A few weeks ago there was a flurry of activity in the NYTimes on topics relating meditation to contemporary science and culture. The eminent scholar Donald Lopez summed it up well in an article posted at The Immanent Frame, a blog sponsored by the Social Science Research Council:
On Sunday May 25, 2008, the New York Times published an article entitled “Superhighway to Bliss” about Jill Bolte Taylor, a neuroscientist who suffered a stroke in 1996. After she regained the ability to speak, she described the experience as “nirvana.” Neuropathology as religious experience is nothing new, yet the next day, the piece was number one on the Times list of most e-mailed articles. In the Science Times section of the paper the following Tuesday, there was an article entitled “Lotus Therapy,” on the growing use of the meditation cushion to treat problems previously consigned to the analyst’s couch. The next day, “Lotus Therapy” had taken over the top spot as the most e-mailed article. Clearly, something is going on. But that had become clear two weeks earlier when, on May 13th, the paper published an op-ed piece by conservative commentator David Brooks called “The Neural Buddhists.”
Lopez is justly skeptical of much of the buzz surrounding this trend. As he notes: “Researchers who often identify themselves as Buddhists measure the effects of meditation techniques that are not unique to Buddhism.” He also observes that Brooks, in the column that started the mini-trend, only uses the terms Buddhist and Buddhism, and never defines the terms; “He may assume that it is common knowledge, and he is probably right.” Actually, that’s not quite accurate, because it seems to me that the Brooks piece does offer a sort of implicit definition, or at least a description, of the phenomenon he’s talking about:
Over the past several years, the momentum has shifted away from hard-core materialism. The brain seems less like a cold machine. It does not operate like a computer. Instead, meaning, belief and consciousness seem to emerge mysteriously from idiosyncratic networks of neural firings. Those squishy things called emotions play a gigantic role in all forms of thinking. Love is vital to brain development.
Researchers now spend a lot of time trying to understand universal moral intuitions. Genes are not merely selfish, it appears. Instead, people seem to have deep instincts for fairness, empathy and attachment.
Overall, Lopez’s criticisms are still well-founded though. Not only is there nothing particularly Buddhist about the trends noted in the passage I just quoted; everything following the first sentence is a non sequitur, insofar as none of the development that Brook mentions constitute an kind of challenge to materialism — only to the most simplistic forms of mechanism and computational theories of mental activity.
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