PART THREE: How Cancel Culture is Trashing the Dharma:

Tale of a Slandered Mindfulness Teacher

by Blake Shields Abramovitz

Part Three

I seen the showdowns, slow-downs, lost and found, turn-arounds

The boys in the military shirts

I keep my eyes on the prize, on the long-fallen skies

And I don’t let my friends get hurt

All you back room schemers, small trip dreamers

Better find something new to say

’Cause you’re the same old story

It’s the same old crime

And you’ve got some heavy dues to pay

— Steve Miller

This is part three of a three-part article in which I’ve attempted to sound an alarm about a problem in Buddhist meditation communities in the West. The nature of that problem is implied in my choice of titles, but what you’re reading right now will make more sense if you check out the first two parts first. Don’t worry, I tried to keep things lively.

In Part One, I tell the tale of how I was canceled from my Buddhist meditation community for the following outrage: I articulated perfectly dull, mainstream views about history and politics (serves this heretic right, of course).

Part Two was my effort to illuminate just how wokeness, or cancel culture, or critical social justice theory (or whatever) is deeply hostile to the Dharma, and why it should have no place in our sanghas.

I’ve thereby done something that many of my fellow practitioners, though they are equally upset by what they see happening to their spiritual communities, feel they cannot do, for fear of being canceled themselves. And in Part Three, I will plant my flag and make my final case against an ugly, illiberal, and incoherent sociopolitical movement that brooks no dissent, and threatens to gut the very soul of Buddhist practices in the West.

i

To begin, I can already hear what people are going to say: I’m exaggerating. My vision has gotten distorted by a strange personal episode with no bearing on the wider community.

Perhaps that’s true. Perhaps I’m merely reeling from a psychological ordeal, and all the study and reflection I’ve done since adds up to nothing more than a dopey red-pilling. Or perhaps I’ve grossly misunderstood the movement that’s been flooding our sanghas. Perhaps it is what it claims to be after all, a needed and righteous response to grave social injustices.

But I don’t think so. I could be wrong, but here’s what I see when I look at the Dharma in the West today: I see a diamond chariot that has carried hundreds of thousands of souls out of hell — teetering on the edge of a cliff. Down there amid the rocks and the breakers, there is no wisdom, no Lion’s Roar, no justice, and no awakening — just wokeness.

I wouldn’t have taken the trouble to write this paper if all I cared about was comeuppance. I’m too heartbroken, too tired for that. I wish my old friends well. But it is my ardent hope that their political project fails spectacularly. And I think I have a responsibility to help see that it does — to prevent our precious chariot, which saved my life, from crashing over the ragged edge.

I don’t want the 2021 analogue of my nineteen-year-old self to stumble bleeding into a sanctuary that offers no sanctuary at all, but only interminable tribal politics. I care about that kid, whoever he is. Black, white, or razzmatazz, he’s been wrung out and raked over the coals all his life. My passionate hope is that when he finally crash-lands in some pretty West Coast meditation hall, the personage on the dais doesn’t have more to say about “dismantling whiteness” than about dismantling the locks that bind the human heart. Vulnerable as he is, I’d hate for him to find himself locked in a struggle session with a facilitator chiding him about what a racist he is, when what he was looking for was help.

I’d like for us to preserve the compassionate, apolitical legacies of Alan Watts, Joseph Goldstein, and Shinzen Young from a sneering activism that won’t even affirm our most elementary ethical trainings — not harming, not lying.

Call me old fashioned, but I like the Dharma. I’d like to see it continue to stand as a beacon for all suffering beings, not morph into an archipelago of activist training camps. For all those shattered, tattered, demented babies who come to us from broken homes, from the night of addiction, the squalls of grief; for their sake, I propose we stick more or less to the sober wisdom we inherited from our own teachers (deepened with insights from the new neuroscience and psychology), and which we ourselves have employed.

ii

I’ve spent the last decade of my life in practice rooms and on retreats at Against the Stream, IMS, Spirit Rock, and Joshua Tree Retreat Center. I met practically my whole circle of friends in meditation halls and meditation intensives. I’ve seen a lot, and I care a lot.

A lifelong progressive, I attended the POC support meetings, the white ally groups, the activist-led seminars. I believe in fighting for the little guy and gal. Of course we should concern ourselves — within reason — with diversity, and with offering our teachings and friendship to disadvantaged communities. Yes, we should be exquisitely intolerant of actual bigotry wherever it rears its miserable head. But while the critical social justice people will say that’s what they’re after, it’s the thin side of a wedge — a Trojan horse, as James Lindsay put it. We’ve seen a far more sweeping, cynical crusade smuggled in, which exploits our guilt, and our urgency to be good.

A conspicuous feature of today’s landscape is fear — ordinary people with totally uninteresting opinions terrified to say what they think. And they are not wrong to be terrified. If they are caught thinking the wrong thought, or departing in some minute fashion from the elect orthodoxy, then what happened to me could happen to them, and they know it. And so begins the slide toward paranoia and authoritarianism — in an American Buddhist scene, for crying out loud.

You can say I’m overstating. You can shrug once again that we’ve got bigger problems. And perhaps we do. White nationalism on the ascent in America, right-wing populism making gains in Europe, unhinged libertarian gun people in Alabama, the 70 million who just voted for Trump again, etc. And hey, I’m with you. But if you’re reading this, you can’t say you weren’t warned.

One fine day, I found myself unemployed, orphaned from my sangha, and scrabbling for change for a 7–11 hotdog. The Picante Bite. Quite filling. Whatever one thinks about my transgression, I paid a steep price for it.

And I’m far from the only one facing outsized repercussions for the infraction of holding spectacularly normal opinions. I know this, because sundry aggravated yogis tune into my articles or videos (now that I’ve been canceled I can happily say what I like), and they contact me. They thank me for speaking up — in strictest secrecy, naturally. Then they treat me to appalling stories about abuses hurled at white people for being white, at men for being men — in Dharma rooms — and about empowered Dharma teachers who indulge this; about being made to feel like strangers in what they thought was their spiritual home. And these are not nobodies, they move in high echelons of the American Buddhist establishment. Is this the kind of social dynamic we want to foster?

If none of this turns your stomach, you and I may have little in common in terms of basic values. And if you reflexively dismiss my claim that something has gone terribly wrong here, if I’ve kicked a tripwire in your mind, please note that the emotion you’re feeling now does not refute anything I’ve said. I invite you to take a breath, and practice a little mindfulness with me in this very moment.

Just consider the possibility that you’re missing something. And consider: How do you think you would treat a sangha member who had somewhat different views about, let’s say, Black Lives Matter, or MeToo? Would you listen? Would you take that breath?

If, on the other hand, you’ve been nodding along in passionate sympathy (whether you’re in Dharma or some other sphere), but you don’t know what the hell to do about it, let me offer this much, in all humility, and deepest solidarity:

When you disagree with something, speak.

Do it as carefully and meticulously as is necessary. Take appropriate measures to protect yourself.

But speak.

You don’t have to go along with this. We don’t live in the Soviet Union — not yet. America is still a land of big, messy conversations. No one gets to tell you what it’s okay to say or think — not here. And far braver souls have sacrificed far more than we can imagine so that you and I could be free.

So, dare to push back. Risk something, before American Dharma is engulfed by this movement. There is strength in numbers. They can’t cancel us all. We could be like those rebel slaves at the end of Kubrick’s legendary gladiator film: “I’m Spartacus.” “I’m Spartacus.” I’m Spartacus.”

iii

In a very real sense, we’re Americans before we’re Buddhists. That is, first we are citizens of a modern liberal democracy; that’s our ultimate center of gravity. The reason I believe this is that whenever we butt up against something in a Buddhist text, let’s say, that doesn’t gel with modern liberal principles — humanism, science, pluralism — we chuck it.

It doesn’t matter what the traditions say. We take what comports with our values, and leave the rest. For example, my sisters now get to sit in the meditation hall if they like, and if some venerated Burmese Sayadaw took issue with this in 1382, well, no one really gives a damn. Nor should they.

Likewise, modern understandings of compassion, sangha, and mindfulness do not chafe against the axioms of the liberal Enlightenment. That’s no accident. Because as contemporary Western people, we discarded whatever seemed backward or irrational, no matter who said it — the Buddha, Mohammed, or Roger Rabbit.

So, let’s get busy discarding this. Critical social justice theory isn’t just an insult to the Dharma — it’s un-American and illiberal. My love for our exquisite, messy, and evolving Buddhist sangha helped compel me to write all of this. But on an even more essential level, I wrote it because I’m an American. Not the flag-waving, rah-rah type, perhaps, but an American who has begun to discern how fragile and precious our founding ideas and institutions really are, however heartbreaking our history (as are all histories). So, I’ve come to see it as my civic responsibility to push back against an ideology that is not only trashing the Dharma, but threatening to do genuine harm to the country.

To my brothers and sisters in Dharma: Let’s get back to articulating truth, goodness, and beauty to precious, haunted souls. Let’s keep sharing whatever scraps of light we’ve managed to gather in the night, so that our networks of relatedness glow a little brighter, a little gentler. Let’s leave abolishing the police and tearing down the system to Antifa and their ilk, and get on with it. We had a worthy project. It didn’t need an update. It certainly didn’t need this one.

I’ll close with this: On March 19, 2020, James Lindsay gave a talk at the National Liberal Club in London. He pointed out that critical social justice can infiltrate anything, poison anything. As a kind of reductio ad absurdum of his case, he cited Dungeons & Dragons. Apparently, the movement has not even spared dorky, broadsword-wielding online roleplaying enthusiasts. Well, I took the liberty of swapping out “Dungeons & Dragons” with “Dharma.” Because if it can happen to them, it can damn well happen to us.

Social justice tells us that if we all just care a little more, and care in the right ways, which they will tell us, we could have a fair and equitable society. We just have to get everyone on script. We all just have to commit to a lifelong process of dismantling our own complicity and theoretical evil, and start thinking in socially just ways. We all must become critical theorists. To do it though, we will have to do away with liberalism, with freedom, because then people can’t choose the wrong things, and mess up…

The limits of freedom in a social justice society will be defined by critical theorists. Their job is to do one thing: Scrutinize every conceivable cultural artifact for hidden injustices — speech, food, dress, text, performance, outcomes, everything.

The point of a critical theory is not to understand a liberal society, it is to change it, and to replace it with something that openly rejects liberalism. It is to apply constant and cynical criticism to everything — everything — until that happens. Even Dharma.

I promised to speak to critical methods here today, so here is the truth:

Critical theory is a means of applying uninformed and cynical criticism to cause a social and political revolution. It exists to get rid of liberalism, to limit freedom, to control thought and action for our own good, which it says we can’t be trusted to know. Their constant cynical criticism is a solvent that will dissolve our liberal societies if we let it. It is already dissolving them now…

Nothing can long survive a persistent enough cynical critique. Not an individual, not a movement, not a piece of art, not masculinity, not a society that has done everything it can to reject and detest racism, not right and wrong, not an institution, not a nation, not Dharma, not anything. And critical theory can be applied to literally anything. Absolutely anything. You don’t even have to understand it.

This is the truth about critical theory, and we cannot let this happen. So, I’m here today to warn you: We are late to this fight. This is already well underway.