Social mindfulness as a force for change
Mark Leonard, British political scientist and author/
Open Democracy
Collective action is more effective when people understand the values and beliefs that drive their behaviour.
Today, the future of humanity and the biosphere lie in the balance. If you are reading this article, you are likely to be one of many who believe that collectively, we must find answers to the challenges we face if a better world is to emerge out of this time of great change. But how will collective action on the necessary scale be fashioned and sustained at a time when individualism and tribalism are rampant? Mindfulness provides one part of the answer to that question.
In the past, human beings evolved in small, closely-knit groups. We survived by collaborating, caring and sharing resources from day to day. The need to maintain trusting, intimate relationships often overrode the social advantages to be gained from acquiring power and status. Threats were sporadic, acute and potentially deadly.
Today, the sense of threat we face is very different. We have come to believe that our sense of self-worth depends on our ability to achieve our goals and adorn ourselves with the signs of success, so we are under a constant low-level threat to perform and gain approval. We exchange the emotional rewards of social connection with yet more distractions. We worry what others think of us, and fill the gaping hole that’s left in our emotional lives by striving to do better and buy more stuff.
Against this background, as the author David Smail argues, individual therapy acts as a form of social control because it places responsibility for mental wellbeing on the individual, whereas the causes of distress are social and material. Ron Purser develops this argument further in his book McMindfulness with reference to the ways in which a secularised form of Buddhist meditation has become a panacea for the social ills of our time.
Purser’s criticism is not leveled at the effectiveness of mindfulness as means to reduce distress. Rather, he argues that it is offered over-enthusiastically as the answer to almost every ill, and that this is a potentially dangerous form of mass delusion. Mindfulness comes with a quasi-spiritual flavour which feeds the zeal of its devotees.
Yet psychological studies do seem to indicate that mindfulness reduces the negative impact of stress on all manner of human cognitive, emotional and behavioural capacities. It’s clear that stress can make us say things we wish we hadn’t. By contrast, when we feel ourselves, we have more time for others and are better able to understand what is going on for them. Helping others makes us feel better. Reducing stress improves mood; improving mood will make it easier for us to be kind and caring; and being kind and caring makes us feel good.
Since mindfulness does have these effects, it would not be unreasonable to expect that mindfulness could have a collective impact if it were practiced en masse. Empirical evidence already suggests that when mindfulness is taught in the workplace there are positive effects on organisational culture. For example, around 10% of staff at the Royal Orthopaedic Hospital in Birmingham (UK) had improved ‘Basic Psychological Needs at Work Scale’ scores after mindfulness training, a measure that includes autonomy, competence and crucially, relatedness.
If such programmes can work at this level then they should be able to operate at a larger scale too, though this is more difficult because pro-social behaviour is more obviously advantageous in a contained social group. But logically, the more personal and interpersonal skills people have, the more likely they are to value collective good above short-term self-interest. Letting go of the need to account for cost and benefits is a liberating experience that gives us a sense of limitless possibilities in a universe built out of the substance of love – a much more powerful frame for mindfulness than mere therapy.
As therapy, mindfulness is a value-neutral intervention in the same way that Cognitive Behavioural Therapy is a value-neutral intervention. Both these psychological therapies are about as effective as each other in preventing depression, and equally effective as the use of anti-depressants. Different options suit different people. Getting people who are vulnerable to depression to go to a regular pottery class might also be just as effective, but no-one has done a comparison trial to find that out.