For our times we can update Samuel Johnson’s famous remark about patriotism: fear is the last refuge of a scoundrel.
If historians were looking for a label to characterize the dominant theme in our public discourse these days they could do no better than call it “The Age of Fear.” It may be true that crime rates in most parts of the country have generally fallen, and that the chances of being the victim of terrorist attack are less likely than getting struck by lightning. Nonetheless, we live in an age where too many voices in our political and news-gathering systems depend on fear as their most reliable theme. Acts of terrorism like the recent attack in Manchester England are sufficient for cable news networks, among others, to go into narrow and repetitive coverage. Jerky cell phone videos add all of the video they need to endlessly mull the imagined ghosts in the room, with the added effect of overstated conclusions that we are not safe and terrorism is rampant.
The same thread is endlessly recycled by the President, who uses much of his public rhetoric to focus on threats allegedly coming from undocumented immigrants, Syrian refugees, Muslim extremists, Mexican drug smugglers, Chinese banks, Australia, Germany, to mention just a few from his long list. We learned that we were in for a three-alarm Presidency when Donald Trump broke tradition in his inaugural address to rehash warnings that were endlessly recycled to his followers on the campaign trail. He talked of the “American carnage” of too few jobs, insecure borders, abuse at the hands of our allies and more. The speech was significantly out of the norm: less a ritual celebration of the transfer of presidential power than a victim’s list of grievances against others. And it surely resonated then as it does now with too many Americans with who have little patience to deal with the complexities of modern life. They do not know that the world is generally more understandable and actually less threatening if understood in 2000-word clarifications rather than 20-word rants.
Because we are hardwired first for survival, we look for threats before opportunities; self-preservation before self-actualization.
We can update Samuel Johnson’s famous remark about patriotism and reset it in our times: fear is the last refuge of a scoundrel. It’s easy if not responsible for a demagogue to conjure malevolent ghosts in our midst. This is the rhetorical thread that connects figures from the margins of our civil life as diverse as “Pitchfork Ben” Tillman, Huey Long, Joe McCarthy, George Wallace and any number of public figures who built a political base by motivating concerns about “Them.” Using this thread usually provides an unearned advantage. Those nameless others inside and beyond our borders are almost always portrayed as immoral, unclean or dangerously powerful. The irony is that most Americans have no right to claim a nativist ideology. Our ancestors came from somewhere else. Even so, it thrives.
Fear appeals gain a natural advantage from the human impulse to fantasize about what we do not fully know or understand. Fear always builds from the predicate of potential harm we can imagine. Because we are creatures hardwired first for survival, we look for threats before opportunities; self-preservation before self-actualization. As any lover of film-noir knows, another person’s shadow is all we need to envision the worst. It follows that verbalizing threats against survival is easily rewarded. The beneficiaries may be political scoundrels, cable news companies, and various agents who have seemingly simple solutions to sell: everything from home security alarms to firearms to grotesque projects like a massive border wall.
A person with high social intelligence has a set of ‘antennae’ that are strong enough to be a guide for what will give another more comfort than pain.
We are used to thinking of “intelligence” as a single entity. But it’s not so simple. To be sure, we have IQ scores and other measures of a person’s capacity for understanding abstract ideas and processing information. But traditional measures of intelligence are notoriously imprecise. The term itself is difficult to operationalize, something that must happen with any “objective” measure. It’s thus problematic to saddle an individual with a number that is supposed to stand as a representation of their cognitive skills. It’s not unlike establishing the overall worth of a car by the time it takes it to go from 0 to 60 mph. People put a lot of stock in both kinds of numbers. But to do so is mostly a fool’s errand. By contrast, there surely is something of value in the idea of social intelligence, even though it also will not easily yield to social science metrics.
Broadly speaking, social intelligence is a capacity to “read” others and various human environments with an ability to adjust to relevant norms. In practical terms, this turns out to be mostly a function of a person’s skill in knowing how to respond in a given environment. Psychologists sometimes talk about ‘theory of mind” as the related capacity to be able to anticipate what is going on in another person’s life, making adjustments that are more empathetic than indifferent. We know it when we see it, as when another person has said what seems like just the right thing to a needy friend.
As the effective use of impressions that we give off, social intelligence is best understood as a function of our ability to perform words and deeds that are a good match for a given situation.
In actual fact, there are assorted ways we can sense another person high social intelligence: their abilities to self-monitor impulses that might be awkward, a willingness to engage even with strangers, the capacity to listen to another and respond appropriately. A person with high social intelligence has a set of ‘social antennae’ that are strong enough to grasp what will give more comfort than pain to another.
The phrase “social intelligence” is perhaps most clearly associated with the psychologist, Daniel Goleman, and his best-selling book under the same name (Bantam, 2006). The book is a worthwhile study, even if its subtitle badly oversells the subject as a “science of human relationships.” And there’s the rub.
Years ago a less flamboyant sociologist, Erving Goffman, reminded us that social relationships are predicated on functional presentational skills. He talked about “impression management” and role taking as skills situated at the core of our relational world. The model he adopted was less “scientific”–meaning capable of precise measurement–and more properly seen as “dramatistic.” We are actors creating responses appropriate to a given scene.
The shift in perspective makes a big difference. As the effective use of impressions that we give off, social intelligence is best understood as a function of our ability to perform words and deeds that are a good match for a given situation. There is no single standard or set of norms or skills, but infinite possibilities.
This is why the dominant art form in our lives is film in all of its variations and platforms. Seeing individuals act in the presence of others is always a potential touchstone. Comedy generally lets us see people behaving badly, or at least inappropriately. Our laughter flows from a recognition of violated social codes. And drama puts us in close to see moments when lives can be transformed. It isn’t the transformation itself that grabs us. It’s a character’s response to the problem that precipitated it. Their reactions are how we come to know the features of their character, especially their aptitude for rising to meet social circumstances fraught with complexities.
In a sense we are all critics of performances, using personal preferences and floating standards to assess the responses of others. This more open-ended dramatic framework gives us the kind of pluralism of potential responses we need to understand the marvels and occasional disasters that unfold in social encounters.
