Gradually, one sees why the concept of emotional intelligence won such wide acceptance. It is not a quality or even an attribute but a regimen of restraint. It is a collection of practices—assessment, feedback, coaching, meditation—for monitoring yourself and others, in a way that marries the promise of total self-actualization to the perils of absolute social deprivation. For all its righteous proclamations about what ails the modern world, its goals are straightforwardly conservative: to encourage people to stay in school, to secure stable employment, to bind themselves to their work, to have families and keep them intact, and to raise their children to repeat this same cycle of productive activity.
Emotional intelligence, in other words, is a self-help doctrine deeply indebted to the moralizing ideology of neoliberalism. The word “neoliberalism,” with its critics and counter-critics, is now used so casually as to have become almost meaningless, so it’s worth going back to a definition offered by Michel Foucault, one of the first theorists to discuss the term. In a series of lectures he delivered in 1979—a few months before Margaret Thatcher took office in Britain and a year before Ronald Reagan was elected President—Foucault described neoliberal ideology as the application of an economic model to “every social actor in general insofar as he or she gets married, for example, or commits a crime, or raises children, gives affection and spends time with the kids.” Any of these actions could be seen as entailing certain costs and benefits, certain risks and rewards, which, if calculated properly, would result in the “optimal allocation of scarce resources to alternative ends.” The subject shaped by this model, Homo economicus, pledged himself to the pursuit of absolute personal freedom and responded to any changes in his environment with rational self-interest. To anything that lay outside his self-interest, he remained “blind,” Foucault claimed.
In pop psychology, such blindness is elevated to the first principle of craft, in a way that conceals the link between the psychological and the political. The genre’s preferred method of narration is the parable. An arresting example of human behavior is clipped from a newspaper article or a research paper. Stripped of the social and historical detail that might give it depth and complexity, it furnishes a readily digestible lesson about right and wrong, or, in Goleman’s case, productive and unproductive allocations of emotion in the “subterranean economy of the psyche.”
The method invariably leaves traces, and, reading “Emotional Intelligence,” one begins to sense that Goleman’s examples are telling only half the story. For a book whose ultimate goal is to urge people to ingratiate themselves with their colleagues or be a little less shouty in their marriages, a startling number of chapters feature tales of capricious killings and casual violence. A father, inexplicably armed and overwhelmed by his evolutionary fight-or-flight instinct, shoots his daughter when she jumps out of a closet to frighten him. A heroin addict on parole goes “bananas,” as he later puts it, robbing an apartment and killing two young women. A star student stabs his high-school physics teacher in the neck, providing Goleman with dramatic evidence that high I.Q. and good grades do not determine success.
Looking up Goleman’s sources, one soon discerns a pattern in what has been left out. The father who shot his daughter? At the time, in 1994, he was living in West Monroe, Louisiana; the state had the highest rate of poverty in the country, and the city’s residents were telling reporters that they couldn’t even visit a shopping mall without the fear of being robbed in the parking lot. The chief deputy on duty that night, interviewed by the Associated Press after the shooting, said that it revealed “how scared people are in their homes these days.” The heroin addict who killed the two young women? The example is an older one, from 1963, and a more familiar story than Goleman lets on. The heroin addict, who was white, was not caught for more than a year, while the police arrested and extracted a confession from a young Black man, George Whitmore, Jr.; the Supreme Court later called the case the country’s “most conspicuous example” of police coercion. And the boy who stabbed his physics teacher? He was a Jamaican immigrant living in southern Florida who allegedly tried to kill himself along with his teacher. A judge found the boy to be temporarily insane owing to “his obsession with academic excellence” and his conviction that he would rather die than fail to attend Harvard Medical School. American élite higher education remained, for him, the key that would unlock the good life.
Start to slot in cities and dates, to fill in the gaps in history, and Goleman’s diagnoses seem beside the point. This failing is inherent in the self-help genre, whose premise is that the capacity for change always lies within ourselves. Goleman promises to show his readers how to free themselves from the “emotional hijacking” of the brain by biochemical surges, the body’s unwitting tendency to set off its own “neural tripwire.” This language, with its hints of terrorism and home invasion, encourages readers to stay alert, continually monitoring their reactions in order to bring them in line with accepted rituals of emotional expression.
It is a vision of personal freedom achieved, paradoxically, through constant self-regulation. “Emotional Intelligence” imagines a world constituted of little more than a series of civil interactions between employer and employee, husband and wife, friend and neighbor. People are linked by nothing more than, as Foucault summarized, the “instinct, sentiment, and sympathy” that underwrite their mutual success and their shared “repugnance for the misfortune of individuals” who cannot get a grip on their inner lives.
The concept of emotional intelligence arose when the global economy was undergoing a sharp structural transformation, with the decline of manufacturing and the expansion of the service sector in the world’s largest markets. Anyone who has visited a retail store or sat in a classroom knows that service work is a mode of production organized around communicative interactions. It places Goffman’s arts of impression management—the friendliness of a saleswoman’s voice, the elegance of a teacher’s gesture, the charisma of an executive’s presentation—at the heart of productivity. Arlie Russell Hochschild, in her 1983 book “The Managed Heart,” coined the term “emotional labor” for this kind of work. “Day-care centers, nursing homes, hospitals, airports, stores, call centers, classrooms, social welfare offices, dental offices—in all these workplaces, gladly or reluctantly, brilliantly or poorly, employees do emotional labor,” she wrote. “The poor salesclerk working in an elite clothing boutique manages envy. The Wall Street stock-trader manages panic.”
Since most service work cannot be made more efficient with machines, the productivity of emotional labor can be increased only by encouraging workers to cultivate displays of emotion that are more convincing—both to others and to themselves. As Hochschild notes, “The pinch between a real but disapproved feeling on the one hand and an idealized one on the other” becomes an economic liability. Emotional labor involves minimizing that pinch, transforming a surface display into a deep conviction.
What appeared in Hochschild as a Marxist feminist critique of alienation among service workers resurfaces in Goleman as earnest advice for what one must do to get ahead, or perhaps simply to survive. By turning “emotional labor” into “emotional intelligence,” Goleman replaces the concrete social relation between an employee and her employer with a vague individual aptitude. Hochschild’s envious, inflexible salesclerk reappears in Goleman’s book, now adapted for his purposes. She has grown irritable and depressed. “Her sales then decline, making her feel like a failure, which feeds her depression,” Goleman explains. His proposed solution is more work, better work, more enthusiastic work, first as a superficial distraction, then as a deep salve: “Sales would be less likely to decline, and the very experience of making a sale might bolster her self-confidence.” Her ability to control and channel her negative emotions will reap both economic and moral rewards. Besides, what choice does she have if she wants to keep her job and make her living?
Emotional labor, estranging workers from their inner feelings, refashions the ostensibly private realm of the self as an extension of social and corporate interests. These incursions raise the question of how much any emotion originates from and belongs solely to the individual. Are people’s natural capacities for empathy and warmth co-opted by the impersonal structures of the market? Or do people reproduce exactly the smiles and lines that are given to them by advertising, training programs, and hospitality scripts? Only one thing seems certain: the more we experience emotional labor as a feigned display rather than as a true feeling, the greater our psychological angst. “When display is required by the job, it is usually feeling that has to change,” Hochschild writes. For the individual worker, there is every reason to believe in the script she recites. She wins nothing and risks everything by asserting her freedom from it.
While keeping certain kinds of workers anxious and pliable, the concept of emotional intelligence also renders the emotional lives and the labor conditions of non-service workers wholly irrelevant. One sees this in the limited range of players in Goleman’s success stories; the emotionally intelligent invariably seem to be managers, engineers, consultants, doctors, lawyers, and teachers. For him, the only relevant question is who will come out on top: “the manipulative, jungle-fighter boss” or “the virtuoso in interpersonal skills” who embraces “managing with heart.” His implied reader is someone capable of “dropping the small preoccupations—health, bills, even doing well”; someone for whom “going bankrupt” is as unlikely as “a loved one dying in a plane crash.” Never mind that, in some states, the probability of filing for personal bankruptcy is as high as one in two hundred, whereas the probability of losing a loved one in a plane crash is one in eleven million. In Goleman’s universe, both are equally unthinkable.
Time has not been good to “Emotional Intelligence,” and it is now almost too easy a target for criticism. But it is also criticism-proof: the ideas that animate it are everywhere, and their appeal is hard to deny. After all, what could be objectionable in asking people to care for one another and be aware of how their actions affect others?
Perhaps the best response is to reimagine the concept in a form that shows what lies beneath it. Envision “Emotional Intelligence” and the books descended from it as morality plays for a secular era, performed before audiences of mainly white professionals. In a theatre that admits no light or sound from the outside world, the audience watches as poor, begrimed laborers and criminals are pushed onstage to shoot their kids and stab their teachers. Pricked by the masked vices of Rage, Depression, and Anxiety, shamed by the veiled virtues of Empathy, Mindfulness, and Reason, the players have no chance at salvation. The lessons of emotional intelligence are not theirs to learn.
When the curtain falls, the audience members turn to one another to talk softly about how to teach their children to avoid such a fate, how to live happily in a world where one is bound to be inconvenienced by the violent impulses of others. Even from the front row, they cannot see that the masks and veils hide a reality in which they are no freer than the players they condemn. To pull back the mask would be to uncover an impotence they all share. And it might allow the audience and the cast to rise together, becoming angry to the right degree, at the right time, for the right purpose, and in the right way, toward the right people, who have, for the past twenty-five years, sold them some of the most alluring and quietly repressive ideas in recent history. ♦
