Mindfulness
Mindfulness misconstrued
I’m afraid I must administer a mild rebuke to my friend Scott Barry Kaufman, the Columbia University psychologist I’ve had had the pleasure of talking with on my podcast some months ago. On his Scientific America blog, he recently posted an interesting piece about the fact that people say they derive meaning from extreme emotional experiences—not just positive ones, but negative ones as well.
Which makes sense:
So far so good. But then Scott writes,
These findings also have implications for the mindfulness craze, and provide a much-needed counterpoint to the current trend of viewing calm and tranquil experiences as most conducive to a life well lived. To be sure, mindfulness, meditation, and cultivating inner calm can be beneficial for reducing anxiety, improving depression, and helping us cope with pain.
However, the intensity of peak experiences may be more likely to define who we are. At the end of our lives, will we look back and remember most poignantly all of the calm and tranquil meditation sessions we had, or will we remember the moments that plumbed the depths of our emotional life, that made us feel most alive?
Two points:
In my experience, some subjective experiences are much more intense when you’re mindful. I’m thinking particularly of aesthetic experiences—seeing the beauty around you so clearly that you feel true awe and wonder.
Progressive Realism
Bring on the revolution
I feel a little guilty about how much I enjoyed David Rieff’s...
“There is nothing necessarily inappropriate about a biographer being in profound sympathy with his or her subject, to the exclusion of that person’s contemporaries. But when Packer says, as he did in a talk he gave at an Asia Society meeting when the book came out, that he misses the Holbrooke era because “the alternative is Trump’s America,” he is being disingenuous. Forget Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and the possibility that, for the first time since the socialist congressman Vito Marcantonio lost his House seat in 1950, a political left worthy of the name will be competitive in U.S. electoral politics. For an alternative to these two choices, one need look no further than Barack Obama, who looms like Nemesis over the last part of Packer’s book.”
The Psychology of Tribalism
Virtuous virtue signaling
Our dog Frazier was on death row when we got him—slated to be “put to sleep” if the animal shelter couldn’t find a home for him.
If you don’t recognize that sentence as virtue signaling, you need to get more in touch with the Zeitgeist. Over the past few decades it has become cooler and cooler to casually mention that your dog is a “shelter dog.”
Don’t take my word for it. Here’s Matt Bershadker, president of the ASPCA: “Rescuing an animal has become a badge of honor,” he told a New York Times reporter. “People proudly go to dog parks and walk around their neighborhoods talking about the animal that they rescued from a shelter.”
And this fact—that you can actually brag about your dog being a formerly homeless mutt and get social credit for it—seems to have been good for dogs. The percentage of dogs at animal shelters that have to be put to sleep for lack of adoption has dropped sharply over the past decade, according to the Times.
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Links
The New York Times interviews Ram Dass, author of the 1971 pop-eastern-philosophy classic Be Here Now about the ego, the soul, death, and related matters.
In Prospect Magazine, Ray Monk, a philosopher and Wittgenstein’s biographer, argues that the landscape of modern philosophy might be quite different had it not been for the premature death of the philosopher R.G. Collingwood in 1943—a death that left hyper-materialist Gilbert Ryle with unrivalled power within British philosophy.