McMindfulness: How Mindfulness Became the New Capitalist Spirituality by Ronald Purser
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

The Religious Right

This fellow Ronald Purser is like the committed Marxist who knows where Communism went wrong and insists we should give it another, more radical, try (Zizek and Eagleton come to mind). Or like those perennial Christians who fervently belief that some version of their religion originating at some arbitrary point in history is the authentic one to which their co-religionists should return (David Hart Bentley is one of the more recent but the appeal to the Ole Time Religion is rife in America). Purser reckons that the respectable spiritual tenets of Buddhism have been corrupted by bourgeois capitalism into an ideology of self-serving greed, a practical religion of the status quo. He wants this to stop.

Despite his petulant foot-stamping, Purser is of course right. A primary function of any institutionalised religion (and Mindfulness is very institutionalised) is to prevent civil disturbances, to calm the masses by suggesting an alternative universe in which all pain and injustice is eliminated. But this doesn’t justify saying it over and over again in 274 repetitive and ill-structured pages. Everything he wants to say is on the first page; the rest is tendentious padding. And to whom is such an unneeded excess directed? Not to the ‘mindful’ sellouts to capitalism who are by his own assessment unreachable. Probably not to other critics of purported Buddhist heresies, each with their own version of the correct path. And certainly not to the vast public who know nothing about such spiritual outrage and care even less.

What irks most is that Mr. Purser seems entirely unaware that his gripe against bastardised Buddhism is one that can be applied to all spiritual movements. All religious traditions, if they are to remain traditions, develop an economic imperative which demands commercialisation for survival. This inevitably means that they become dependent upon established institutions which are economically and politically dominant. In short, whatever the movement started as, it will end up as a religion serving the prevailing culture. Purser, the true believer, seems as unmindful 0f this as the targets of his righteous wrath.

Skip the book. Wallow in your smugness. Or not. But at all costs stay away from any idea that has cycled through California dreamland.

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