The People’s Parish - Singing Our Own Song

of Scotland’s larger towns - especially those with areas which score highly on the Index of Multiple Deprivation. In my own field of cinema, I was alarmed to appreciate that, outside the seven cities, the ten most populous towns in Scotland have little or no access to local cinema. At best some half a million people have available to them only an edge-of-town multiplex, with high prices, a limited programme and transport issues. Many don’t even have that.

Yet the irony is that many of these communities do have access to town centre venues, often rather handsome ones, such as Motherwell Concert Hall. But, in the absence of specialist programming staff - such as do exist in, for example, Fife Cultural Trust - these venues play host only to amateur work - an utterly vital role, of course - and a succession of tribute acts, most of them second rate at best. So, in relation to cultural democracy, there is a very substantial proportion of the population with little or no access to the arts provision for which they pay through their taxes, and to which they are therefore surely entitled.

That issue of venues is at the crux of the matter. Francois Matarasso’s wonderful short book Where We Dream tells the inspiring story of West Bromwich Operatic Society, and what its inclusive activities, over many decades, have meant to one of the most economically depressed areas in the country. But a leitmotif of the story is the recurrent need to change venues over the years as, one by one, theatres, most of them publicly owned, were closed, converted or demolished. That physical infrastructure, and the human resource that should go with it, are surely fundamentally enabling parts of our cultural commons.

It’s easy to get political about this situation, and certainly I believe that it is within the devolved powers of the Scottish Government to do something about this, to make Scotland a beacon of cultural democracy. Here are some suggestions:

• Develop indicators of ‘cultural deprivation’ to be included within the Index of

Multiple Deprivation.

• Formulate a distinctively Scottish model of ‘event cinema’ which would allow the best of Scottish cultural product (especially by the national companies) to be relayed to cinemas and centres across Scotland, at affordable ticket prices.

• Make arts provision a statutory duty of local authorities (before it’s too late. For some LAs it may already be too late).

• Reduce the dependency of Creative Scotland on National Lottery funds to support core cultural activity. There are few better examples of cultural democracy in action than the hundreds of concerts promoted each year by Live Music Now Scotland, yet it must reapply to Creative Scotland each year, presenting its work each time as a new ‘project’, because of Lottery rules.

• Put local communities as much as artists at the core of Creative Scotland’s mission.

• Build productive partnerships with those national agencies focused on community development and town centre regeneration, and put culture at the heart of their strategies.

There is also, I believe, another fundamental issue at stake. Most local cultural activity is generated within the community, even if that community energy ultimately results in a multi-million pound arts centre, like An Lanntair in Stornoway. But it is a geo-demographic issue - a postcode lottery, if you like - as to which communities have the ability to self-organise in this way. It’s hardly rocket science to appreciate that the more a community is hit by the effects of multiple deprivation the less likely it is to generate spontaneously the voluntary effort to achieve appropriate cultural access. Yet we know from many examples, from Easterhouse to Wester Hailes, that, if you start with culture, much else that is beneficial will follow.

So, if we’re going to be really serious about cultural democracy, we’re going to have to give some communities a helping hand, to develop tools and models that can stimulate and support community-based efforts to develop better cultural access. And we need to ensure that the physical and human infrastructure is in place to host and to support community-generated cultural activity - and not simply out-housed to unaffordable, inaccessible, privately owned ‘campus’ schools. The alternative is accepting a shameful cultural deficit that is unworthy of any truly progressive nation.

Mindfulness and the Contemplative Commons

Peter Doran

A feature of the contemporary commoning movement is the welcome shift away from a view of the commons as merely a ‘thing” or ‘resource’ or set of arrangements. We are coming to understand the resurgence of interest in the commons as an invitation to embrace new ways of seeing ourselves and the world and how these ways of seeing co-emerge. Alongside this, the explosion of interest in mindfulness - with its origins in Buddhist meditation teachings and similar practices such as yoga - signals a profound return to the arts of self care and the cultivation of an ethos of mindful attention. Both these trends, and the associated rise of an ‘attention economy’, can be seen as emerging alternatives to contemporary capitalism and neoliberalism.

We live in an age of disenchantment and ecological destruction that have followed in the wake of our lonely enclosure in cultures of technology, consumerism and hyperindividualism. Our increasing preoccupation with navigating social media, upping our screen time and complaining about the blight of time poverty is fuelled by a form of capitalism, referred to as ‘cognitive capitalism’, which creates value by engaging human neurological systems. Contemporary forms of capitalism now set out to enclose and marketise not only land and our labour but our very imaginations and capacity for carefully attending to that which is life-giving and life-sustaining. Under this form of capitalism we humans are the products – ‘imagineered’ for manufactured dreams with origins in corporate media complexes and public institutions that are dedicated to enhancing our ‘mental capital’.

In contrast, commoning, as a new way of seeing ourselves and our entanglement with the world, is about undoing the disenchantment that has roots in the colonisation of our worldviews by the primacy of economics (or the “miserable science”). It is about re-embedding the stuff of life in new relationships of care and due attention that extend all the way from our own human intentions and values through to a renewed respect for the agency and even the subjectivity of other species. In Buddhist circles this is called a culture of ‘interbeing’ - a cultivated experience of the continuities of our ecological self with the communities of life of other species, with the land, and with the atmosphere. Commoning has been described by the wonderful German writer, Andreas Weber,47 as an attempt to redefine our very understanding of the economy, to challenge a dominant understanding that has celebrated rationality over subjectivity, material wealth over human fulfilment, and the abstract notions of growth and endless accumulation of money and things over wellbeing. What we are now seeing opening up is a new arena for the commons - the ‘contemplative commons’. And this is occurring just as, once again, the combined forces of the market and capitalism set out to extend the horizons of enclosure and marketization to the intimate realms of our attention.

Human attention is an exceptionally important cognitive function, and it is one that is now at the heart of a global corporate competition for ‘mind-share’. The eminent psychiatrist and writer, Iain McGilchrist, believes, in line with Buddhist understandings, that the mind and brain can be understood only by seeing them in the broadest possible context – the context of the whole of our physical and spiritual existence and of the wider human culture in which they arise. He has described48 how attention occupies a special status in our lives because it comes into play prior to our functions, relationships and even to our encounters with things. In other words, what we choose to pay attention to has a decisive influence on our very dispositions. It changes the nature of the world we each inhabit.

The great insight behind Buddhist and other practices around mindfulness is that the quality of our attention is not a fixed human deposit. Mindfulness is about cultivating and training that innate human capacity for more focused attention, and reclaiming our ability to observe closely the mind-body. Mindfulness practices encourage the quiet observation of habituated thought patterns and emotions, with a view to interrupting what can be an unhealthy tendency to over-identify with, and stress out about, these transient contents of the mind. In its Buddhist settings, mindfulness is inseparable from the ethical life, because it is the original human technology that cultivates the space where our human condition is laid bare. This is the inner space, where we can reclaim freedom as a kind of virtuosity in the practice of our lives together, and where limits and forms are gateways to an original freedom for improvisation that we associate with a ‘beginner’s mind’. In the words of Thich Nhat Hanh, we can recover the insight that the real miracle is to walk mindfully on the earth and glimpse, once again, that beauty of the first morning of the world.

Somewhat paradoxically but predictably, mindfulness - or perhaps more accurately the popular, secular variety of ‘McMindfulness’49 - is also big business. It is worth in excess of $1.0 billion in the US alone and linked to an expanding range of must

have products including downloadable apps (~1300 at the last count), books to read or colour in, and online courses. Mindfulness practice and training is now part of a global wellness industry worth trillions of dollars. McMindfulness - mindfulness stripped of ethical and critical consciousness - can appear to offer a tailored and individualised therapeutic response to many of the features of neoliberalism. It can be sold as the perfect antidote when we are overcome by a desire for respite from hyper-consumerism. It can provide us with support in our struggle to comply with pressures to enhance productivity in the workplace. Or it can offer individual training programmes designed to enhance our resilience.

But as our enclosure in this attention economy accelerates, our vulnerability to addiction, loneliness, depression and alienation increases in a disenchanted world, bereft of complexity, care and meaning, and where nature and other people appear to retreat behind a series of screens. Mindfulness in corporate and institutional settings can be co-opted as a form of self-discipline and adaptation to cognitive disciplinary forces in the service of enhanced productivity. Or the practice can be deployed by institutions to help mitigate consequences at heightened moments of distress, e.g. when staff are being prepared to adapt to news of their imminent redundancy. This is why Slavoj Žižek once described Buddhism as the perfect supplement for a consumerist society.50 Stripped of its ethical and contextual roots, mindfulness-based practices borrowed from Buddhist and Zen lineages, risk shoring up the very sources of suffering from which the Buddha set out to liberate himself and others.

Mindfulness must be practised with attention to the operation of power and context if it is to generate useful and liberating insights, irreducible to exclusively personal or individual experience. Aligned with, and informed by, acknowledgement of our institutional sources of suffering, mindfulness can be a pathway to critical engagement and transformation and can provide access to the contemplative commons. The risk for mindfulness practices is that they are co-opted and instrumentalized by corporate, educational and other institutional settings. The very domain of interiority, where resistance can begin with insights into the nature of modern power, is in danger of being colonized and enclosed by the imperatives of neoliberal logic.

The recovery of the contemplative commons is central to creating an alternative pathway to a more sustainable life - a life lived both individually and collectively with care and due attention to the mutual entanglements of self, others and nature. Mindfulness needs to be practised in the context of Buddhist or similar ethical teachings and, in such a context, leads to a liberation that is richer and more interdependent than the lonely, doubting and radically insecure life of solipsism.