Mental hygiene in an age of AI targeted advertising

A commenter to an article I just read, wrote:

Almost wondering if this is the onset of the death of democracy and its replacement by ad-campaigners who believe the voting public can be persuaded to go with anything provided enough fake propaganda is thrown at it. Is this modern democracy?

This triggered me to write something that I've been mulling over for a week or several in odd moments. So I replied

The ad campaigners don't believe; they know. 70 years of experience under their belts and now social media have handed them the tools to begin to really target advertising. It's still playing the odds but upping the likelihood of responses they hope for.  Our difficulty as populations subject to this is how to think about our own agency. We're too used to thinking of ourselves as in control and not sufficiently aware of subliminal and unconscious drivers. 'Of course, I'm not persuaded by advertising'. Well, maybe not directly but over time background opinions shift, we tend to mirror or move towards what we perceive 'people like us' are thinking/approving/accepting. It's a long game, but then the Murdoch press have being playing it for what? -30 or 40 years? Add to that the new toolbox from the people who take up the market slack from Cambridge Analytica. We all need to learn how to practice mental and emotional hygiene in a advertising age.

I think too that we need to find a way to talk in popular discourse about the fact that advertising does in fact change minds or influence opinion without making it sound like someone who does respond is an idiot and doesn't know their own mind. It's clear that statistically, advertising and targetting it does work but it's not 100%. Certain percentages of people are likely to follow up certain kinds of advertising and to be influenced by certain messages relayed and spun in certain ways. We need to find ways to enable people to be more aware of how this happens and to step up our out-smarting smarts. Many have got quite good at spotting 'crude' and direct sales pitches. We now need to get good at spotting and discounting the subtle.

Somewhere in all the comments in the Times article you can find the originals. Times is paywalled, but you can see a couple of articles a week free.

Chaplaincy -a diaconal ministry

A couple or so years ago, I found myself in conversation about the ministry of university chaplains saying that I felt my ministry was more expressing my diaconal orders than priestly. And I recently read a post about 'distinctive deacons' in the diocese of Europe which seemed here to offer an explanation of orders that supports what I found myself saying then:

 ... a deacon is something, not simply someone who does certain thingsDeacons are ordained to hold up before the Church and the world, diakonia, the distinctive ministry of Christ the Servant, as being central to all Christian ministry.

Some ask how a deacon is different from a priest; is a deacon not simply a junior priest? Well, no. A priest’s focus is on the parish community and sacrament. They are pastors/shepherds of the community, feeding them and leading them. The deacon’s focus is on outreach, service, and supporting the ministry of the faithful in the world. Eurobishop: Deacons make history in the Diocese in Europe: 

I'm not focussed on a parish community (though I do serve some), I don't preside at communion very often -it's not a major strand of being a chaplain to a university. I do tend to focus on outreach, serving the people and institution I'm placed with. I try to support the ministry of Christians (and others!) in the world of 'my' university and HE more widely. It's good to feel that my diaconal orders are still being 'used'.



On a separate note, Eurobishop's comment " a deacon is something, not simply someone who does certain things" is a widely shared trope of more Catholic theologies. And I do agree with the reasons I often see or hear it shared: it provides a respite from functionalism and activism with their implied works-based judgmentalism. I've always felt that we should notice that being and doing are integrated and that where the priority goes in thinking about them depends on what one is trying to consider. I note that the 'being' in that passage is justified in terms of functions. Which makes my point that we can't conceive of pure being without taking in what it is doing.  Can we just not work with that distinction? Rather let's consider such things as dynamic and relational: a deacon is in relation to the church and the world, typcially, in certain ways and those ways are definitive of a deacon's 'being' in some way such that diaconal actions are likely to result and in turn the diaconal being is consolidated and grows in the doing of the ministry. Let's refuse to put ministry and minister asunder except for the briefest of thought-experiments.

A 'secular' ritual -what can we learn?

I find myself thinking a lot in odd moments about rituals and the language of ceremony and how the churches often 'speak' gestural languages that are quite alien, that is, unintuitive, to our host cultures. So this article and in particular this paragraph got me thinking.

The bell-ringing tradition started in the US, and has become popular in the UK over the past five or six years. The idea is that, on your final day of treatment, you ring a bell to mark the occasion: sometimes, other patients and staff are there to watch you do it and you’re clapped and cheered. It’s a moment for a photo for the Instagram account, a moment to stop everything and acknowledge that you’ve been through something incredibly scary and pretty hellish but that now you’re at a turning point. Your life might continue as it was before, or it might be different, but this experience was so big that it needs to be marked in some way.

It seems great to have a ritual that can aknowledge, somewhat publicly, and in the presence of people who have helped and supported that a turning point has been reached.

And why a bell being rung? The best clue I could get was in this later line

there are some who will never be able to ring the bell because they’ll never be “clear” of cancer.

Clear as a bell -get it? The thing is, though, if this is the right etymology of the practice, then it does and does not help us in a search for intuitive ritual actions. It does not do so because the explanation for the symbolism is at one remove in that you have to know the English simile to 'get' it. But then, a number of people probably respond to the action without ever knowing that connection to the simile.

How do they read it? I wonder whether their reading might be something like my naive reading before I saw that line inferring the connection. I think I read it in the light of other bell ringings -particularly as in the article there is a photo of the kind of bell (along with the notice explaining the practice). So my connections: school bells to call us to play or to class. If this was the interpretive adjunct then we might read the bell as a change from one kind of time or activity to another -possibly from treatment time to the rest of life. This would be reinforced by the continued use of bells to mark time.

I also associated with a bell tolled at a funeral or a time of mourning. This seems less apposite. I suspect that this association is not unlikely but might be rejected because it is the opposite of what is being expressed. (Though the death of the cancer? -probably not: this would be a cause for rejoicing not mourning). Similarly the sound of bells at sea on buoys warning of shipwrecks or sandbanks.

The bell itself must act as a standing visual sign and perhaps a hopeful one. It potentially speaks of a hope for the future. People could look at it and hope for the day when they would ring it as an all clear.

The article itself, of course, is noticing that the symbolism and ritual doesn't work for everyone. And that is something to take note of too. When we are co-creating rituals particularly for people who may be in emotionally charged or vulnerable states, we might recognise that not all will find them cathartic or resonant (sorry for the pun in this context but it's the right sort of word). Some of them may find it off-putting as a result. And that's okay: as long as it is not compulsory. All may, some should, none must (attributed to Elizabeth I, I believe, in respect of oracular confession).

From: I didn’t ring a bell at the end of my cancer treatment. But I get those who do | Joanna Moorhead | Opinion | The Guardian:

A Good Look at Evil -a book review

I'm interested in the ontology of evil -or something like that. Partly because it seems to me that in popular culture we so often find dualism and the idea of 'goodies' and 'baddies' which hardly does justice to the reality that few of those who do evil actually think that's what they're doing and that it is impossible to do evil in an extended way unless one is able to construe it as 'right' or 'good' by some frame of reference. And Solzhenitsyn's quote about the battle between good and evil running through the heart of every human seems important here.

So with those things in mind it was quite intriguing to discover that the starting place for this examination of evil was with ones life story and our construction of one. The author (Abigail Rosenthal) makes the "claim that we live, or ought to live, corrigible nonfiction narratives ".  The core thesis of this book is, in the author's words; " to show conceptually and by many illustrations how the life of an evil-doer involves deliberate sabotage of the true story that inheres in a human life, which we must protect if we would protect our goodness."

At first sight I was a bit skeptical about this: is this not in danger of becoming hopelessly subjective in such a way as to, in effect, exonerate Eichmann (and others like him)? Is this a form of existentialism?

It is also intriguing that this book was originally finished in 1987 when it was rare to think about narrative as a philosophical tool or category. It does feel like the author was prescient! It is not a straight reprint, it has been reworked to some degree and new material brought into it, some of which is comment and work with materials not available at that point to do with Hannah Arendt and her arguments.

What helped me to get with the plot was in the first paragraph of chapter one. "Agents are good, then, insofar as they try to realise the ideal stories that belong to themselves, or to anyone affected by them" I think this made sense to me because, it seems to me, that our ideal stories are ones that are about fullness of life, good relationships, harmony, fulfilment of gifts and callings, and growing personal wholeness. And it is the 'anyone affected' that helps to anchor it in more than just a personal set of choices which could be arbitrary (shades of Nietzsche).

Definitely a proposition to engage with as Christians -we have a decidedly narrative foundation document ....

Links for more info

A Good Look at Evil on Amazon
Abigail Rosenthal’s Website
Abigail Rosenthal’s Blog
A Good Look at Evil video talk

Please tag your posts for this book as #AGoodLookAtEvil

I should point out this was a review copy but having it does not commit me to making favourable comment on it.

Abigail L. Rosenthal – Just another writer.

Mindfulness for revolutionaries

For me, as someone who leads mindfulness sessions is a modern unviversity, this article The mindfulness conspiracy | Life and style | The Guardian is interesting, provocative and challenging. However, perhaps not in the way the author (Ronald Purser ) would expect because I actually agree with him in most respects but one. I think that perhaps the heart of his critique can be seen in this paragraph

It is a fundamental tenet of neoliberal mindfulness, that the source of people’s problems is found in their heads. This has been accentuated by the pathologising and medicalisation of stress, which then requires a remedy and expert treatment – in the form of mindfulness interventions. The ideological message is that if you cannot alter the circumstances causing distress, you can change your reactions to your circumstances. In some ways, this can be helpful, since many things are not in our control. But to abandon all efforts to fix them seems excessive.

And the truth is that I agree that mindfulness can be used as a kind of shoring-up of individuals and distract attention from the arguably more insightful and humanly-beneficial work of analysing the structural reasons for distress and to reinforce the privatising and individualising of finding solutions to it that don't involve changing the 'system'. I don't think we should acquiesce in the idea that the real benefits of mindfulness should only be used by big business or its equivalents for their own own ends.

Well, I don't necessarily agree. I do agree that mindfulness can be and often is used as a kind of sticking plaster over a big wound that needs a more corporate treatment. So to be clear, I do believe that the kind of stress that university staff whom I host sessions for would be well served by changes in governmentally-driven regimes which marketise HE and starve it, in effect, of funding. In turn this means that staff are having to do more with less and face greater precarity in greater numbers than before. I'm not saying that there were not faults in the previous systems. Some reforms are helpful but those that are have been overwhelmed by those that are not.

So why do I continue to offer mindfulness within our university? Well, there are several reasons and I'll mention some here that address the critique that Ronald Purser helpfully offers in the article.

Probably the most pressing is that by doing so I think that I am helping people. The research and informal feedback indicate that doing this stuff genuinely does help people to cope. And while I do not think that mindfulness sessions are the ultimate or only thing that should be done, if it helps some people then its usefulness as a kind of first aid, let's say, justifies doing it. Where I would be remiss would be if I were colluding with the forces of market disciplinary ideology but in itself mindfulness is not this: I do point out to people in wider conversation that I believe the more important long-term work is to change the system to be more humane and not to dump its labour-related externalities on its own workers.

In fact, I think that mindfulness can help in this more 'revolutionary' work. The flip side of the critique of mindfulness as co-optable into marketisation prop is that it can assist those working to change things. If mindfulness can help develop resilience for profit, then it can help develop resilience for change-making. If mindfulness can help people to work more efficiently for someone else to profit, it can help people work more efficiently for change. If it helps greater clarity of thought and reaction for profit, it can do so for analysing root causes of distress and help conscientisation.

If we took the message to be, 'mindfulness is being used as a tool to pacify workers in inhumane working conditions, therefore we should stop people learning mindfulness techniques' then I would say we are missing the possibility that mindfulness could be part of wider strategies to change things. It can be part of a message which says, 'use your greater clarity and ability to gain space to not simply react to consider how to make the conditions better and not to need to work so hard to adjust yourselves to unreasonable and inhumane conditions: notice you are not at fault, but the system you are in is. Direct the anger you find to changing the conditions'.

So, I suppose that I am disagreeing with the very next bit of what Ronald Purser writes:

Mindfulness practices do not permit critique or debate of what might be unjust, culturally toxic or environmentally destructive. Rather, the mindful imperative to “accept things as they are” while practising “nonjudgmental, present moment awareness” acts as a social anesthesia, preserving the status quo.

Let's look at it a bit more closely. 'Do not permit critique' -I'd agree if it was 'in the usual format on offer by the mindfulness industry'. However, I would say that it is perfectly possible for a mindfulness group leader to have conversations about this and to have conversations about how mindfulness permits us to gain insights which can inform critique and can help us to gain a degree of resilience to take action on those insights. After all, if the problem is that people are being overworked, in effect, then asking them to take more action to resist or overturn things is going to require from them more than they may feel they can do: mindfulness techniques can be something that helps with that.

'Accept things as they are' -yes this can be co-opted into social anaesthesia. But only if it is tied to a conservative no-change vision of the way things are. This may be implicitly what wider society and media do but it is not inherent to mindfulness. Mindfulness can support those engaging in social, political and economic change and is not inherently conservative. In fact, by helping us to be more aware of our own reactions we can begin to be clearer about what is, in fact, our own baggage and our own capability and what needs wider and collective action. Ironically, many businesses want workers to be more creative and to think more widely -but then they may have to work to try to keep that within the bounds of their own enterprise. Creativity could cut both ways and come up with ways for working people to subvert the system. 

'Non judgmental present moment awareness' can lead/help us to be aware that actually it's not us, it really is 'them', that the 'promise/hope' of better life or conditions if we just endure this, work a bit harder etc is not serving us in the present and maybe never will; it can strip off those ideological illusions that keep us being well-oiled cogs in the profit-machine. The task is to provide alternative voices to assist the potential conscientisation that mindfulness can be the midwife for. Don't let the business leaders have all the best techniques for helping us to live a little better -let's harness them to socially transformative work.

Activists can burn out too. If these techniques can help those working for change, let's not write them off by only thinking about them as they work within the exploitative frame of mind. We can imagine differently: we can imagine groups of people better able to challenge injustice because they can identify and channel their rightful anger more effectively and learn to have space to properly care for each other by attending to the present experience of hearing the person in front of them and being present to them.

One things this article has done for me is to consider how best to redesign my support leaflets for mindfulness sessions to highlight the importance of not just individualising our responses to workplace stress. And perhaps I will open up conversations with the union activists in our place around this.

Tell Europe: 100% Clean energy to tackle the climate emergency!

Join me in writing to EU leaders about taking action on climate chaos. Avaaz - Tell Europe: 100% Clean energy to tackle the climate emergency!:

Here's what I wrote:

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I'm scared for my children and grandchildren. Climate chaos could mean they have to learn literal survival skills I never envisaged they might need because civilisation has so improved so many facets of life. But now I see carbon pollution heating our planet and threatening thereby the ecological systems that support food production and living arrangements. This starts to be scary and for me the concern is that those apocalyptic film backdrops seem somehow less unlikely now. How will my granddaughter survive a world of Mad-Max style warlords? How will my grandsons cope with the rapid changes in assumptions that will be called for?

When I was young, it looked as if progress was a fixed trajectory; the only questions being how fast and which pathways. Now I see already the infrastructure of decline and failure is being put in place and to cap it all chaotic and catastrophic weather events growing ever more common with civilisational resiliance stripped back further and further.

I'm scared. I may become angry. I'm not alone in this.



We need to do stuff and we need to do it now. We need bold action to do what we've pussy footed around for 40 years. We need to stop pretending climate-change denial is a respectable voice of dissent when we know it is a lobbying position astroturfed by big businesses -who incidentally have known about the effects for 40 years or more. Such cynicism and it's apologetics are to be resisted.



We know it is possible to begin to do the right things and to create a virtuous cycle of development. It might be hard but a return to the stone age will be harder.

Formation and Sleep Ethics

One of the things I have noted in Praying the Pattern and which I will be reworking and expanding (maybe with this research!) in the forthcoming Living our prayer and praying our lives is how choosing bad sleep and rest patterns is choosing to make it more likely that we behave less graciously than we might otherwise. There is research, now, to back that up:

if you don’t get enough sleep, research suggests you are more likely to engage with unethical and deviant behaviour, such as being mean, bullying your fellow employees or falsifying receipts.  -Disrupted sleep article

So, contrary to some medieval asceticism, we should probably not normally be skimping on sleep.
It does, however, make me wonder what the purpose of sleep deprivation regimes was in those medieval regimes. I have the impression (but without researching it further) that it may have had something to do with avoiding sloth; that lying a-bed was seen as sinfully lazy. But I also wonder whether for some at least, there was a sense that we do indeed tend to worse self-censoring and self-checking when we are tired, so the point in that case may have been to push themselves more closely to their limits to make the testing of benevolence etc more real and more frequent, to give more chance to practice.
If that was the case, then I have to say that I wonder whether that is not, in fact, putting God to the test .... more thought needed.