By Kevin D. Williamson
Monday, January 01, 2018
Andy Lee has an interesting job title: He is his
company’s “chief mindfulness officer,” and he is not employed at some voguish
Silicon Valley start-up or by a chain of organic-food co-ops — he works for
Aetna, as old-fashioned a corporate giant as you could ever hope to find. In an
interview with Healthy Workplace
author Leigh Stringer, Aetna’s mindfulness program was described in familiar
terms: “Participants are regaining 62 minutes per week of productivity,”
Stringer wrote. “They are seeing an approximate dollar return, in terms of
productivity alone, of more than $3,000 per person per year.”
Never mind karma — this is a bottom-line issue.
“Mindfulness,” a meditation practice that is in essence
Buddhism without Buddha, is everywhere in corporate America and celebrity
culture. (The two are no longer entirely distinguishable: Bill Gates is a
celebrity, and Oprah is a vertically integrated global conglomerate.) Google
offered a course under engineer-guru Chade Meng Tan (employee No. 107) that at
one point had a six-month waiting period; Meng has since gone off on his own.
Goldman Sachs has caught the mindfulness bug and uses a mindfulness app to keep
its employees mindful. Intel is on board, and a study undertaken by the
National Business Group on Health and Fidelity Investments found that one in
five of the companies surveyed offered mindfulness training, with another 21
percent planning to do so — at a cost of up to ten grand per session.
When they aren’t pushing Häagen-Dazs out the door,
General Mills employees and executives have access to a seven-week mindfulness
program. After completing the program, 80 percent of executives reported that
their decision-making skills had improved. One wonders about that datum: Were
these executives going to tell their superiors that their decision-making
skills had been degraded, or that they’d wasted their time? Bear in mind that
Häagen-Dazs doesn’t actually mean anything in any language — the guy who
founded the company just thought it sounded cool and that people would buy it.
There may be a bit of that at work here, too.
Scientifically, mindfulness is way down there with yoga,
acupuncture, and homeopathy in terms of empirically observable results. The
evidence for its effectiveness is largely subjective, e.g., self-reported
improvements in mood, attitude, stress, or sleep. A recent paper published in Perspectives on Psychological Science —
co-authored by 15 prominent psychological and cognitive-science researchers —
gently derided the “pervasive mindfulness hype” associated with research on the
subject and concluded that there was very little evidence for its effectiveness
on any metric. There were predictable design problems with the research:
inconsistent and conflicting definitions, lack of control groups to adjust for
placebo effects, lack of replicable results. A review in American Psychologist found that fewer than one in ten mindfulness
studies had included a control group. “A 2014 review of 47 meditation trials,
collectively including over 3,500 participants, found essentially no evidence
for benefits related to enhancing attention, curtailing substance abuse, aiding
sleep or controlling weight,” Scientific
American reports.
Mindfulness training is a $1 billion–plus business in the
United States alone and growing robustly.
Why?
Ronald Purser has an interesting perspective on that: As
a professor of management in the business school at San Francisco State
University and an ordained teacher in the Zen Taego Buddhist tradition, he has
a foot in both the corporate and mindfulness worlds, and he is a trenchant, at
times scathing, critic of corporate mindfulness, which he dismisses as a kind
of prosperity gospel for coastal liberal elites — Joel Osteen in a saffron
robe.
“I’ve been to a number of corporate mindfulness
conferences,” he says, “just as a fly on the wall to see what’s going on. Some
of the consultants selling this stuff are Buddhist practitioners. But the
Buddhism is backstage. At the Awakened Leadership Conference, a big mindfulness
event, one of the consultants told me:
We know we’re teaching Buddhism —
but they don’t. “They” meaning the
corporate sponsors. In order to sell, they’ve really had to go stealth, selling
mindfulness as a scientifically proven method. And the conference was all about
how to sell the program, how to sell
this stuff in corporate-speak, how to get them to perceive it as a
performance-enhancement technique.
Cf. Aetna’s purported $3,000-per-person-per-year
productivity kick.
Purser says he is sometimes accused of being a “Buddhist
fundamentalist,” but his attitude toward corporations and corporate culture is
pretty much what you’d expect from a college professor in San Francisco. He
thinks that corporations are a major source of the problem that mindfulness
advocates purport to mitigate, especially stress:
Arianna Huffington published a book
a few years back, called “Thrive,” that’s a classic capitalist-spirituality
type of book. It assumes that we can all get rich and be perfectly healthy and
happy, and that our well-being will flourish, that we’ll flourish as humans,
and that we don’t have to worry too much about systems and structures in
society, such as corporations, which are notoriously not exactly caring about
human beings. Mindfulness has had an overwhelmingly positive popular reception
because the idea that our well-being is totally within our personal control —
that we are masters of our own destiny and that practicing mindfulness will
make us more healthy and more wise — resonates seamlessly with the neoliberal imperatives:
Don’t depend on the state, don’t look to the government, you are responsible
for your own well-being — you have to become an entrepreneur of your self.
Corporate mindfulness is, in his view, just a way to
gussy up an old-fashioned management program with a bit of Eastern exoticism —
but not too much.
“It’s just another self-help program,” he says, one that
shifts responsibility from institutions, especially businesses and government,
to the individual.
The mindfulness debate is part of a larger religious —
some would object to the word — convulsion: American Buddhism is having a
Protestant moment, with longstanding institutions and centers of power coming
into conflict with reformers mindful of corruption and skeptical of authority.
Buddhism, from its more orthodox varieties to more vaguely defined notions of
Eastern spirituality, has for a certain subset of Americans come to fill the
social and moral purpose once served by what is sneeringly called “organized
religion,” meaning mainly churchgoing Christianity and, to a lesser extent,
Judaism. But it got organized very quickly and, in some of its more colorful
expressions, resembles nothing so much as a New Age reimagining of Catholicism
emphasizing the ceremonial and ritualistic elements of Buddhism: The black
cassocks and tonsures are replaced by more colorful robes and shaved heads, the
apostolic succession replaced by the ceremonial listing of a guru’s teacher,
his teacher’s teacher, his teacher before him, etc. The question of “guru
devotion” is very much on the mind of American Buddhist reformers such as
Stephen Batchelor, a self-described Buddhist atheist and author of Buddhism without Beliefs. His worries
about “elevating the guru to the same status as the teachings themselves” are
recognizably Lutheran: sola scriptura,
in effect.
In the 1960s, Christian religious brothers and sisters
were coming out of the cloisters and into the streets, and American Buddhists
began moving, intellectually if not physically, in the opposite direction, with
an emphasis on monasticism, formalism, and hierarchy, albeit a very democratic
and consumerist one, and one ensnared by all the familiar concerns of American
identity politics. From a recent edition of the Buddhist journal Tricycle: “By paying lip service to
female empowerment but not materially supporting Western female monastics, we
leave them — and the future of Tibetan Buddhism in the West — in doubt.” The
democratic and consumerist impulses have shaped mindfulness in basic ways:
Prior to the 20th century, mindfulness meditation was almost entirely
restricted to full-time religious practitioners in monastic life. Lay
meditation is a relatively new phenomenon.
“There is a void,” Purser says. He’s cagey about the question
of whether he would describe himself as “religious,” but he is skeptical of
trying to reduce meditation to a mere technique deracinated from its cultural
context and Buddhist tradition. “People are skeptical. Institutional religion
has lost its luster, but people still desire something to fill the void.”
Mindfulness? “It’s the new capitalist, secular religion. But calling something
‘secular’ doesn’t make it secular.”
Secularism is culturally mandatory for corporate America.
The promises made by mindfulness gurus aren’t materially different from those
made by earlier generations of faith healers. But the limits of secularism are
very much on the minds of American Buddhists such as David Loy, a popular
writer who is skeptical of “McMindfulness.” “For the Protestant reformers,” Loy
writes,
secular life was a preparation for
our ultimate destiny: this world is a means to a higher end. However, as the
sacred pole — God, the guarantor that life is meaningful and salvation possible
— faded away, the original religious reason for that distinction (eternal life
in heaven) was lost. The evaporation of the sacred left us with only the
secular pole. As the mode of life became increasingly separated from any
religious perspective or moral supervision, modern consciousness grew bereft of
the spiritual orientation the Reformation had originally promoted. . . . That
final Darwinian stroke left the modern West stranded, for better or worse, in a
mechanistic and desacralized world, without any binding moral code to regulate
how people were to relate to each other.
Attempts to harmonize the demands of secularism with the
need for shared ethics have been not entirely successful. Google famously
described its ethical position as “Don’t be evil,” but it has of necessity
found itself making accommodations for some pretty substantial evil, including
the government of the People’s Republic of China, which does not have a great
record when it comes to meditation-based health-and-wellness movements such as
Falun Gong.
The embrace of mindfulness need not be understood quite
so cynically as Purser and other critics do. It may in fact indicate that among
reasonably enlightened, good-faith leaders in the business community, there is
an understanding that something is wrong with life here in the rich, healthy,
peaceful, free, capitalist world, that something is missing. But if there is a
hole in the soul of the West, it probably isn’t shaped like a designer
meditation cushion ($349.99 from Walmart), and it probably will not be healed
by something so vague and diluted as “mindfulness.”
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