James Rowe finds insight and sites of social justice in a mindful relation to death

James Rowe is a professor of Political Ecology and Cultural, Social, and Political Thought at the University of Victoria and the author of a great book called Radical Mindfulness: Why Transforming Fear of Death is Politically Vital. Radical Mindfulness examines the root causes of injustice and how the fear of death works as a major cause of injustice globally. One of my main takeaways, so to speak, after reading and thinking about the book a lot is that there is a specific responsibility that white settlers have to rectifying the structural wrongs we are fundamentally complicit with — and that’s whether we like it or not… and there are a lot of people who believe those wrongs exist in the past, and thus don’t need to be dealt with by folks in the present, and—conveniently—feel that it’s too far back to care. Well, the past is not passed, and Rowe asks us, on a philosophical and physical level, why we carry a resistance to healing “the historical and existential trauma” we carry. One of the things that seems to interrupt the use of mindfulness to access and heal those scars is appropriation. Radical Mindfulness talks about the corporate co-optation of mindfulness in really wonderful ways, stating that while there isn’t any need for people to be Buddhist to “benefit from meditation… naming and honoring the tradition is important to avoid appropriation.” If we don’t, we risk the side-stepping of a crucial component of that tradition: which is about transforming “fear of death into a deep acceptance of earthly life, thereby reducing destructive behaviors.”I’m not going to say that I was sceptical of the idea that fear of death is the central cause of most structures of domination, most violence, most oppression, but I just couldn’t fully wrap my head around what that meant. Radical Mindfulness helped me get the ways that fear of “finitude” drives a pathological commitment to a kind of immortalism, a commitment to preserving the nation, the corporation, the self at the expense of others, or of the Earth itself. So I think accepting death as part of the “fullness of reality” is “politically vital,” as James puts it, because if we do recognize the “flow of impermanence,” or what Dominic Boyer has called the “total excessive marvelous abundance” of lifedeath (one word) on this planet, then we can possibly get to a place politically where we aren’t as overcome by the horrible resentments, vindictiveness, protectionism and oppressive impulses that make life miserable for so many people. Rowe’s book doesn’t stay at the super high level of so much new age philosophy — so, think Rainn Wilson’s podcasts “Soul Boom" and "Hey There, Human" — it is materially about the embodied experience of whiteness, of masculinity, of settler being in the world. This is why he advocates for embodied social change within social justice movements that can, themselves, occasionally be quite exclusionary. I’m more open to the idea, after thinking about Rowe’s writing, that there is a lot of potential in mindfulness not just for the dreamy promise of epiphany, but for a kind of comfort that comes from reckoning with why we fear the things we fear.