they are our friends. Only three generations have passed. They are us now, and it certainly feels that way when I teach there and spend time with wonderful friends and Excerpted from Mindfulness for All: The Wisdom to Transform the World by Jon Kabat-Zinn. Copyright © 2019 Jon Kabat-Zinn. Published by Hachette Books. All Rights Reserved. * Jon Kabat-Zinn [email protected] 1
Center for Mindfulness, University of Massachusetts Medical School, 55 Lake Avenue North, Worcester, MA 02421, USA
colleagues. The Marshall Plan restored Germany as a prosperous society after the cataclysm. It was an act of huge moral wisdom and economic foresight on the part of America. The disease of Nazism is past only because it was met head-on. Perhaps there is now an immunity of sorts in their society or in others, but for how long? The United States accumulated huge goodwill in the world in the aftermath of that war, by our sacrifice, and by our generosity and wisdom. But that goodwill of another generation and another era is long gone. Goodwill can be squandered if we drift too far from our intrinsic goodness, and remain blind to our own drifting, soothed and lulled to sleep by our own unexamined rhetoric, forgetting that things change, and forgetting just how much we need to pay
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