Ezra Klein Just Showed Us Everything Wrong With Secularized Meditation

There’s a moment in Ezra Klein’s recent interview with Ta-Nehisi Coates that’s been bugging me. It’s a small moment, easy to miss if you’re not paying attention. But it reveals something crucial about how secularized meditation practices can become tools for avoiding rather than engaging with political reality.

The interview was about Charlie Kirk’s assassination, political violence, and the moral questions facing the left. Coates had been explaining, with his characteristic moral clarity, what it means to come from a tradition of political violence—how Black Americans have always understood that even preaching love can get you killed.

Here’s what Coates said:

“Martin Luther King could be standing up, telling his own people: We do not embrace violence at all, it is morally repugnant, we embrace love — and that could get you shot. Not ‘Burn it down!’ but love can get you shot — you just have a different view of your country.”

And here’s how Klein responded:

“There’s a Buddhist meditation I like. This is a weird place to go. But it goes like this: I’m of the nature to grow sick. I’m of the nature to grow old. I’m of the nature to lose the people I love. I’m of the nature to die. How then shall I live?” (These are known as the five remembrances, first found in the Upajjhatthana Sutta.)

Did you feel that whiplash? From the specificity of political murder, from lynching and assassination, from “love can get you shot”—to a generalized meditation about personal aging and death.

Klein himself seems to know something’s off. “This is a weird place to go,” he says. But he goes there anyway.

The Narcissism of the Meditative Pivot

What’s jarring isn’t that Klein quoted a Buddhist meditation. Klein is Jewish, but in a July 2025 episode of his podcast he mentioned he’s had a meditation practice for 15 years. He’s one of countless Americans who’ve adopted meditation techniques while remaining outside the religious tradition they come from.

What’s jarring is that he centered his own spiritual practice in response to someone describing the violence inflicted on their community. Coates is talking about lynching, and Klein responds by discussing his meditation life as though his contemplation of mortality is somehow comparable to the gravity of racist murder.

This isn’t about Klein being a bad person. It’s about how secularized meditation functions when it’s been stripped of its religious worldview and social context. When meditation becomes primarily about managing your own internal state rather than connecting you to collective struggle, it can become a tool for turning away from rather than toward political reality.

Later in the interview, when Coates asks Klein to define his role as a public intellectual in this political moment, Klein admits: “I don’t know what my role is anymore. I’ll be totally honest with you, man. I feel very conflicted about that question.”

That role confusion, I would argue, is directly connected to a meditation practice divorced from ethical framework and social purpose.

The Three-Legged Stool We Broke

Within Buddhism, mindfulness meditation is one of several integrated practices. For example there’s a concepual trilogy in Theravada Buddhism called dana sila bhavana—a three-legged stool where all legs are necessary for stability.

Dana means generosity and action directed toward others—social engagement, service, addressing collective suffering.

Sila means ethics—following precepts, moral guidelines for how to live in community.

Bhavana means mental development—meditation and mindfulness practice.

Popular mainstream mindfulness practice focuses almost exclusively on bhavana. It strips away the social obligation (dana) and ethical framework (sila), leaving only the technique for training your individual mind. When I attended a meditation retreat at a Buddhist monastery (more on that in a post later this fall), one of the senior monks warned explicitly that practicing meditation without the other two legs was “dangerous.”

But secular mindfulness doesn’t want the other two legs. It doesn’t want ethical precepts that might constrain individual freedom. It doesn’t want social obligations that might demand action beyond personal practice. It just wants the meditation technique—extracted, medicalized, and marketed as a tool for individual optimization.

The result? A technique for individual stress management and performance optimization, completely divorced from Buddhism’s social and ethical dimensions.

But when meditation is divorced from its ethical and social context it can become a tool for political quietism.

The depoliticization of mindfulness didn’t happen by accident. When Buddhist meditation was discovered by spiritual seekers in the 1970s and 80s and filtered through elite bicoastal self-help culture, it was transformed. Matthew Remski, co-host of the Conspirituality podcast, described yesterday in a TikTok video “an internal turn made by depressive ex-hippies who figured, well, we didn’t change the world so we can change ourselves.”

The result is a meditation culture that values lowering the temperature, depolarization, viewing conflict as unproductive or distasteful. A culture that encourages practitioners to see beyond conflict to some common, shared universal existence—even when the conflict is about fundamental human rights.

This creates what Remski identifies as a particular style of liberal political thinking that Klein embodies: “calm, measuredness, fair-minded both-sides-ness, the ability to endlessly turn this over and that over and never get too activated about anything.” The belief that “placid deliberation will cure everything, because in meditation, it does.”

These qualities—calm, detachment, refusing to take firm positions—are virtues in mindfulness culture. Perpetually shrugging your shoulders as though it were a yoga move. Viewing clear ideological positions as “too rigid” or “uncharitable.”

But when fascism is rising and people are being harmed, that calm becomes a form of avoidance.

The irony is that Buddhism isn’t always divorced from political action. Vietnamese Buddhist monks self-immolated to protest the war. Tibetan monks and nuns have resisted Chinese occupation.

But when mindfulness was commodified for American consumption, it was depoliticized. Meditation became mindfulness, and mindfulness is about managing your individual stress, not addressing systemic oppression. About optimizing your performance, not transforming unjust conditions. About finding your own inner peace, not working for collective liberation.

What Engaged Buddhism Offers

There are forms of American Buddhism that have resisted this depoliticization. What’s called “engaged Buddhism” or “socially engaged mindfulness” maintains the connection between meditation practice and social justice work.

In her book American Dharma, religious studies scholar Ann Gleig describes how some American Buddhist communities are “applying Buddhist principles to the sociocultural dimensions of individual suffering and collective suffering.” They see racism, for instance, as a form of dukkha—suffering that requires collective response, not just individual processing.

Larry Yang, cofounder of the East Bay Meditation Center and author of Awakening Together, frames the real purpose of mindfulness this way: “The practice is not just about our own personal awakening, enlightenment, or freedom. The path is not just about personal salvation. It is about our collective journey and transformation toward a shared experience of wisdom and tenderness.”

This is Buddhism with its social engagement intact—practices connected to addressing collective suffering, not just managing individual stress.

You Can’t Meditate Your Way Out of Fascism

So what happens when someone like Klein—who’s been practicing meditation for 15 years but it seems likely without the religious worldview or ethical framework—encounters a moment that demands moral and political clarity?

He retreats into his practice. Not to deepen his commitment to collective struggle, but to find personal equilibrium. The meditation becomes a way to process overwhelming information internally rather than a practice that connects him to social obligation and action.

Coates comes from a tradition that understands struggle as ongoing, that recognizes losing is always possible, that insists on moral clarity even—especially—when it’s dangerous.

Klein comes from a meditation culture that treats equanimity as the highest virtue, that believes if you can just see things calmly from enough perspectives, answers will emerge.

These are fundamentally different orientations. One is grounded in collective history and social obligation. The other is grounded in individual practice and personal optimization.

When Klein admits “I don’t know what my role is anymore” after Coates challenges him, it’s revealing. His 15 years of mindfulness hasn’t prepared him for this moment. It’s prepared him to manage his own stress and find his own calm—but not to know what he owes to collective struggle, not to understand his obligations beyond personal equilibrium.

His 15 years of mindfulness hasn’t prepared him for this moment. It’s prepared him to manage his stress—but not to know what he owes to collective struggle.

This is the problem of ad hoc spirituality in general—practices extracted from their religious contexts become tools for individual comfort rather than collective transformation.

Buddhism teaches meditation within a framework that often includes dana (generosity and service to others) and sila (ethical precepts for living in community). The three legs worked together. Meditation alone, without social obligation and ethical guidelines, is considered dangerous.

American mindfulness kept the meditation, ditched the ethics and social engagement, and called it an upgrade. We made it secular, scientific, accessible to all.

But in doing so, we created a practice that can make us calmer about injustice, more detached from others’ suffering, more focused on our own internal states than on collective conditions. We created a tool that can enable political quietism under the guise of spiritual development.

What Religion Reimagined Might Offer

I’m not arguing against meditation or mindfulness practice. What I’m arguing for is understanding what gets lost when we extract techniques from their religious worldviews.

Buddhist teachings offer a way to think about meditation as a practice that should connect you to collective suffering and collective struggle, not separate you from it. The sangha—the community of shared practice—in this understanding exists partly to ensure meditation doesn’t become narcissistic navel-gazing.

This type of meditation can support political engagement rather than substitute for it. It can help you sustain commitment to justice work rather than retreat from it. It can clarify your obligations rather than obscure them.

But that requires taking the religion seriously, not just borrowing the technique.

Klein’s response to Coates reveals what happens when mindfulness culture meets political emergency: confusion, equivocation, retreat into individual practice. Coates is describing lynching, and Klein responds with a meditation about his own mortality.

That’s not wisdom. That’s avoidance with a spiritual veneer.

AMENDMENT (can you do that on here?)

I’m adding the following about a week after this went live because I had SUCH GREAT comments on this post, including some that made it clear I created some confusion by not clearly distinguishing between three different things:

1) Canonical Buddhism (like the Pali Canon)—focused on individual liberation from samsara, not on fixing the world. Often apolitical or even conservative.

2) Socially engaged Buddhism—modern movements (like those documented by Thích Nhất Hạnh, Bhikkhu Bodhi, and scholars like Ann Gleig who I reference above) that extend Buddhist ethical principles toward collective liberation and social justice.

3) Individualistic secular mindfulness—meditation extracted from any religious framework and marketed primarily for stress management and personal optimization.

My critique in the post is specifically about #3—how secular mindfulness strips away both the religious worldview AND the social/ethical dimensions. But I wasn’t clear enough that canonical Buddhism (#1) also isn’t particularly helpful for racial justice work, since it’s aimed at transcending samsara, not transforming it.

What I should have said more clearly: socially engaged Buddhism (#2) is a modern development that takes some ethical principles from traditional Buddhism and redirects them toward collective suffering and systemic change.

That’s actually what interests me about religion, and why this Substack is called “Religion Reimagined”: how do we craft forms of socially engaged spirituality that extend religious ethical principles without either romanticizing traditional forms OR stripping away all ethical/social accountability?

My argument about Klein (which was the main reason I wrote this piece) still stands: when meditation becomes only about managing your individual internal state—divorced from both religious framework AND social obligation—it can enable political quietism. But I should have been clearer that I don’t want to romanticize “traditional Buddhism” as inherently socially engaged. I’m contrasting individualistic secular mindfulness with contemporary movements that are trying to reconnect contemplative practice with collective responsibility.

Thanks for reading!