Mindfulness and "the folklore of common sense"

There are a couple of ideas I've been churning through at a slow and unfocused rate the last few months and I thought I would post them here. 

Students in schools may be taught about mindfulness these days. Define that term for yourself first, before you keep reading, as it's a broad and vague topic. 

Mindfulness, in its manifestation as DIY psychological life-coaching, is often linked to a panoply of ideas that (as I understand them) urge an individual to re-stylise, retract, expand and revamp his or her ideas about inherent capabilities, stress levels, focuses, personal conceptions of limits, etc. The sales pitch can often be reduced to "don't convince yourself you can't" and "find quiet amidst stress" and "learn from your challenges". Mindfulness and its cousin mindset are currently hot topics amongst educators -- the wisdom of its truisms is infectiously inviting -- so be prepared to see quotes, anecdotes, and stats that tie into this trend everywhere around you.

It occurs to me that there's a link between this fascination with mindfulness and the topic of lying/self-deception.  Culturally, we are paying increased attention to the importance of our narratives that we have with ourselves, our explaining things to ourselves in terms of benefits, costs, justifications, and outright lying. Books abound about popular behavioural psychology. The chief specialist on lying, Dan Ariely, is invited to consult on tv shows, and his books sell very well.

Here are my thoughts linking mindfulness and self-deception: we lie to ourselves when we take on more than we can handle, and we lie to ourselves about why we're suffering once the handling turns to mishandling. We act out in various ways, referred pain from the root cause. So the optimism of the mindfulness movement is that although you lie to yourself when you think you can do it all, paradoxically, being mindful can help you do ever more. What narratives of deception are at play here?

Then I came across this article on the social science that has gone into studying sports fans, and the reviewer of this literature made a couple of observations that really gave me pause. 

The critic (Louis Menand) begins with a summary of the book he is reviewing, This is Your Brain on Sports (in gorgeous New Yorker style, of course; emphasis mine):

"Wertheim and Sommers’s [the authors'] basic conceit is that although people seem to behave irrationally when it comes to sports, they’re acting no differently from the way they do in the rest of their lives. If cheering on the underdog, loving perennial losers, and risking life and limb to snag a cheesy T-shirt fired out of a cannon are, objectively, absurd things to do, then it’s natural to be irrational. 'Your brain on sports,' they conclude, 'is really just your regular brain acting as it does in other contexts.'

"The authors nail their points down with the mighty hammer of cognitive science. 'As outlandish as sports conduct might seem,' they explain, 'it is rooted in basic human psychology, neuroscience, and cognitive tendency.' Their procedure is therefore to find for the various sports-related attitudes and behaviors they discuss (Wertheim is an editor at Sports Illustrated) scientific findings (Sommers is a psychologist at Tufts) that ground them in biology."

Menand continues with his critical view of this kind of scientific commentary as it is used for a mass audience:

"It is good to know that these assertions have been proved in a laboratory, because they have been part of the folklore of common sense for pretty much ever. This Is Your Brain on Sports is a book for people who think that if, instead of saying that people are happy when their team wins, you say 'Activity increased in a region called the ventral striatum,' or, instead of talking about stress, you talk about 'a surge of cortisol,' then you are on to something.

"What you’re on to is physicalism, which (leaving the metaphysics aside) is simply a method of redescription. We’re conscious of our thoughts and feelings; what we’re not conscious of is their physical correlates, the chemical states in our bodies that constitute them and without which nothing could be felt or thought. 'The experience of rooting for your favorite team can actually be captured at a neural level,' Wertheim and Sommers say. This is true, because so can the experience of everything.

"The fallacy to watch out for is the assumption that brain states tell us something about what an experience means to the person having it. Brain states of the kind that Wertheim and Sommers describe—that is, things like hormonal increases and changes in the ventral striatum—are indifferent to meaning. On that level, the brain of someone whose team has just lost the Super Bowl is indistinguishable from the brain of someone who is grieving for the death of a loved one. No one would say that those experiences are equivalent."

Back to mindfulness: 

Without painting with too broad a brush (are hormonal increases really indifferent to meaning??) I merely wanted to submit to you my fascination with the phrase "the folklore of common sense," given the ubiquity of mindfulness and mindset pep talks. I absolutely don't have a clear picture for myself when thinking about what the significance is of knowing scientifically what you're feeling emotionally, or whether seeing evidence of irrationality is a meaningful armament against irrationality. That is to say, these broad issues, against which popular fascination with behaviouralism quite directly abuts, are too important to ignore, but also too vast for me to proffer easy answers.

Here is the link to the book review: 

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/05/16/the-professional-sports-bubble

Translating Ingeborg Bachmann's "The Thirtieth Year" (Das dreißigste Jahr)

The Austrian post-War poet and author Ingeborg Bachmann (1926-1973) is not as famous outside of the German-speaking world (and even within the German-speaking world) as some of her later counterparts, such as Elfriede Jelinek, who won the Nobel prize, or Peter Handke, who according to Jelinek should have won the Nobel prize. Bachmann's work is read less often in English than that of Swiss author Max Frisch, with whom Bachmann was romantically linked. When W.G. Sebald issued a book of essays on Austrian literature (Unheimliche Heimat), he wrote about Handke at length without mentioning Bachmann once. When I tell my English-speaking friends I'm reading Bachmann, their stares are blank. "Never heard of her." "Sounds interesting."

Photo credit: Bayerischer Rundfunk

This is not to say she is some obscure figure. She was part of the Gruppe 47 -- the most meaningful literary project of German authors in response to the crimes of World War II -- and there is a major prize named after her -- the Ingeborg-Bachmann-Preis. Her poetry is highly regarded and as widely read as poetry can be. Her poetry collection Die gestundete Zeit is required reading in Austrian and German schools. Her legacy is one of immense moral authority and highly critical assessments of her too-complacent post-Nazi society.

But there's no shaking the impression that Bachmann lurks in the background of the prominent voices of 20th century German literature, fairly or unfairly, likely a result of her gender, her relatively short life (she died in a fire in Rome, probably addicted to barbiturates), and her overwhelming moroseness. Her most famous poem begins with the line "Es kommen härtere Tage" -- harder days are coming. Her major story "Das dreißigste Jahr" (1961) opens with an anonymous character who awakens, Samsa-like, "an einem Tag, den er vergessen wird, und liegt plötzlich da, ohne sich erheben zu können" (on a day he will forget, and lies there, unable to lift himself). The critic Reich-Ranicki describes a Bachmann so sheepish and sombre that her poetry reading was barely audible, even after achieving acclaim.

So when my husband turned 30 this month, and my colleague Michael Redeker referred me to her story about turning 30, I returned to Bachmann's language for the first time since college, when I read her in Thomas DiNapoli's class on 20th century German women authors and was awestruck by her poetic power. I imagined giving the story to my husband as a birthday present, though its darkness hardly suits the occasion of his good fortune and cheer. I realized his German skills wouldn't get him through a story of this length, which at 44 pages is no whopper but with its highly poetic, trance-like prose still demands close attention. I sought a translation from here in Zürich, where I live, and found nothing, so I ordered one, but it's out of print. I sat down and started translating myself.