“Giving teenagers mindfulness lessons at school to boost well-being is largely a waste of time, a major UK study has found… Hundreds of teachers and thousands of pupils at 85 different secondary schools took part in the experiment.”
Well I never, who would have thought. The limited usefulness (uselessness) of mindfulness was immediately obvious to me from the get-go. But it sounds good and, I was repeatedly assured, ‘backed by science.’ I see it all over the place, ancient whatever in tune with modern science etc. As soon as I get a hint of it I move well away.
“it works for some people but not all. The important questions are who can benefit from it, when and how."
Right. It’ll work for those who have the fundamentals sorted – connection to others, embededness in place, a sense of purpose and direction. If you have good company and a decent job making yourself useful in some way, a meaning that expands your being outwards; if you are embedded in proximal relations, a place and a purpose in life; if you are lucky enough …
Mindfulness will probably ‘work’ .. but so might hopping on one leg whilst banging a tin tray on your head.
It is only fair to point out that few of the students in the study bothered to practice mindfulness, so obviously they are hardly likely to see the benefit. But the reluctance of people to practice is a not insignificant factor when judging its usefulness. People don't fancy it, it's boring. It's like being told that a diet of lentils is good for you. It might be. But not if it bores you rigid.
I’ll give you some good advice here. With any issue you are addressing, any problem you are solving, always seek to identify precisely the power that is doing the heavy lifting. You soon learn to strip away what is redundant. I tested Rousseau’s Social Contract this way. I looked at Rousseau’s arguments on ethics, the moral sensibility, the truths written on the heart, the folk community, the patrie etc and it soon became clear to me that the contract itself wasn’t doing any work. Rousseau was borrowing and inhabiting terms his own unique way.
I also have a rule of thumb. If ever I seek advice and help and someone suggests mindfulness, breathing techniques, CBT I know immediately that they have nothing to offer and to move quickly on. I’ve wasted far too much time and energy over the years exploring this kind of thing. (I’ve been reading books written by Françoise Hardy concerning all the therapies she sought over the years. Some were so bizarre I daren’t go into details here, it just left me wondering why she returned. But her conclusion after decades of increasingly surreal therapies is that they are all useless).
I’ve been introduced to mindfulness on three separate occasions. The first time was with my doctor, which was fine, because it was all about locating the source of the problem. When mindfulness made no difference she pushed on to the real source of the problem. Job done? The second time was in anxiety classes, which I had joined because they needed the numbers I’d actually turned up seeking a teacher training course, but got invited along. I thought why not, it’s somewhere to go, something to do. Socialising, meeting others, chatting, was far more therapeutic than the useless exercises and the stress of remembering instructions. What, human beings are social beings that thrive in company? You can see why Aristotle is considered a genius. Covid hit, classes were off for good, and we got social isolation instead of socialisation, continuing the atomisation of society and sending mental health issues off the radar. I’m basically as sound as a pound, but I saw people in that class who were in serious distress – one woman would turn up with her scalp bleeding as a result of her picking at it. I shudder to think what became of those people during Lockdown.
The third time was this year. Having finally located the source of all my problems, after years and years of working around them - I was diagnosed with autism - I returned armed with knowledge, information, and a professional diagnosis to seek help and advice and was given …. … mindfulness (oh and a bicycle club miles away, when I can’t even ride a bike).
Basically, everyone knows society is diremptive, fractured, disordered, people are dislocated and disconnected, and authorities/experts/helpers are trying to stick things and people back together. It doesn’t work that way, there has to be organic connection and growth. CBT and Mindfulness are offered as help but people know they are no help, just inexpensive, easy to administer sticking plasters dressed as help.
We have lost the social glue, the social cement, so that it has become increasingly difficult to trace the binding samenesses and common patternings that draw and hold people together. Critics say we need proper mental health services. Most probably. We need ‘proper’ everything, most especially proper relationships. More than health services dealing with impossible stresses and strains we need what Erich Fromm called the ‘sane society.’ One of my favourite writers is the socialist and historian R.H. Tawney, a man who knew the difference between conservative and Conservative and socialist and Revolutionary:
“All decent people are at heart conservatives, desiring to conserve human associations, loyalties, affections. What makes the working class revolutionary is that modern conditions are constantly passing a steamroller over these in the name of material progress.” (R. H. Tawney).
The age is taking a long time to learn the lesson that economic de-regulation and cultural de-regulation are twin processes, twin reefs upon which society will be wrecked. Contemporary politics is a phoney war between a phoney Right and a phoney Left, pitching economic libertarians and cultural libertarians against one another, with all the protagonists asserting the right to choose the good – and the true – as they see fit. Such politics is not a genuine battle between conservatives and socialists but a civil war fought by different sides of neoliberalism.
It is not the least of capitalism's achievements that it leaves its subject peoples in debilitating dispute about illusory antitheses and unreal dichotomies, which can only truly be understood when their roots are traced back to that system which must for ever create false contradictions in order to conceal its true ones. It is only in real people's anguish and torment that the workings of the system are glimpsed, and then only partially; for even at this level the system would have us so mis-recognize the nature of our afflictions that we ourselves perceive them as personal problems and individual disorders.
"Like Saturn, the Revolution devours its children." Once liberalism discarded its metaphysical supports (transcendent standards of truth and justice which pre-date liberalism) and became a political doctrine, it was bound to curve in on itself.
Conservatives cite this quote often against socialists and socialism. But the revolution that is eating the contemporary world is the liberal revolution, the revolution in which individuals ditched transcendent standards of truth, justice, and goodness and took morality into their own hands. That’s liberatory in the first instance. The problem is that free individuals soon start to collide with one another, their self-chosen goods cancelling one another out. With the “death of God” came the loss of an overarching and authoritative moral framework and the loss of objective standards capable of evaluating between competing claims. Each free individual became his or her or its own God, brooking no opposition. Truth is non-negotiable. The result is a polytheism of values, an endless and unwinnable war fought between ‘men as gods.’ That’s the revolution that is devouring itself. People seem to admire Douglas Murray. Murray is clueless, seeking merely to halt the revolution he and his ilk inspired in the first place as soon as it comes to topple the idols he favours. Neoliberalism won and consumed society and politics and culture, and we live in the maelstrom. I’ll not be taking sides.
It is not the least achievement of the ‘iron cage’ society within which we are confined that it embroils us in endless debilitating dispute over illusory oppositions between unreal friends and enemies, antitheses which are unravelled only when traced back to an estranged, alienated system which must continue to generate false contradictions so as to better hide its true ones from us. I’ve spent a quarter of a century analysing the problem as a philosopher and as an academic. How to bridge contemplation and action so as to translate knowledge into practice is a key problem for those seeking to ‘change the world.’ But I was critical of what I pompously called the ‘theoretico-elitist model’ from the first. (I was an academic writing for academics, such terms look good in papers). Basically, vanguards that work on people ‘from the outside’ and then impose their remedies ‘from above’ are inorganic and are a form of alien mediation that entrench and extend the basis estrangement. I have learned that it is only in the anguish, torment, and suffering of real persons in the flesh that the insane, inhuman operation of the system is glimpsed, however partially and inadequately. But these glimpses are enough to tell us to be wary of how ‘the system’ and its servants and functionaries would have us continue to so mis-identify the nature of our afflictions as to perceive them as personal problems and disorders with purely personal solutions. Put bluntly, when you need help, you have a pretty good idea of what you need, and you know when what you are being offered is merely pretend help. It would be much better if people would simply admit they have nothing to offer than carry on with the pretence, encouraging false and misplaced hopes, wasting time and good will, only for people to realise the horrible truth, which hits with treble force given the raised expectations.
I know mindfulness, CBT, breathing techniques etc. so well I could probably deliver classes on them. Warm words and nice thoughts. They will work for some people. They cost nothing and have the person seeking help doing all the (useless) work. It passes time, kicks the can down the road, wastes time, saps hope gradually so that people learn to resign themselves to the futility of it all and accept the hopelessness of their position. Expert/idiot/place sitters who have no clue as to how people find meaning, purpose, and motivation offer these kinds of things. I suspect that such people do actually have a very good idea as to the nature of the problem but have zero resources to help, knowing the futility of sticking plasters in the context of societal disconnection, dislocation, and disorientation. So we play this game of pretend solutions to real problems.
I can remember once class which involved mindfulness techniques. I suffer from noise sensitivity. So imagine how disturbing it was to hear a car alarm going off non-stop as we attempted to drift away into the ether. I kept complaining. I was told that if I stopped seeing such things as a problem they would no longer be a problem. That’s a great solution. It costs nothing and solves nothing. The white flag of surrender is raised and you reconcile yourself to an unchanged situation. Things are bad and will continue to slide until a general noise engulfs each and all. This is how it works. When you identify a problem and ask for its resolution, you are told to stop seeing it as a problem. In effect, the problem is personalised – you are the problem.
When I see a broken window, I want it fixed.
And exercise and do sport. Being active is a powerful good for both mind and body. Working on health and fitness has proven to be far better for my mental health than irritating twaddle like mindfulness.
Excuse the ill-temper. I know too well the frustrations of people on the receiving end of twaddle like this. I’ve done the courses, I’ve tried it. Frankly, you are better off finding something you like and doing it (so long as it’s not harmful to health or others).
I remember presenting a pretty serious list of issues I was dealing with to someone involved with mental health services in my home town. I was dealing with profound grief as a result of family bereavement, the uncertainty of losing my life-long home and the stress of finding a new home, chronic illness, prospective loss of my job, and delayed referral for AS. I was offered mindfulness, links to YouTube videos of “walking in the countryside with authentic bird sounds” and the possibility of an allotment (that was the last I heard of it and it wasn’t remotely what I wanted). I told the woman who suggested these things that I’ve fallen down mountains in California and swam with sharks in the Mediterranean. I was exaggerating, slightly, but extremes magnify the truth, and I am nothing if not truthful. And there might well have been sharks in the Mediterranean on the days I swam. I never saw them. But I never saw the nice lady I swam into underwater either. I was following the fish. It’s not my fault they ran into her.
I’ll end on mindfulness with an exchange I had with someone struggling with mental health issues.
The authorities offer nothing other than “just CBT over, and over, and over again.”
He was ‘amused’ by my reference to an allotment, a nice, quiet place to visit alone. “Might as well give you the rope as well.”
People may have other views. This has been my experience and the experience of people I have known.
But seeing that I am in justified, legitimate rant mode, I may as well continue on a related issue.
I think I must have been one of the first people to have been on the receiving end of ‘nudge theory,’ back in 2010. I was looking for teaching hours to finalise my MA in Learning and Teaching in Higher Education at Liverpool Hope University. I ended up being sent in the direction of A4E, where with other graduates, professionals, and very clever and talented people were being ‘nudged’ well away from where they wanted and needed to be into things that were, well, available. I was subject to the same pressure too. It was all about dumbing down your CV and lowering expectations. The group were told to ‘clean toilets’ if they had to. Which was most helpful, seeing as all I needed was a meagre four teaching hours to complete my practical assessment for the MA. I received zero help and maximal hindrance overload.
Twaddle, the lot of it. I should sue them all. Ten years on and this ‘nudge’ approach towards moving human beings externally has been extended across society. This is what happens when STEM people with zero human understanding attempt politics and ethics. For years I have emphasised the need to nurture the inner motive force of person and society in order to initiate, sustain, and support change for the better. Such motive power is self-sustaining in building on itself. I have therefore emphasised the importance of character-construction, underlined the need to cultivate the moral and intellectual virtues as qualties for successful living (flourishing), underscored small-scale practical reasoning, the recovery of warm, affective ties and bonds based on proximal relations, the love of home and place, the inner motives, personal responsibility as well as co-responsibility. All of these serve to create a sense of ownership on the part of individuals with respect to solutions and not merely the generation of problems, creating the conditions for a consensual devotion to common ends. That consensus is grounded in communities of practice, communities of character, the creation of a habitus in which the virtues can be known, acquired, internalised, and exercised.
Such work is dismissed by people who know nothing of people, nothing of politics, and nothing of history. I have a first degree in history. I am a historian by training as well as by inclination. I know about how change is made in history as a synergy of metaphysical ideals, moral motives, and material interests. I have found myself being lectured by non-historian activists and ideologues who insist that you only need a critical mass of 3% of the population to generate change. I compare these people to the football coaches who worked out that since most goals were the result of the long ball, all you needed to do was keep hitting long balls. The skills base of the game collapsed, meaning that teams were never able to work the positions from which the decisive final ball was played. The non-historians are predictably stupid and blinkered in their reasoning, comparing their civil resistence to Gandhi, a man who led a nationalist movement in undemocratic conditions against colonial oppressors. It’s too daft to laugh at. Simply, such people are politically inept, fail to persuade enough people to their platforms, then resort to ever more extreme actions. It never occurs to them to engage in a self-examination in light of failure, see what they themselves might be doing wrong. I have warned for years about the failures of environmentalism as politics, only to find that too few listen. I have learned that not only do people who think they know best never listen to others, for the reason they think they know best and hence have nothing to learn, only lectures to deliver to others, they don’t know best either. The backlash is growing and it won’t be pretty. It’s entirely predictable. Something I’ve always noticed about such environmentalists is how unconsciously and implicitly authoritarian they are. You can detect it easily in the casual language they use. When you present the ambitious, expensive set of climate demands, and the enormous cuts to living standards they imply, such people will admit that ‘people will never vote for it.’ Cue the usual apologetics for the usual political failure, damning people as stupid, greedy, and blinkered. But I always hone in on the revealing claim that ‘people will never vote for it.’ That tells me straight away that there is little interest in persuading people to a cause, with the corollary that authoritarian imposition is the only solution. If the climate plans are necessary and non-negotiable and people will never vote for them, they can only be implemented involuntarily by authoritarian means.
That’s just wrong. It is wrong on point of principle. But it is just plain wrong on every count. For the reason that people who are most convinced they are right tend to be the most blinkered of people, the most closed to contradictory evidence, the most susceptible to group think, the most monomanical in fixing on one imperative to the neglect of other, no less important, imperatives. Look at the mess of energy policy in Germany, Australia, look at the Green revolution in Sri Lanka, look at the Netherlands. The experts are cretins.
I write at length on the inner motives in order to avoid the inevitable recourse to ‘necessity’ and external (authoritarian, technocratic) manipulation and imposition. But in an age under the sway of ‘scientism,’ people want short-cuts, they want to push people’s buttons and pull their levers and twist their arms.
I came across this kind of thinking when studying economics aeons ago. There is a branch called ‘behavioral economics.’ The same with psychology. It is a basic inhumanism, a behavioral approach that seeks to work on human beings from the outside rather than, as with a genuine ethics and politics – the regimen of the human good in the ancient definition – from the inside. I studied economics at masters level, but abandoned it having realised that, at its best, economics is a branch of politics and ethics. Economic ‘science’ is an attempt to rationalise value commitments, or simply eliminate them for their radical implications (as soon as Marx showed the revolutionary implications of political economy we were treated to the marginal revolution and the discarding of un-scientific metaphysics).
The emphasis I place in my work on inner motives, character, practice and the virtues is all ignored for twaddle like ‘nudge’ in its various guises. It’s all about short-cuts created by people who know nothing of politics, ethics, and human beings (and truth be told, hold all three in contempt.)
I’ve come across this reasoning too often now:
“Experts push, people follow.”
One activist, defending the war of attrition being waged on the great public, justified civil disruption this way:
“Movements push, people follow.”
I have nothing but contempt for such sanctimonious people playing fast and loose with civic bonds and democratic norms, using the threat of climate catastrophe to justify any action. ‘This might be bad but it will be so much worse with climate change.’ That kind of reasoning justifies anything. Lessons that have been learned the hard way in history are just jettisoned by such people.
Nudge is thus being extended to movements for change. This is nudge on steroids. And it is a corruption of politics and a manipulation of people. Instead of doing politics properly, some are just seceding from society, retiring to some Empyrean height from which to better order and instruct others.
My advice is this, when pushed, push back hard, and deliver a smack hard on the nose or any other available place. I’ve met the people pushers in all their guises, and a mediocre bunch they are too. I’ve learned that the problem with people who think they know best is that, in knowing best, they never listen to others, and tend not to know best as a result.
‘Sure, that’s about as likely as the whole world going Vegan,’ one clever person full of engineering plans to be executed by ‘government’ told me ten years ago, in response to my argument for a Green Republicanism premised on ecological virtue. And there was me thinking we were talking about civilisation change. That’s a vast undertaking. As unlikely as it was, the Christians managed in carving a civilisation out of the Dark Ages. But they had a common belief system, an inner purpose, a sense of direction, a transendent hope. All this age seems to have is a disenchanting science that tells us that the universe is objectively valueless and that the only meaning we have is the ones we as a very fractured and self-contradictory entity make up. Good luck with that! There is the source of the problem. And people are stuck in it.
Short-cuts short-circuit the process. I always find it remarkable how many ecologists who talk endlessly about mirroring nature have recourse to the most inorganic and mechanical forms of politics. Lewis Mumford warned decades ago about behaviourism and the intellectual and psychological preparation for entry into the Megamachine. In the 1940s he wrote that the virtues have become a foreign language. You can’t build and sustain a civilisation ‘from above,’ it has to have inner motive power, an inner force and purpose, a common belief, confidence, hope.
Conservative? Socialist?
It was clear to William Morris a century ago that revolutionary transformation could not be considered an automatic response to objective conditions and crises. He therefore emphasised the need to strengthen the subjective conditions of social transformation, a process of 'making socialists' by way of education and broad political activity. Without this, socialism would be but 'the mill-wheel without the motive power.' (Morris, William Morris: Artist, Writer, Socialist 2 434-53). Morris thus underlined the importance of devising modes of conduct and participatory structures that were educative in terms of character construction. Unless buttressed by self-conscious agency possessing structural capacity, social force, and motivational character and intent, knowledge and know-how are impotent, a blunt rationalism or engineering, whilst institutional action drifts to abstraction, idealism, and surrogate collectivities. That road wasn’t taken. Instead, the world went down the top-down, bureaucratic road. Short-cuts that short-circuit a process and invite a revanchism by way of democratic deficit. As Morris told Fabian state socialist Sydney Webb: “The world is going your way at present, Webb, but it is not the right way in the end.” (William Morris, talking to Sidney Webb in 1895, quoted in R. Page Arnot, William Morris: The Man and the Myth, London, Lawrence & Wishart, 1964). If you premise your politics on contempt for the people and disdain for the capacities of the people, then you will go the wrong way.
Jurgen Habermas is another thinker I admire. I liked his ideas of a communication community. I just kept noticing that his work on ‘autonomy and solidarity’ was incredibly thin and lacking in solidaristic substance. It was overly rational, lacking in actual social connection. He noticed that something was missing, too, coming to identify the inner motive as something that each and all share in common, pointing to the need to better understand our social existence so as to be able to live well together.
Habermas argues that ‘bureaucratisation’ represented the highest form of societal rationality and ‘the most effective subsumption of acting subjects under the objective force of an apparatus operating autonomously above their heads’ (Habermas 1989: 307). I tend to think bureaucracy is not an explanation but stands in need of explanation by way of the abstracting tendencies of the wider social formation. Why the alienation from sources of life, from others, from ourselves?
Beyond his work on the communicative ethic – which reads like a blend of Rousseau and Kant – Habermas here and there hints at an older tradition which emphasises the creation of the appropriate social forms and practices of the common life, putting character formation (the social identity supporting the intellectual and moral virtues) and social formation together, thus forming the inner motive that Habermas identifies as the key to all true learning. (Habermas 1981: 28). That’s the spring to action, without which the emancipatory potential contained in the accumulation of scientific knowledge and technological know-how will remain unactualised, merely canalized within prevailing social forms and power relations. Technics will continue to misfire unless embedded in an appropriate regime for the human good, a properly authoritative moral framework buttressed and supporting an ethico-social infrastructure of character, conduct, practice.
“À quoi servent de beaux wagons quand on n'a pas de locomotive?”
"What use/good are beautiful wagons when you don't have a locomotive?"
– Serge Gainsbourg.
You can have all the beautiful facts and figures in the world, but that truth will remain passive and inert, an impotent ideal, if it lacks motive force within the practical social world. You can state the truth all you like, but truth needs to be invested with a motive power if it is to be incarnated. The lesson is plain: the truth cannot be simply and passively given but must be actively sought, willed, internalised, and acted on. Creating the character traits and the psychic grounds for living in truth is precisely what virtue ethics is about. This kind of thing used to be taught, in the days before the “death of God.” Now it’s all external education as information. It’s the wrong approach and it won’t work. It hasn’t worked. It is not the informing of empty heads that makes the difference but the forming of character in the first place so that individuals become truth-seekers, people who actively will the truth. Character formation precedes effective information.
It was in answering this kind of question that William Morris emphasised the building of the subjective conditions of social transformation as the most important condition of all since, in its absence, socialism or any transformative movement would be but “the mill-wheel without the motive power.” At present, environmentalists have the mill-wheel, but not the motive power. Activism has all the hallmarks of a vanguardism detached from and increasingly turning against democracy precisely because activists see themselves as propagandists and politicians for the mill-wheel, addressing people not as citizens and agents of their own publicity but as an unenlightened mass standing in need of education. They are too blinded to see that that unenlightened mass is actually the locomotive power any transformative politics needs in order to succeed. There is a complete failure to take politics and ethics seriously here, betraying a condescending attitude on the part of those who think science not only necessary but sufficient. It leaves them at a loss.
People 'knock' common sense - but there's a lot to be said for it. I’ll take the common moral reason shared by each and all over – and if necessary against – expertise any day, especially that expertise which is formulated at a distance from the human roots that feed politics. In an age of technocrats and neurocrats my advice is to beware experts seeking to push you in certain directions, reclaim the associational space of society along with other ‘ordinary’ folk and be ready to push back. Because you can be sure that when you are confronted with people pushing you into an unreasoning involuntary response, those people don’t have your best interests at heart.
I was once accused of delivering ‘an anti-scientific rant’ when arguing along the lines above. There’s nothing remotely anti-scientific nor anti-technology about any of it. I’m just careful not to mix my logics. I like what Ray Monk writes with respect to Wittgenstein’s ‘forgotten lesson’
‘Wittgenstein's philosophy is at odds with the scientism which dominates our times.’ And so is mine. Those in the grip of this scientism can’t see the errors they make. ‘Scientism takes many forms. In the humanities, it takes the form of pretending that philosophy, literature, history, music and art can be studied as if they were sciences.’ And in politics and ethics it takes the form of behaviourism, external engineering techniques, manipulation, and ‘nudging,’ working on people from the outside.
I’ll end with a quote from scientist and mathematician Jacob Bronowski, standing in the ruins of Auschwitz:
I owe it as a scientist to my friend Leo Szilard, I owe it as a human being to the many members of my family who died at Auschwitz, to stand here by the pond as a survivor and a witness. We have to cure ourselves of the itch for absolute knowledge and power. We have to close the distance between the push-button order and the human act. We have to touch people. (Bronowski 2011 ch 11 ).