Craig Mod, Roden, September 1, 2020. https://craigmod.com/roden/043/ --- This month’s Newsletter Essay™ — Emotional intelligence These past five years, the notion of “emotional intelligence” has become an organizing principal for my moving through, and responding to the world. It’s become a prime characteristic by which I (perhaps ungenerously!) qualify who I want to be spending more time with. I’ve had older friends query my use of the phrase “emotional intelligence” with a side-eye suspicion reserved for banal millennial ambiguities. So I thought I’d take a second to break down — for me, anyway — how I’ve come to characterize the notion of “emotional intelligence,” with the aim of reducing any wishy-washy ring it may carry. I find high emotional intelligence is defined by a refined sense of empathy, thoughtfulness, brilliance, kindness, and curiosity. High emotional intelligence is the antipode to bombastic jingoisms, and signals an overcoming of childish impulses. Most importantly: High emotional intelligence does not suffer sloth. Lazy responses are often physical responses, takedowns, attacks, slanders, ad hominems. Someone with high emotional intelligence rises above the low-hanging response, takes time to compose themself, and responds with clarity and with a clear goal in mind. (Which does not strictly preclude emotional intelligence from deploying violence.) There is a disembodiment to emotional intelligence, and in that way, a connection to Vipassanna-style meditation. (Prev. notes: part 1, part 2.) Someone with high emotional intelligence is able to distance themself from the immediate chemical component of a dire situation, and cooly assess (which is different from dispassionately, or assessing without emotion) how to achieve some desired result in the most efficient and most sustainable way possible. People with high emotional intelligence don’t look for simple solutions, they look for durable solutions. They don’t look to solve a problem once by force, they look to unlock a problem forever, often through kindness and cunning. Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. come to mind as easy examples of highly emotionally intelligent people. The long walk, the sit-in, the non-violent gesture — these are sustainable, historical-arc responses to oppression. These are not the “obvious” or easy responses. It requires a tremendous faith, understanding of human nature, and belief in core values to rise above “punching back” when you’ve been punched. In that sense, a cultivation of high emotional intelligence enables us rise above our base animalistic station in the world. Emotional intelligence is often a proxy for grace. Personal attacks are often emotionally driven attacks. And in that sense, they are perhaps the simplest indication of someone with low emotional intelligence. Personal attacks represent low impulse-control. They are childish by default, and often have no lasting useful effect. Folks who tend to attack — rather than deconstruct, or empathize — are often trapped in tremendously narrow world views. They tend to see all relationships as existing within a thin column, a tight hierarchy of being above or below each other. And in service to that “alpha” pole position at the top of the column, they need to attack and make sure you or your work sits below. The emotionally intelligent person recognizes that this person’s thin column is not the world, steps outside of it (or chooses not to enter the column by disengaging), and looks on with a mixture of pity and freedom as the attacker is stuck in a cage of their own historical construction. This stepping outside of the column isn’t easy to do! That’s why emotional intelligence and sloth aren’t compatible. To be emotionally intelligent is to require energy, training. It is a skill and mode of living that isn’t necessarily implicit or “organic” to our programmed being. It’s easy to pick on social media, but perhaps more than any tool in history, social media rewards, amplifies, and encourages a self-immolation of any emotional intelligence someone may have. The less emotionally intelligent the tweet, the more likes, the more retweets. Without friction between an emotional spike and response, we are disincentivized from considering non-reactive responses. The result is dumpster fires heaped atop dumpster fires, all the way down. Tiny loops, aiding in animalistic impulse. Similarly to how the vipasanna meditator is not so disembodied from the world as to allow someone to come up and slash them with a knife, so too, the emotionally intelligent person does not take attacks without response. But instead of operating on a response timeline of milliseconds, they can operate on one of minutes, hours, years. This timescale is relative; the best martial artists are the most emotionally intelligent — that is, they see the opponent gestures not as emotional, personal affronts, but as moves in a puzzle. I suspect Bruce Lee was able to channel or distill any impulse-laden emotion into greater focus and accuracy. Which is to say, those emotionally intelligent among us are alchemists. Our bodies are as bodies are, billions of years of genetic encoding can’t be erased, but it can be willfully redirected. I’ve witnessed that aikido-esque energy redirection of the mind in certain friends during stressful moments. It’s been inspiring and instructive to see someone attacked, the eyes harden slightly, the initial jab-response transmuted into a fifteen-move game of well-understood manipulation, ending often with the attacker having fallen in love with the one being attacked, and the attackee getting everything they wanted and more. Importantly: Everyone in the social equation has been elevated. And perhaps the attacker is able to see — however slight — the world beyond their thin column. Until you see this happen, it’s difficult to believe it’s possible. John Lewis knew this, experienced this, and preached this. If you’re looking to increase your own emotional intelligence — that is, if you find yourself overly enthralled to impulse above rationality or equanimity — I’ve personally found therapy to paid handsome dividends. The ability to self-analyze can be learned with the help of a good therapist. A good therapist should be of supreme emotional intelligence. Disengage, immediately, from any therapist that judges or berates. They are not the teacher you’re looking for. In developing the skill of self-analysis, one gets better at understanding an impulse as it arises, seeing it for what it is, and analyzing how best to channel that primal energy. Done over and over it becomes a habit. The best habits define our identities. Emotional intelligence can very much be learned.