Back in the Saddle

Back in the Saddle
Covid, Blogs, and the Future more Generally

On the other side of a year back at Uni, now, which goes some way in explaining why this blog has been idle since last summer. Pleased to say that I didn’t find it overwhelmingly difficult at any stage, but I was still reticent to divide my efforts – I was already trying to keep up with music and physical activity, so writing with any regularity would have been maybe a bit much.

However, as everyone is no doubt aware, things have changed up since then, and I find myself with a profusion of free time. These last weeks have been spent tying things off with the academic year – my situation is somewhat unusual as I’m sat between two universities, and, at the moment, between two degrees, but that is shaping up as the days pass. Also, alongside just about everyone else, I’ve been coming to grips with our new, COVID-19 reality. We’ve moved back to Canada, which has not been hit as heavily as many other industrialised nations yet, and our particular slice of it has fared even better than average, but the change to schedules, the psychic space, expectations for the future all take time to adjust oneself to. But, even as provinces and states move to re-open (grossly prematurely, to my estimation), get our feet under ourselves we do.

More than just growing acclimatised to the new weirdness and searching for semi-productive ways to spend my time, though, it was a recent read by way of Cory Doctorow’s blog that has me coming back here.
If you’re a long-time reader, my enjoyment of weblog extraordinaire BoingBoing shouldn’t be news to you. Unfortunately, over the past half-year or so, I’ve had the niggling feeling that quality has been dropping off: unlike most spaces on the internet, I’ve elected to turn off the adBlock when I visit there, under a likely-misguided belief that they deserve my clicks more than other sites, but, between the rapacity of the ads and the growing use of auto-play and pop-up videos, the viewing experience is falling off a cliff. Likewise, though more difficult to track, it feels like the quality of content has decreased – less interesting posts, and those that do make it through lacking the previous character and nuance.
As it turns out, Doctorow – one of the key figures over the site’s multi-decadal history and a large impact on its left-wing, tech-philic anarchic flavour – has been disaffiliated since at least some point in February, if not earlier. It’s unclear whether this was due to the direction the site was taking, monetising more deliberately with advertorials often in direct contraposition to other content, or if it was down to a disagreement amongst editing staff (though, as I said, nothing is clearly laid out insofar as I can tell, it seems that he and other core-BB member Xeni Jardin may stand on opposing sides when it comes to the conduct of Glenn Greenwald and the Intercept’s handling of whistleblowers), but in the end it doesn’t much matter: no longer is he there and it seems the worse for his departure.

All this to say, I’ve started frequenting the personal blog he keeps at pluralistic.net, a stripped-back, almost retro-internet space that is dedicated to making good on what Doctorow espouses –

Does what it says on the tin

One recent piece discussed the end of another blog space, that of ‘Beyond the Beyond,’ the regular column hosted by Wired where cyberpunk giant Bruce Sterling would regularly dump his brain. Apparently Condé Nast have been hit so heavily by the economic results of COVID that they are jettisoning even unpaid blog spaces to stay afloat (get a year’s subscription to Wired, 88% off!), and so it must go. I’d not been a frequenter of Beyond the Beyond before its demise, only ever really have a passing interest in cyberpunk and its luminaries, but the eulogy prepared by Sterling was interesting in-and-of itself, and a portion in particular stuck out for me, on the nature of blogs more generally:

Unlike most WIRED blogs, my blog never had any “beat” — it didn’t cover any subject matter in particular. It wasn’t even “journalism,” but more of a novelist’s “commonplace book,” sometimes almost a designer mood board…It’s the writerly act of organizing and assembling inchoate thought that seems to helps me. That’s what I did with this blog; if I blogged something for “Beyond the Beyond,” then I had tightened it, I had brightened it. I had summarized it in some medium outside my own head. Posting on the blog was a form of psychic relief, a stream of consciousness that had moved from my eyes to my fingertips; by blogging, I removed things from the fog of vague interest and I oriented them toward possible creative use.

I’ve a few of my own, physical zibaldones kicking around, but they seldom require of one the sustained attention that a proper blog does, and certainly don’t have the flexibility underlined by Sterling – no ctrl+f, no hyperlinks, certainly no possibility of any interaction with a public. I don’t assume a large readership here – in fact, if you do find your way here, I’ll assume you made a wrong turn at some point. I don’t actively advertise the site, haven’t optimised the URL or the content for search-friendly traction, and, honestly, never really intended it to be otherwise. As such, I’ll continue to use this spot in the spirit Sterling outlined above – a clearing-house for my thoughts, where I can mull things over in long-form that I wouldn’t otherwise be able to do with such ease.

If you’re still along for the ride, you’ll be pleased to know I’ve finally completed Ronald Purser’s McMindfulness, and should have something on that in the next few days after chewing on it a bit. I haven’t yet finished Kabat-Zinn’s Full Catastrophe Living, which should make for interesting reading following the evisceration Purser subjects him to. Otherwise, I’m nearly through Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum, and I feel like my understanding of that novel almost necessitates digestion and regurgitation, cud-like, just to try and make sense of it. Lastly, I’ve recently come into possession of a fresh collection of essays on Erich Fromm, and I suspect that will, in one way or another, make its way here eventually.

Fresh. Exciting.

There may, heavens forfend, even be a return to fiction at some point.

Recent Additions

In other news, I stopped by one of London’s many metaphysical shops before we quit the country, picking up Kabat-Zinn’s Full Catastrophe Living and Alan Watts’ Psychotherapy East & West, so expect eventual commentary on those once I’ve made my way through them. Given the last post, should probably get to grips with the beasts that started it all.

Unsurprisingly, I’m much further along in the Watts.

Contra Mindfulness – A Quick Comment on the Rash of Anti-Mindfulness Articles

Over the last few years there has been a growing number of voices decrying the mainstream adoption of Mindfulness. Insofar as I’ve seen, these are generally people politically affiliated with the Left, concerned that the stripped-back, purportedly ethics-free version of Mindfulness is being deployed by the State and by Industry more largely in ways that are disingenuous at best and actively malicious in more extreme cases. There are also voices decrying the way in which Mindfulness, transmogrified for Western palates, is being perverted by removing it from the ethical and soteriological grounding in Vedanta and Buddhism, resulting in a mere technique where once was an holistic world-view.

Unlike, say, Hegel, Buddha doesn’t do so well when turned on his head.

Examples of the ways in which Mindfulness could or has gone wrong run the gamut – from broad-stroke worries about the ways in which focus on the self disconnects us from larger social concerns, exemplified in military training or, you know, that monster Sam Harris, to the hand-washing benefits it grants existing power structures, such as the shockingly cruel example of a local council selling off affordable housing, and then providing the former occupants life-coaching workshops to treat their stress, thus presenting themselves as a solution, rather than the source of the problem in the first place. To get a feel for how established Mindfulness’ cachet is, look no further than the way other cultural institutions are trying to benefit by association, such as Museums, critiqued here (following a quick search, it looks like critiquing Mindfulness has become something of a cottage industry over at The Baffler).

For my part, I find myself open to both these criticisms, that of misuse and of inappropriate or insufficient presentation, but am probably more inclined to the former. Stephen Batchelor has long argued that a modern, secular Buddhism can be crafted to find fertile ground in Western soil, without losing its core nature or mission, that in fact this has always been part of Buddhism’s multi-millennial character, fitting itself into its host society to most effectively communicate itself in the local parlance. So, with that in mind, I think that that hurdle can be addressed – though obviously what we’re currently seeing is falling far short of the mark.

As I think I’d mentioned before, I’m gearing up to start training in psychotherapy, so the larger issue is something of a concern for me – am I going to be investing time and money, only to unwittingly perpetuate the ills I’m hoping to cure? What I’m finding frustrating about a lot of these articles is that they are merely pointing out the possibility for abuse, or indeed documenting the abuses already being committed, without pointing a way forward. I’ve had conversations both online and in person regarding this, and maintain that Mindfulness training is a useful tool, and not one we should give up on merely because it is currently being misused on an industrial scale, unfortunate as that is. The fact remains that it demonstrably improves people’s lives in a measurable way, as I’ve seen in my own life and in data.

Of late, a number of the articles have been pointing to the recently published work McMindfulness, written by Ronald Purser, which “argu[es that] its proponents have reduced mindfulness to a self-help technique that fits snugly into a consumerist culture complicit with Western materialistic values.” Purser is a Professor of Management at San Fran State University which I, uh, am left a little dubious by, but he seems to talk the talk alright, with a publishing record in the appropriately Leftist/rad-lib journals and sites, and is purportedly a long-practising Buddhist, so at least should know what he is talking about on that score. I’ll try to grab a copy at some point, but I’m hoping for something more substantial than simply a book-length version of the same formulaic article we’ve been seeing for years now.