BOOKS AND ARTS MAY 4, 2012
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Washington Diarist
“Even though I am still very shy, I find myself able to project a quiet but unmistakable self-confidence, whether I am meeting world leaders like Barack Obama, speaking to a large audience, or dealing with a traffic police officer. ... In most situations, when interacting with people, I let my ego become small, humble, and mostly irrelevant, while focusing on bringing kindness and benefit to whomever I am interacting with. ... I am amazed by how much my simple aspiration for world peace has resonated with so many people.” The man who wrote those words must be insufferable. I have never met him, but I have read his book. It is called Search Inside Yourself: The Unexpected Path to Achieving Success, Happiness (and World Peace), and he is Chade-Meng Tan, an engineer at Google, Employee Number 107, known officially as the “Jolly Good Fellow (which nobody can deny),” whose job description is “enlighten minds, open hearts, create world peace.” My own heart his book has turned to stone. It is a work of the most obnoxious contentment, and a precious document of the sanctimony and the insularity of Silicon Valley. It is also an insidious example of what used to be known as industrial psychology, or the managerial promulgation of doctrines of the mind that will pacify workers and motivate them for “high performance.” In the case of Google’s in-house lama, the instrument of the corporate mind-fuck is Buddhism itself.
SEARCH INSIDE YOURSELF is a Zen-like curriculum in “emotional intelligence” that has been taught at Google University to Google employees since 2007. Its central concept is “mindfulness,” a kind of serenely focused attention, and it consists in a series of meditations and mind-body exercises—“wisdom practices in a corporate setting”—that are designed to enhance “stellar work performance, outstanding leadership, and the ability to create the conditions for happiness.” The irony of refining the attention of people whose business is to disperse and even destroy attention is of course lost on Meng, who soulfully includes a prescription for “mindful e-mailing” (“begin by taking one conscious breath ...”). Meng does a meditation “every time I walk from my office to the restroom and back.” The restroom, indeed. “Mindfulness,” he explains, “is the mind of just being. All you really need to do is to pay attention moment-to-moment without judging. It is that simple.” (The denial of significant complexity is inscribed in the book’s vrai-naïf style: “Difficult conversations are conversations that are hard to have.”) Owing to Meng’s course, employees at Google get promoted, come to work more often, and have fun. As an example of someone who grasps that “your work is something you do for fun,” he gives—in one of the many unself-aware passages in this manual of self-awareness—Warren Buffett. More than fun, “your work will become a source of your happiness.” And of the company’s happiness, too.
THERE ARE MANY THINGS wrong with all this. Take a conscious breath and consider them. “Pay[ing] attention moment-to-moment” is a renunciation of the critical temper. The pure present is for infants and mystics. The serenity that Meng teaches is a go-along, get-along quietism, an organizational submissiveness—a technique of mental manipulation designed to strip the individual of any internal obstacle to the ungrumbling execution of his tasks. “Mindfulness can increase my happiness without changing anything else.” Good worker! Enlightened cog! Meng and his authorities—“happiness strategists,” “leadership scholars”—insist upon the “non-judgmental” character of the mindful ideal. This is one of the great American mistakes. Instead of teaching people how to judge, we teach them not to judge—but there is no circumstance or context in which the absence of judgment is not a judgment, specifically one of accommodation and acquiescence. Or in the words of an ancient Chinese master cited raptly by Meng, “just cease having preferences.” Could there be a less Google-like instruction? There is also the matter of the relationship of work to joy. Dissatisfaction with one’s job is a sorry fate, though a common one; but the promotion of the workplace into the site of the individual’s deepest happiness is a terrible illusion. Spiritual fulfillment should not be sought on a screen or in a number. Yet here is Meng, who tells a monk that “the reason he became a monk is because he could not join Google back in 1972,” spiritualizing the corporation. This is a cunning extension of its sway, and of its idea of success; and of the imperialism of the office, and the penetration of private life by professional life. “Just being” is possible only far away from the cold, quantified universe of productivity and achievement. “Just being” is a rebuke to it. As for the peace of the world, it is not, as the people of Syria and Congo and Sudan and Tibet will confirm, the peace of the individual. But Employee Number 107 says that “the way to create the conditions for world peace is to create a mindfulness-based emotional intelligence curriculum, perfect it within Google, and then give it away as one of Google’s gifts to the world.” Who do these people think they are?
THERE IS ALSO an empirical objection to this cultic propaganda. It is the Stakhanovite ethos at Mountain View. “When you get to a place like this, it can tear you apart,” a Google sales engineer told The New York Times, which reported on Meng’s business dharma. In “a culture of 80-hour workweeks,” the assault on the private sphere must be disguised by the transposition of its values to the sphere of labor, and alienation be remedied by a promise of salvation. Meng’s course, said the sales engineer, is “broadly applicable [because] everyone struggles. ‘Am I the smartest person in the room? What if I’m not?’” The poor souls of Google, perfect SAT scores and all, need help. Another Google employee, “an engineer in rockabilly spectacles who works in site reliability,” declared that “Business is a machine made out of people. If you have people, you have problems.” But until the advent of the singularity, when the wolf shall friend the lamb and the leopard text the kid, Google, with its “healthy disregard for the impossible,” will have to put up with the frailties of mortals. What a flaw in a business model. At least it will make some of them rich.
Leon Wieseltier is the literary editor of The New Republic. This article appeared in the May 24, 2012 issue of the magazine.
20 comments
Buddhism doesn't translate well in the modern world. There are not many Bodhi trees in noisy urban environments to sit under and meditate. "Corporate mind-fuck" is an apt description of what Buddha brings to Google's workplace. This reminds me a bit of Hamburger University. I worked at McDonald's for a year, and the indoctrination is similar. Produce at a high level, and be loving and accepting in the process. Translation: work you brains out, and don't ever speak up. Well written, Leon.
- magboy47.
May 13, 2012 at 12:28am
Reminds me of the vibe at a couple of Unitarian Fellowships I've attended and reminds me also why I don't attend them.
- AaronW
May 14, 2012 at 1:39am
LOL. I myself am into mindless emailing, which probably explains a few things:)
- Sophia
May 14, 2012 at 1:57am
In my field, law, the 80 hour work week has always been the norm. The best and brightest law students had (I can only speak of my time) grueling schedules, with class assignments, law review or moot court, research for a professor, so all-consuming that the students had no personal life. Of course, those same best and brightest got jobs at the "best" firms, which meant grueling schedules not different from those while in law school. Life and the law were one. A couple of months at the firm, I had an epiphany at, of all places, what used to be called the firm retreat (an odd term considering nobody was planning one). The families of all those best and brightest lawyers were a miserable bunch, and the hostility they felt for the firm and the lawyers in it was palpable. This was particularly evident among the families of the forty-something lawyers, those at the peak of their productivity, which coincided with the (neglected) family years. I remember looking at the older lawyers and their miserable families and asking myself "is this it?" Few have such epiphanies, or if they do, they accept their fate. The law firm model has spread to Google and most other employers with the best and brightest: life and work are one. Have a nice day.
- rayward
May 14, 2012 at 7:31am
In today's economy, those who have jobs work all the time. They must promote their personal brand all the time. They can't get off the carousel or else the music will stop entirely. They only have Meng Buddhism for consolation.
- amidut
May 14, 2012 at 7:52am
"They only have Meng Buddhism for consolation." Personally, I find three fingers of Wild Turkey quite consolling.
- AaronW
May 14, 2012 at 9:10am
Thank you, Leon.
- STTaylor
May 14, 2012 at 9:35am
This is the first article by Wieseltier I've read that I agree with. I particularly like this line: "Instead of teaching people how to judge, we teach them not to judge." Amen.
- arock28
May 14, 2012 at 9:39am
"It is a work of the most obnoxious contentment, and a precious document of the sanctimony and the insularity of Silicon Valley." Yup. Having worked in the semiconductor industry for 25 yrs. it never ceased to amaze me how insular and arrogant silly valley is compared to any other tech hub in the world (the stars of obnoxiousness are at that ifruit company with google a close second).
- tmmats
May 14, 2012 at 10:19am
Well, it's nice to know that Google's assault on the human spirit isn't entirely confined to internet privacy policies. It makes things so much simpler when you know that they're running their business in a comically evil, totalitarian fashion, too.
- zuludown
May 14, 2012 at 12:28pm
I regard mindfulness meditation as a tool or even a skill but not a theology. There our times when the ability to be fully present without distractions is crucial. There are other times when perusing the past and/or projecting the future are paramount. Meditation would not be the method of choice for the latter instances. Writers like Eckhart Tolle, among many others, do err on the side of making being fully present a theology to be practiced in every situation. Wieseltier, IMHO, appears to err in the opposite direction of throwing the baby out with the bath. Maybe his larger point is that sorting this out is a personal growth matter that should not fall under the subtle coercion of corporate policy and sponsorship.
- JackR
May 14, 2012 at 12:36pm
Is this about teaching the multi-tasking (a/k/a ADHD) generation how to focus on one subject (focused attention)? I spend time with teenagers and their inability to focus on one subject is maddening to me, though for them it's what comes naturally. I often wonder how they will function as adults. Do I want my surgeon to be a multi-tasker? Or to have focused attention? For Googles (is that what Google employees are called?) I suspect that focused attention is a rarity, computer types being notorious multi-taskers. An entire work force with ADHD. What a laboratory!
- rayward
May 14, 2012 at 1:27pm
I think JackR is correct on all points. The issue isn't really the virtues of meditation, focus, a sense of wholeness and purpose or "mindlessness," since these are clearly valuable (I think) but rather, whether people should be chained by them or by any other means to an 80 hour work week.
- Sophia
May 14, 2012 at 1:28pm
PS: let me say this, though: lots of people - moms, artists, people with any number of vocations work 24/7 often for no worldly gain at all. That's a huge part of our joy. It's also pretty much what I've observed in the natural world; the birds don't take time off. There are brilliantly colored ducks on our inland sea. They don't seem to fit there at all, unlike the wild gulls whose wings and color and ferocity match sky and water. Yet the ducks ride the wildest waves and fly the fiercest headwinds. When it's calmer they paddle along, usually in pairs, quacking (happily it seems) in each others ears - looking for food and watching out for each other. Sometimes they strike off across the rocky sand, because they know people have left food for them under the trees. They are so awkward and vulnerable on the sand. People let their dogs pursue them and others throw rocks. The ducks persevere in their beauty.
- Sophia
May 14, 2012 at 1:37pm
Ah, the lamentable seriousness used in considering banal utterings from the technocratic rich. Meng’s spiritual drivel is no more revelatory or sincere than the faux libertarianism that has become so popular in Silicon Valley. Such efforts usually are mere attempts to avoid serious thinking about deeper problems, and to avoid making the judgments needed to address them, as Wieseltier notes. All answers eventually are reduced by such “believers” to a silly overdependence on the wonderful solutions that technology purportedly will deliver. People need only find some comfortable way to spiritually, socially, or politically fit in with the economic machinery of tracking, sorting, herding, and commercializing themselves. Feel-good ideas such as “crowd-sourcing”, for example, are great revenue-generators for companies like Google and Facebook and Twitter, but they also make many people dumber and more narrow-minded. The pretend-spiritualism shown in Meng’s writing illustrates how even those who develop such technological capabilities often have to delude themselves into thinking that they are pursuing some sort of higher calling in life. Meanwhile, despite Google’s hype about being such an übersmart, soul-searching, world-changing company, it still makes the vast majority of its income by displaying pedestrian and obnoxious little ads. No wonder the company tries to teach its employees how to make believe that toiling away on mostly boring gruntwork is somehow “enlightened”, “mindful”, “spiritual”, and “fun”. But the real “happiness” for Google’s workforce, of course, involves the stock market.
- mam
May 14, 2012 at 4:13pm
Yes, as Sophia says -- there's nothing wrong with quiet meditation or other psychic and spiritual exercises, except that they should embody an alternative to the post-industrial treadmill, and not a control device for speeding it up.
- ironyroad
May 14, 2012 at 4:21pm
I'm with the inimitable JackR, the ever sensible Sophia and the ever balanced and wise Ironyroad: Wiestlelier in my judgment too is--and only slightly to emend the inimitable JackR--throwing out the baby with the bath water. (Note the water; throwing out the bath would, at least for me require a contractor.) I wonder whether Google's are happy employees, whether there is or has been wholesale employee alienation there, whether there have been employed based crises? I hear rumours the company is quite successful.
- basman
May 14, 2012 at 6:35pm
On a completely oblique note, isn't it curious how the Germans and French actually get quite a lot done, even though they take a month-long break every year for winding down and recharging the batteries? But in the U.S. we have developed a new type of human being who doesn't need any of that time-wasting and dangerous relaxation. S/he works an 80 hour week even when we have 9% unemployment as a national average.
- ironyroad
May 14, 2012 at 6:55pm
I had wanted to say that in contrast to Rayward that my law firm! varying between 15-20 lawyers in downtown Toronto, of high repute, especially in family law, my own area of specialization, usually serviced by boutique firms, in a metropolitan population of over 5,000,000--so this is is big city stuff--we expected about 1,200 billed hours a year, a modest expectation, leading to reasonable profits and remuneration, and accordingly had a relatively happy staff and group of lawyers. At firm outings, we had enthusiastic attendance of lawyers and their spouses and I can't a recall in over 30 years any instance of lawyers or their spouses hating the firm. To be sure we had our run of typical problems from time to time and had lawyers and staff come and go over the years. But looking at my firm from an overview, I think it was a good place to work by and large and is getting better for those there now. There was there, to be sure, no overarching philiosophy via Google U or any other of that kind of thing but, rather, and much more simply and common sensically, the lawyers were fairly reasonable and decent and honourable in their dealing with each other and staff, nice people in a word or two. We did once take on a partner who wasn't built that way though he was the source of a lot of business. He was grasping, conniving, very subtly dishonest, and prone to enmity. He presented to us a dllemma of money as against a bad apple inclining to spoil the bunch. Before the matter come to a final head, he, seeing the writing getting more legible on the wall, left of his own accord.
- basman
May 14, 2012 at 7:47pm
This is an important critique of the Google culture and indeed the entire culture of Silicon Valley which has branded a kind of watered-down Western Zen to help its employees in research and sales perform better. A good book to read on the Stakhanovite and collectivist culture at Google is "I'm Feeling Lucky" by Douglas Edwards -- you can learn a lot about their practices and thinking: http://www.amazon.com/Im-Feeling-Lucky-Confessions-Employee/dp/0547416997 What I loathe most about this warmed-over Buddhism is the way in which the practitioners always think the bad karma is coming to someone else, and always think that the minimizing of their egos and replacement of it with the collectivist diktat from their culture is somehow an improvement or liberation. It's important that pieces like this still get to appear in TNR by veterans like Wieseltier, but I'm troubled by what's happening with the editorials, which doesn't bode well. The same issue has a Google/Silicon Valley cheerleading session with every single geek political plank endorsed from the ill-named "net neutrality" to the opposition against CISPA on fake privacy grounds. That editorial seems to have been dropped into the pond directly by the new owner, Chris Hughes, without any intellectual engagement by the other editors in the liberal arts, if you will. If any intellectual scrutiny was put to these self-interested campaigns by the Valley, they wouldn't be endorsed. They are all terribly tendentiously portrayed. There is a fake notion of "openness" and "innovation" invoked in defense of these obstructions against Google's rapacious business model, which is basically just hijacking content long enough to sell ads and bat down some DMCA takedown notices. Just as Wieseltier has knocked down the phony "selflessness" of a Buddhist harnessed to make a tech company more productive, so he and others need to examine all these fake notions like "net neutrality".
- catfitz
May 14, 2012 at 8:22pm