The problem with self-help
I have a lot more work than I expected this weekend, so I’m just popping into share an article that’s relevant to our interests, and that I almost missed but am glad I didn’t. It’s a book review in the New Yorker of Emotional Intelligence by Daniel Goleman, a self-help pop-psychology blockbuster first published 25 years ago. It’s one of the best articulations I’ve read of how the goal of most self-help is to turn readers into better cogs, sublimating everything, including their own emotions, to the demands of the workplace and the market. It also includes a great description of emotional labor, a term coined by Arlie Russell Hochschild and mostly misused today. (It’s come to mean the managerial work many women are forced to perform in the domestic sphere, but it’s really “a Marxist feminist critique of alienation among service workers,” as the review’s author Merve Emre says.) I’ve been talking about self-help, one way or another, for the past three newsletters, but I only want self-help whose goal is to show us why and how to tear down the machine, not figure out how to better contort ourselves to fit inside it. Self-help that burns itself down first. Here’s a quote from the review:
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?
My writing
I forgot to send my latest story last week, about a possible Teotihuacan embassy found in the ancient Maya city of Tikal. It’s kind of an update to my feature from last year about the mysterious relationship between these two Mesoamerican cultures, and whether Teotihuacan conquered Maya cities. The embassy was built almost 100 years before any possible conquest, and it echoes a possible Maya embassy found in Teotihuacan. So it seems like these cities were friends before they were (maybe) enemies. Cool!