Affective disorders are a kind of captured discontent.
—Marc Fisher
Politics as therapy, changing the world one individual at a time, doesn’t make the world less brutally competitive and unequal, it helps people cope with these conditions.
—Ronald Purser
Mindfulness is actually establishing itself as the hegemonic ideology of global capitalism.
—Slavoj Žižek
Part 1: Mindfulness/Wellness
Self-Optimization & the Politics of Refusal
If work today has really “got you down,” you are not alone. In the U.S., lots of boomers, well-past working age, chase seasonal retail, and wonder how they could have worked so hard, and still have so little to show. Much of generation X’s professional-managerial class is already suffering from serious burnout, and will be exiting, voluntarily or not, long before the age of sixty-five. Among millennials, who invested heavily in college, there is a strong feeling of having been shafted by the disappearing “social contract” of American capitalism. As for generation Z, the bulk of whom are now approaching college age, there is a lot of uncertainty; nobody really knows what the landscape of post-pandemic higher ed looks like, much less what sort of economy they will be entering.
Recently, I have been probing the possibility (however dim it may be) that the conditions of work-as-we-know-it today might be challenged by forms of collective action, something that implies the thorny prerequisite of increased solidarity across traditional social divisions. The logic went something like this: if we come to recognize the pervasive “exodus of capital” from its own, work-based society, and see the abandonment of things like full employment, social benefits, and public goods as a defining characteristic of late capitalism, then we also must recognize the need for an updated concept of political struggle.
Given the increasing imposition of a neoliberal capitalist “non-society,” the updated concept of struggle thus involves the liberation of work itself from what John Holloway has called the “gelatinous suction of the capitalist social synthesis.” The struggle today is not so much labor against capital, as in traditional trade unionism, but rather turns out to be a struggle against the continued pre-eminence of wage labor per se, under post-Fordist conditions where it is in fact steadily disappearing. The recognized need to break with the overarching logic of capital in order to escape the fabric of capitalist social domination, therefore, calls forth what one might refer to as a “politics of refusal.”
But this immediately raises the question of precisely how we want to specify this kind of politics. For his part, Holloway has stated, for example, that the constant assertion of our “concrete doing” over and against abstract labor should be understood as a form of “collective self-therapy.” “Open every moment,” he says, “and fill it with activity that does not contribute to the reproduction of capital, and multiply all the little rebellions.” From there, the task is apparently to stitch together these “thousand points of light,” presumably under the banner of what, in the Francophone world, gets called the international “mouvement altermondialiste.”
Is there a connection between our diverse projects of personal recovery and social and political movements of resistance and refusal?
As I have explained elsewhere, I tend to be skeptical of critical theories that characterize a sought-after politics as a kind of collective self-therapy, presumably as a way to fill the hole that gets left once all revolutionary zeal has waned, both practically and theoretically. This is because much of what goes by the name of self-help, self-care, self-optimization, etc., has already been so thoroughly co-opted and enlisted to meet the needs of capital.
As Bifo Berardi points out, digital technology has now enabled capitalism to harness mental labor as production, and to extend work beyond traditional wage labor to include mind/language/creativity as elements of the production process. For aspects of mental labor to become stable elements of production, all that is needed is that the person as a whole has to be swallowed up by their work. This is what Berardi means by “the soul at work.”
If today we are seeing “an epidemic of fear, anxiety and depression, “Berardi writes, it’s important to remember that these things “continually disturb the normal flow of capitalist validation in the new economy” as a consequence of these very working conditions. What then is the potential vector from alienation to autonomy, he asks, “now that work harnesses the parts of ourselves that in the past were left to us when the work day was over?”
Like Holloway, Berardi thinks that we require “a shift in the social investment of desire” away from work, with the prescription to transform politics into a social therapy of that desire. But it seems like this characterization of modes of refusal as “collective self-therapy” hits a major snag if capital has thoroughly co-opted the parts of the self that are supposed to be the seat of this resistance.
This whole line of reasoning brings up a number of disquieting questions:
Can something like an aesthetics of existence really be marshalled as a politics of refusal today, when projects of self-optimization, recovery, wellness and personal happiness are actually what capital most fervently recommends?
Also, how should one orient oneself, with respect to personal projects of healing and recovery, of mindfulness, wellness, and happiness, if the things one wishes to recover from are all ills arising in relation to hegemonic neoliberal capitalism?
Is there, or should there be, a connection between our diverse projects of personal recovery and social and political movements of resistance and refusal?
Certainly, millions of people make good use of self-help instruction to embark upon personal journeys of recovery and self-optimization, and obtain real, and even lasting, therapeutic benefit. And one can easily argue that well-considered programs of intentional self-care are a universal pre-condition for just about any other sorts of projects. As RuPaul says, “If you can’t love yourself, how you gonna love somebody else?”
But maybe there are still some good reasons to retain a healthy skepticism toward hyper-individualist programs for changing the world “one individual at a time,” even if leading gurus from RuPaul to Jon Kabat Zinn have things of value to offer us. Ronald Purser has written that “mindfulness is therapy for [capitalist] realists who have swallowed the idea that ‘there is not alternative’ to the market logic of Margaret Thatcher.”
What if, as Slavoj Žižek has also pointed out, “mindfulness,” (as a set of practices that encourage a particular kind of self-knowledge and self-care) is actually “establishing itself as the hegemonic ideology of global capitalism?”
The Bricolage of Capitalist Spirituality
Perhaps, like millions of other people (including many born into advantages of race and class) you suffer from PTSD/anxiety or depression due to the effects of long-term job precariousness. Or maybe you also exhibit some combination of real or psychosomatic illnesses attributable, at least in part, to the effects of workplace powerlessness or toxicity, or the “bullshitification” of work. Maybe you are feeling really burned out, because your job makes increasing demands upon your personal “biopower”— you work massive overtime, and you are always on-call and monitoring communications. If you work in media-oriented parts of the services sector, perhaps your employer increasingly seeks to leverage various aspects of your personality or talents or interests, and even seeks to dictate aspects of your lifestyle.
For those afflicted by some combination of these work-related maladies – PTSD/anxiety, depression, despair, eating disorders, other neuroses, sleep problems, burnout, boreout – it’s therefore only natural to want to try to save yourself from a life cut short, to look for recovery, for healing, for a new way of managing your life energies, a new life path. Recovering a sense of well-being in the face of these conditions can take many months or even years of patient and determined effort, even assuming the most ideal conditions. Take my word for it on this one, I know what I’m talking about.
If you are someone who is an active participant in an organized religion, then you probably reach out to a pastor, a rabbi, or an imam for guidance, and in response to your concerns, you are encouraged to deepen your expression of devotion and your commitment to your family and faith community. I’m told that for the faithful, this sort of guidance offers at least a “quantum of solace,” even if one still must “render unto Caesar” and/or “bow before Mammon.”
But if you belong to the PMC (professional-managerial class) or if you find your direction rather osmotically, via the popular culture and advertising messages, then it’s likely that you frame your problem in spiritual terms, and seek help with self-help, via offerings available in the spiritual/wellness marketplace. What does one find there? Almost without exception, if one cares to look closely enough, one finds a rather improbable amalgam, a strange stew of loosely combined elements.
But what precisely is meant here by capitalist spirituality?
As William Davies says in The Happiness Industry, here “the psychology of motivation blends into the physiology of health, drawing insights from sports coaches and nutritionists, to which is added a cocktail of neuroscience and Buddhist meditation. Various notions of fitness, happiness, positivity, and success blend into one another with little explanation of how or why.”
In a similar vein, Ronald Purser has called this sort of material “spiritual practice junk food,” and has given it the label “McMindfulness.” He takes a dim view of its breezy claim to have “captured the essence of Buddhism without the mumbo jumbo of beliefs, rituals, institutions, and cultural heritage,” because everything important is now “backed by the latest neuroscience.”
And yet, one must assume that the balance of those who consume this motivational self-help literature find it to be essentially coherent. What then is the underlying (but otherwise invisible) substrate that supports all these disparate elements, what Nicolas Rose calls this bricolage? For writers like William Davies (The Happiness Industry), Ronald Purser (McMindfulness), and Jeremy Carrette & Richard King (Selling Spirituality), Barbara Ehrenreich (Natural Causes) the essential connective tissue is nothing other than capitalist spirituality.
What brings together “sportsmen, business gurus, and statisticians, to extend lessons from sport into politics, from warfare into business strategy, and from life-coaching into schools,” Davies says, is a “science of winning to entrench neoliberal competitiveness as the defining culture of business, cities, schools, and nations.”
The Meaning of Capitalist Spirituality
But what precisely is meant here by capitalist spirituality? To begin with, as Carrette and King write, this term refers to a “self-focused, individual human potential orientation,” where we find “productivity, work-efficiency, and accumulation instead of an emphasis on self-sacrifice, the disciplining of desire, and recognition of community.” Capitalist spirituality thus devolves, as Purser further explains, “upon the notion of freedom embraced by neoliberal homo economicus, “the idea that we must maximize our welfare and happiness by managing our internal resources in a way that increase our human capital.” And mindfulness, he writes, is capitalist spirituality attuned to maintaining the neoliberal self.”
If we then ask what this is really all about, i.e., what this specific, historically-conditioned notion of the self is actually for, and why it must be maintained, the answer that the writers under consideration give is more or less univocal: Capitalist spirituality is designed to help people to better “adjust” to their present working conditions, to accept them as a given, as a way to address the growing problem of workforce disengagement. As Purser points out, where mental labor is a commodity, “managing emotions generates surplus value equivalent to the acquisition of capital.” Capitalist spirituality is thus merely palliative at best, and politically quietist at worst.
And under post-Fordism, Davies writes, “unions may be weakened or crushed, but managers must deal with employees that are absent, unmotivated, or suffering from mental health problems.” Since resistance manifests first and foremost as absenteeism, sickness, and presentism, burnout must be addressed in order for employers to maintain profits. Disengagement thus calls forth new ways of “intervening in the minds, bodies, and behavior of the workforce; instead of social and economic reforms, we get “the hard science of workplace happiness.”
But even with these troubling connections “out on the table,” can there really be anything to gain by taking a firm stand against the pursuit of happiness?
Writing similarly, Carrette and King say that capitalist spirituality offers a “sedative of inner explanation” one that satisfies capitalism’s need to stabilize the self in a way that is accommodationist and supports manufactured consent, thus meeting the demands of the corporate sector for a compliant workforce. The new gospel of psychological individualism is thus everywhere promoted in order to develop resiliency for productivity under stressful and demoralizing conditions, and to reinforce responsibilization (individuals are solely responsible for their own suffering). Well-being, once it is seen as the product of individual effort, reframes problems as “outcomes of choices rather than socio-economic conditions.” And in relation to the workplace, Davies continues, “instead of dialogue and empowerment, we get performance management and healthcare fused into a science of well-being and self-optimization.”
The very term spirituality, according to Carrette and King, has now thus become “the brand label for the search for meaning, values, transcendence, hope, and connectedness in advanced capitalist societies.” Capitalist spirituality is in fact nothing other than the new ‘spirit of capitalism’ in the Weberian sense. And as Nicole Aschoff has written in The New Prophets of Capital, “If you acquire enough cultural capital (skills, education) and social capital (connections, access to networks), you will be able to translate that capital into economic capital (cash money) and happiness.” The “work of a life” for the self so conceived, is to clear and otherwise remove any and all impediments, found within oneself, to realizing this “virtuous circle.”
But even with these troubling connections “out on the table,” can there really be anything to gain by taking a firm stand against the pursuit of happiness? Putting aside the matter of the required personality traits (curmudgeon, iconoclast, crank) the question is a serious one. William Davies actually asks himself this question in the introduction to The Happiness Industry, and not long after asking it, provides a qualified answer, if only between the lines: one can be against happiness, he indicates, if it turns out that happiness management, rather than being offered as a kind of resolution of a moral and philosophical debate, is actually a way of silencing it.”
In this multi-part essay, I explore this question and related concerns by sketching the ideas of a group of authors who dare, from a critical socio-political perspective, to question the value of our corporate-sponsored search for mindfulness/wellness/happiness.
Mindfulness as a Neoliberal ‘Technology of the Self’
In McMindfulness: How Mindfulness Became the New Capitalist Spirituality, Ronald Purser sets his critical sites upon the “mindfulness-based stress reduction movement” (MBSR) launched by Jon Kabat-Zinn. Purser does not deny that there are useful dimensions of mindfulness practice for the reduction of stress and chronic anxiety, and the general alleviation of emotional suffering. MBSR and Zinn end up in Purser’s crosshairs, he says, mainly because MBSR has allowed itself to become complicit with the wholesale pathologization, privatization, and depoliticization of stress.
“Guided by a therapeutic ethos aimed at enhancing mental and emotional resilience,” Purser writes, “MBSR endorses neoliberal assumptions that everyone is free to choose their responses, manage negative emotions, and flourish through various modes of self-care.” The problem with this, Purser writes, is that where the burden of managing stress is completely shifted to the individual, the name of the game becomes self-optimization—”I want to reduce my stress. I want to enhance my concentration.” But stress, he counters, also has societal causes, and we urgently need to find ways to address the causes of our collective suffering.
The problem with mindfulness-as-commodity is not just that it’s spiritual junk food.
Once Buddhist mindfulness is stripped of its cultural teachings (minor details like overcoming attachment to a false sense of self, striving for universal compassion, etc.) it becomes only technique, merely concentration training, he writes. In so doing, it also becomes void of moral compass or ethical commitments, and thus becomes unmoored from the common good. In assuming that ethical behavior will somehow arise naturally from practice, MBSR actually leaves the question of the good firmly anchored in the ethos of the market. Where mindfulness is commodified, it becomes “McMindfulness” or spiritual junk food. Effectively fetishized, mindfulness becomes just another link in the chain of commodities that includes the neoliberal self, which functions as a human capital.
Purser’s major point is just this: where mindfulness practice gets packaged up as something more ambitious than just stress management, as a way to help people cope, it must be unmasked as simply a new form of capitalist spirituality. Purser’s use of this term is decisive because the characterization of mindfulness as capitalist spirituality provides an opening onto Michel Foucault’s famous fourfold conception of technology (technologies of production, technologies of sign systems, technologies of power, technologies of the self). The characterization thus allows Purser to identify this sort of mindfulness as what Foucault calls “a form of governmentality,” as comprising a set of practices (technologies for the care of the self) that ultimately must be seen to resolve to technologies of domination.
The problem with mindfulness-as-commodity is not just that it’s spiritual junk food. The problem is that mindfulness, as complicit with the privatization of stress, de-politicizes it, and helps to harness the psyche as a productive force under neoliberal social and economic conditions. In so doing, it stands revealed as part of the hegemonic ideology of neoliberal capitalism.
Mindfulness functions as a neoliberal technology of the self, therefore, in demanding that each individual must act entrepreneurially, and develop skills to actively manage their self-care in order to remain employable, as a condition for thriving. It encourages individuals to “make a project of their own identities,” to constantly monitor their personal conduct, and to embrace neuroplasticity’s dream of unfettered agency. As part of an ongoing effort to optimize oneself through personal life-hacks, mindfulness-as-capitalist-spirituality serves as a major conduit by which neoliberal disciplinary power reaches into people’s psyches to create sought-after subjectivation effects (for an example, Purser points to the wellness-related funding priorities of the right-wing Templeton Foundation).
Barbara Ehrenreich & the ‘Epidemic of Wellness’
But perhaps we still need a less theoretical casus belli for being “against mindfulness/wellness/happiness.” To this end, it may be helpful to take a “half-step back,” and consider Barbara Ehrenreich’s Natural Causes, which offers more of an organic critique of the wellness industry.
While the book defies easy description, it’s at least fair to characterize it as a cancer survivor’s rather somber, late-middle age, reflection on “successful aging,” and on agency in relation to life and mortality. For the purposes of this essay, what matters most, however, is its curmudgeonly and effective assertion of a compelling set of grounds for being “against wellness/happiness.”
Ehrenreich’s various arguments throughout the book are all inscribed in the space of what she considers to be a fundamental conflict of interpretations: on the one hand, there is the neuroplasticity concept, by which “contemplative neuroscience” supports all manner of projects of “personal control over your body and mind;” on the other hand, there is an emerging scientific case for a view of the body as a site of “ongoing conflict at the cellular level,” where life processes play themselves out through disharmony, and even self-sabotage.
Having called the neuroplasticity concept into question, Ehrenreich goes on to describe what she refers to as the societal epidemic of wellness, saying that it is “acted out through medical care, lifestyle adjustments…and a nebulous but ever-growing wellness industry that embraces both body and mind.” Ehrenreich does not deny that we would all like to live longer and healthier lives; but she still thinks that these “forms of intervention invite questions about the limits of human control.” The real question, she says, is how much of our lives should be devoted to it, given the relative costs, tradeoffs, and diminishing returns of doing so.
With Gilbert Welch’s book, Overdiagnosed: Making People Sick in the Pursuit of Health as a touchstone, Ehrenreich goes on, in the opening chapters, to explain how she decided to largely abandon preventative medical care in middle age, having decided that she had arrived at an age where it was not inappropriate to die, all other things being equal. The time remaining to her, she says, is “too precious to spend in windowless waiting rooms and under the cold scrutiny of machines. Being old enough to die is an achievement, not a defeat, and the freedom it brings is worth celebrating.”
Ehrenreich’s personal courage and independence is on display in this section of the book, so there is much to find admirable in it, although her indifference to health screenings, even where heredity indicates heightened risk, does seem somewhat reckless.
How then, do we account for the prevalence of so much apparently questionable preventative medicine? Her answer is that “the compulsive urge to test and screen and monitor is profit,” and she writes that, “a cynic might conclude that preventative medicine exists to transform people into raw material for a profit-hungry medical industrial complex.”
Beyond her account of “a pound of prevention for a pinch of cure,” Ehrenreich goes on to offer criticisms of medical procedures that amount to nothing more than rituals, and charts how the medical establishment, in recent years, came to accept much of alternative medicine as complementary. She says that the rise of the new integrative/holistic medicine is also reflective of a larger trend, the project of the self in the late 20th century, which also includes the surge of interest in physical fitness. Beneath these workout/fitness imperatives, Ehrenreich sees Christopher Lasch’s “culture of narcissism.”
Following Flaubert, Ehrenreich is reacting to how these notions have become “received ideas.” These are popular “articles of faith” which then come to have a certain currency in a broader social-political economy of capitalist hegemony.
All the myriad ways of getting healthy and happy are actually reflective of a broader “withdrawal into individual concerns” on the part of elites and the professional-managerial class, who have taken up the challenge of the project of themselves. It’s important to mention here, along with Nicole Aschoff in The New Prophets of Capital, that this project could not have succeeded to such a great extent without an elite group of gurus, people like Oprah that Aschoff calls “the storytellers of capitalism.”
By emphasizing individual strategies for success, Aschoff writes, “Oprah and the other prophets downplay the real structures of power and inequality in our society,” paper over the ongoing crises of capital by “promulgating a configuration of the self that is compatible with the world as it is.” Through their charisma and inspirational stories, etc., they shift the burden to solutions within the existing economic and social logic, because, as we are supposed to recognize, “cultural and social capital are actually just there for the taking, assuming one has the necessary pluck, passion, and persistence.”
Per Ehrenreich, all of this tracks with the manner in which the political radicalism of the late 60s gets transformed into Silicon Valley tech entrepreneurialism. Tech solutionism innovates all manner of “self-hacks,” which then spreads “its deranged syndrome of inattentiveness and self-involvement to everyone else” through Silicon Valley’s corporate culture and products.
On Neuroplasticity: Disciplining the Body, Controlling the Mind
Ehrenreich acknowledges that increasingly during the most recent period, the body “must be trained and disciplined, and put to ever more daunting tests, and evaluated by the conscious mind. But why should the mind want to subdue the body, day after day?” She says that this turn to self-optimization is also explicable in terms of the unfolding story of deindustrialization and diminishing expectations taking place at the same time—if you couldn’t change the world, or even chart your own career, she writes, at least you could “control your own body.”
For the professional-managerial class, there is an even darker side, however. “There is a need to counter the widespread suspicion that if you can’t control your own body, then you’re not fit in any sense to control anyone else.” And in their work lives, she adds, “this is what gym-goers do.” Naturally, these subtle imperatives also dovetail nicely with the messages of employee wellness programs mandated to try to reduce employer health insurance costs with prevention/responsibilization.
On the mindfulness front, Ehrenreich identifies its origins in the perverse tech solutionist “solution” to the pathological effects of solutionism itself. Something had to be done, she writes, “to counter the addiction to devices—something that in no way threatened the billionaires.” So when Kabat-Zinn extracted the secularized core of Buddhism and called it mindfulness, she writes, it provided the basis for the needed “neural hack,” and thereby transformed the masters of the universe “from the villains in the inattentiveness epidemic into the putative saviors.”
What does it really mean to say that we hack our own brains?
But Ehrenreich’s most serious issue with mindfulness turns out to be the claim that it is based “firmly on science.” She points to a 2014 analysis of major studies that showed that “meditation programs are no more or no less effective at treating stress symptoms than other interventions,” and she suggests that the same results can be had by solving an interesting math problem or having a glass of wine with friends. Also, she says there is an almost complete lack of evidence for the usefulness of mindfulness apps.
Why then are these things largely ignored? Ehrenreich writes that it is “because of the allure of the neuroplasticity concept” which she says actually rests upon a powerful analogy operating in our culture, that of “the mind as muscle,” and not upon science. The mindfulness industry, relying on the concept of wellness from holistic/integrative medicine, says that the mind can be controlled much as the body can be controlled, through disciplined exercise, and “possibly conducted in a special place, like a corporate meditation room.”
As with her rejection of preventative medicine, Ehrenreich’s dismissal of neuroplasticity appears to be something of a mixed bag. As a long-distance runner for many years, I have personal experience of the essential entwinement of physical training with learned mental discipline, and it seems pretty clear that martial arts traditions going back thousands of years cannot be easily disassociated from this sort of mind/body “spiritual training.”
What needs to be understood here is that, following Flaubert, Ehrenreich is reacting to how these notions have become “received ideas.” These are popular “articles of faith” which then come to have a certain currency in a broader social-political economy of capitalist hegemony. Where mindfulness is characterized predominantly as a form of fitness training, therefore, and we say we are performing “bio hacks” upon our own brains, presumably in order to control our minds, she is right to ask, “who is the we who is doing the controlling?”
Ehrenreich asks this question in two related but distinct senses. The first is at the level of the individual: what does it really mean to say that “we” hack our own brains? If we really mean that the brain is just a muscle, then who is the self that we are, if we are not our brains or our minds? And what, if anything, could be the nature of this higher-level agency? The implications of how we answer or don’t answer this are potentially profound.
The second sense of her question, “who is doing the controlling?” closely parallels what we find in Purser and also Carette and King. Ehrenreich is here also asking about subjectivation, i.e., the way that mindfulness-as-capitalist-spirituality serves as a major conduit for neoliberal disciplinary power. The question “who is doing the controlling?” thus also concerns the commodification of the self, and how our most prominent “technologies of the self” also turn out in the end to be (neoliberal capitalist) technologies of domination.
Capitalist Spirituality & The Three Orders of Human Suffering
In this first installment, I have tried to step through what Ronald Purser calls the “ambiguities of healing,” because the dominant pattern of refusing work-as-we-know-it today is found in the individual search for self-optimization, for healing and recovery in the face of widespread work-related, debilitating illnesses and conditions. While meditating, running, getting therapy, doing EMDR, spending more time in the garden, unplugging from the internet, and putting down my phone, I have also harbored gnawing doubts about whether the clear benefits obtained from these things really amount to anything having to do with political projects of resistance and refusal. The problem with both mindfulness and wellness programs, as Purser explains in his concluding chapter, is that mindfulness only offers us palliative care for what he calls “first order suffering,” things like the distress that comes from confronting old age and death, chronic pain, psychological conflicts, relationship problems, and personal experiences of loss. This, of course, is far from trivial.
But mindfulness needs to have its ambitions curbed and its “wings clipped” as Kant would say, precisely because it does nothing to address 2nd order suffering (wars, genocide, social injustice, political oppression); and most pointedly, because it also doesn’t address the amorphous, pervasive, and systemic 3rd order suffering caused by neoliberal hegemony (obscure power relations, class interests, social inequities, etc.). Quite to the contrary, because mindfulness/wellness programs are recommended by all manner of elites, and are essentially forms of capitalist spirituality, mindfulness/wellness programs, consciously or not, have become complicit with this 3rd order suffering.
On Resisting Capitalist Spirituality
What, then, can be the recommended prescriptions? We really need to find a way to avoid an unacceptable “either/or,” one where our choices are either to remain complicit with things that make us sick (like neoliberal wage labor and consumer culture) or to withdraw instead into some personal health/wellness project, centering our life upon goals of “self-optimization.” As it turns out, Purser, Carette and King, and Ehrenreich converge to some extent in seeking to support alternative models of spirituality, ones that register the various lessons of social, community, and positive psychology.
Nonetheless, if wishes were horses, so the old saying goes, beggars would ride.
Purser writes that “if mindfulness were to be liberated from its neoliberal shackles…it could lead to the widespread realization that the self is a construction that can foster delusional self-understanding. He champions a return to explicitly Buddhist goals, such as realizing pratitya-samutpada (the interconnectedness of all things). In the individual self of mindful healing and recovery, he says he finds a “false understanding of universal dharma,” as if everyone, unique in their own way, could and should see themselves as a generic (privileged, white) individual living outside of group socialization. Instead, he says that we need to build solidarity out of the ruins of McMindfulness, and he calls for a new social or civic mindfulness without experts or gurus that pursues a regenerative set of aims to try to repair community bonds through community action, and he says that in this it would resemble liberation theology.
Similarly, Carrette and King write that resistance to the commodification of human life itself is to be found through creation and fostering of a solidaristic umbrella movement with loosely-coupled and complementary elements like those found in the “Seattle Consensus,” e.g., Zapatistas, liberation theology, the Chipko and Swadhyaya movements, plus a dash of Thich Nhat Hanh for good measure. For her part, Barbara Ehrenreich says that part of what it means to find a way out of our dilemma is to “confront the monstrous self that occludes our vision,” and she has various things to say about ego dissolution, and the stoic consolations of “dying in a living universe,” one “shot through with non-human agency.”
These suggestions, on the whole, seem to be sensible ones. Nonetheless, “if wishes were horses,” so the old saying goes, “beggars would ride.” Most of us tend to recognize that things “are the way that they are today” not because we are somehow lacking in the requisite treasure trove of cultural wisdom. Rather, things “are the way they are” way because we are in the grip of a seemingly inexorable economic and cultural logic of advanced capitalism, and this order is hegemonically maintained by its major stakeholders.
To their credit, Purser, Carrette and King, and Ehrenreich each actively seeks to resist the seducements of forms of capitalist spirituality that offer healing/recovery and wellness specifically tailored for the optimization of a commodified self. They recognize that these interventions are palliative care offered in a context where capitalist society per se is disappearing along with traditional wage labor benefits and protections, and where the remaining labor is increasingly disengaged and suffering from work-related illnesses. Each of them also has suggestions to make programs of mindfulness and wellness more able to resist being co-opted to meet the needs of capital, and thus more conducive to genuine, autonomous thriving.
It must be admitted, however, that nothing offered here really points the way to some purported mechanism of historical agency that could support a politics of refusal in relation to work, and work-related illnesses. But as Carrette and King recognize, the ideology of privatization–the privatization of religion, spirituality, stress, and wellness–presents today’s social and political projects of freedom with a new and particularly insidious challenge. Privatization, they write, “breaks the social self and conceals the collective manipulation of isolated individuals in the language of free will and choice.”
Purser also echoes this point. We are told, Purser writes, “that if we practice mindfulness and get our individual lives in order, we can be happy and secure.” In doing so, he adds, “it implies that all these concrete good things will follow.” Where mindfulness becomes the subject of inflated promises and fetishized, Purser concludes, it is a “cruel optimism.” The cruelty lies in “supporting the status quo while using the language of transformation.”
Under such conditions, where even our instincts for freedom and our striving have been essentially commodified and captured by the market, the value in de-fetishizing theory itself as a kind of resistance should not be completely discounted.
Capitalist Spirituality, Part 2: The Neuroscience of Happiness
In this first essay, I have considered Ronald Purser’s claim that Mindfulness-based Stress Reduction (MBSR) is reducible, at least in part, to a neoliberal technology of the self, and as such should be regarded as a form of capitalist spirituality. I also described how Purser’s account dovetails with Jeremy Carette and Richard King’s description of the “descent” of capitalist spirituality within the history of the psychology of religion, and I considered Barbara Ehrenreich’s critique of the wellness industry.
In the second part, I next go on to review aspects of William Davies description of the “neuroscience of happiness,” and his effort to situate it within the longstanding modern project of happiness management, in The Happiness Industry. I argue that Davies’ angle of vision functions more effectively as a master narrative for grasping the problem of capitalist spirituality, one that also encompasses the more regional account of how the psychology of religion gets transformed by the commodified self of neoliberal capitalism.
