The Repressive Politics of Emotional Intelligence | The New Yorker | 12/14/2021

Source: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/04/19/the-repressive-politics-of-emotional-intelligence

Summary: Parents do not often concern themselves with moral education, but, when they do, whatever wisdom or warnings they had to impart were accompanied by books—typically, pop-psychology best-sellers. Two stand out: "Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls," by Mary Pipher, and "Emotional Intelligence," by Daniel Goleman. The first is more extreme while the second is more "relatable" to "angry teen-agers," with very sharp tongues and prickly reserves—the armor I believed a girl with a funny name, born in a foreign country, needed to get through the school days in the American suburbs. "Emotional Intelligence" would have allowed no such excuses. "Anyone can become angry—that is easy," Aristotle proclaims in the book’s epigraph, much like a middle-school health teacher. 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.

3 Fun Facts

1. Goleman released several other books after the release of the first was so successful

2. At a distance, Goleman’s denunciation of irrational and “mean-spirited impulses” looks like a refusal to acknowledge concrete societal factors that were right before his eyes.

3. Emotional Intelligence is a very easy target for criticism