Abstract
This chapter might be subtitled “Ethics, Poetics, and the Power of a Weak Community.” It considers the phenomenon of the ethical critique of mindfulness-based programs (MBPs), particularly from within the MBP community itself, and attempts to define the motivation for it. Defining ethics, with Aristotle, as the least precise of all the sciences, the chapter introduces a poetics of MBP pedagogy as a more useful approach to such thinking. Applying poetics, the actions of the pedagogy are shown to generate qualities that allow the class to be with and in the experience of the moment. These qualities are suggested as virtues that shape the experience of the classroom. These virtues result in the generation of a form of community that is strongly bonded, yet also weakly bounded, making it a safe and productive place for those who dissent from inside or who are vulnerable outside the community. The chapter ends with a question about the utility of such a community structure for the scholarly, scientific, and pedagogical enterprise of the MBPs overall.
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Notes
- 1.
The fact that the MBPs are often presented as derived from Buddhist thought and practice suggests to many that we may look there for ethical discussions. However, the distinction of the moral versus the ethical complicates such an undertaking. Denotation of both words centers on appropriate behavior; however, the moral bears connotations of action in the workaday world, while the ethical connotes philosophical description and analysis of those actions. Western thinkers such as Plato and Aristotle write extensively about ethics, politics, and justice, yet scholars have not found Buddhist equivalents to the Republic or the Nicomachean Ethics. While Buddhism is one of the most moral of all the world’s religions, technically, it may be described as lacking an ethics. The historical Buddha solved the fundamental problem of defining the good life and how to live it, and in his teachings detailed the “how to” of such a life. His followers simply had to live it, not reflect on it. Buddhism’s essential pragmatism may account for the mismatch of categories with Western philosophy (Keown 1992, 2006). Mindful of this fact, my discussion proceeds with Western ethical conceptions.
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McCown, D. (2017). Introduction: A New Hope. In: Monteiro, L., Compson, J., Musten, F. (eds) Practitioner's Guide to Ethics and Mindfulness-Based Interventions . Mindfulness in Behavioral Health. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-64924-5_1
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