“Jesus Never Laughed and Socrates Never Cried” Sept 8, 2019 Dr. Roger Ray
J. R. Benjamin, A surprising pronouncement from the end of the fifth chapter (“Action”) in Hannah Arendt’s 1958 book The Human Condition.
It’s striking how frequently Jesus and Socrates are compared or counterposed, especially in works of philosophy. Perhaps this trend stems from the fact that each figure works as a respective stand-in for Tertullian’s Jerusalem-Athens paradigm, though there’s probably more to it. One of the more worthwhile recent musings on this matter came from Cornell West, who spoke of a historico-philosophical question which hefound particularly interesting: “I sometimes wonder why Jesus never laughed and Socrates never cried.”
My father was the youngest of nine children. His oldest brother, Presley, was, in several ways, the humanizing, loving, generous, patriarch of the family. He didn’t have children of his own which gave him that wonderful freedom to be indulgent towards his nieces and nephews.
When Presley was nearing his death, my father and I drove up to Chicago together to visit him. I had just finished graduate school. I had majored in pastoral counseling in my masters and doctorate but there was something about my own character that I had never been able to understand. Why did I have such a short fuse? Why was I angry so much of the time? I had worked with my counseling professor on the issue of anger. Dr. Mills was certain that it was a part of my family of origin, but I just couldn’t see it.
But this visit to see my dying uncle was when it all became clear to me. Presley was a very meticulous man whose lawn and garden was always manicured, his home was spotless, and his personal appearance was of the Beau Brummell sort. But, in his final weeks of life, things were falling apart. Presley’s clothes hung on him like burlap bags, the lawn was shaggy and the garden was full of weeds, and even the house was in bad shape . . . the silver needed to be polished, there were cob webs in the corners and dust bunnies in the hall.
My father was stomping around in a rage. He wanted to fire the neighbor who mowed the lawn, the cleaning lady who was slacking off, and the health care workers who were not attending to Presley’s appearance. Dad was like a bomb ready to go off in any second. But I realized that my widowed uncle was lonely in these final days and when the neighbor came to mow, he would pull out a lawn chair and sit with Presley in the lawn and talk, rather than carefully weeding and trimming. The cleaning lady who had known him for years would make a couple of cups of coffee and just sit and listen to Presley as he sorted through his memories. Clearly, the healthcare workers saw that the end was near and emotional support was much more important than helping him to shave and dress up. Presley had cast his bread on the waters, and it was coming back to him. He was surrounded by love, except for my Dad.
Which he did by barking at the cleaning lady, yelling at the lawn guy, and making me and Uncle Presley very uncomfortable.
I call it “hillbilly rage,” a kind of unreflective anger that I see in my siblings and in their children. Anger poses as strength, ferocity, forcefulness. Anger presumes to be in charge, to be potentially dangerous. We see it in Fox News consumers who seem to think that anger even makes them smart enough to be condescending towards facts.
When, in fact, anger is none of those things . . . anger is fear, or shame, or any one of a host of other emotions, all of which would betray a certain vulnerability that can be hidden by just expressing all of your emotions as anger.
That is not to say that anger is always an inappropriate emotion. You can’t say that middle C on a piano is the wrong key. It is a very important key, one that is played repeatedly in most songs; however, it is not the only key, and, ask my piano teacher, it can also be played at the wrong time to disastrous results.
My favorite quote from Aristotle’s The Nicomachean Ethicsis,“Anyone can become angry - that is easy. But to be angry with the right person, to the right degree, at the right time, for the right purpose, and in the right way - that is not easy.” I don’t know how many generations this hillbilly rage goes back in my family, but I know this, I have made it my lifelong goal to bring it to an end in my own life.
There are a lot of reasons to be wary of too quickly or too easily throwing around psychological diagnoses, but a painful reality about our emotions is that we need to be aware of them, to name them, to understand them, to keep them from taking control of our lives.
I appreciated hearing Dr. Cornell West riffing on the observation that Socrates never cried, and Jesus never laughed.
At least according to Plato, even as Socrates was being handed the cup of hemlock that was the means of execution by the city of Athens, even when everyone around him was weeping, Socrates refused to be sad. He cheerfully talked with his friends as he accepted his unjust execution.
Socrates was a stoic. He insisted upon a life of the mind and was convinced that displays of emotions were simply a failure to properly discipline the mind.
I don’t think that it is at all fair to describe Jesus as being the opposite of Stoicism but while the gospels will tell us that Jesus got angry, that he was sometimes afraid, that he wept, felt grief and sorrow, and he loved friends and children, but the New Testament never mentions him laughing or being happy.
Of course, Plato is not trying to give us an accurate biographical sketch of Socrates, and the gospel writers have little insight into the comprehensive character of the historical Jesus, but Dr. West quotes this observation about Socrates and Jesus as a way of exploring both the range of human emotion and our flawed efforts at controlling them.
I would like to think that the historical Socrates was able to cry when his dog died and that the historical Jesus would have laughed at any early Palestinian version of “a rabbi, a priest, and an imam walk into a bar . . .” stories he may have heard.
The famous psychiatrist, M. Scott Peck, talked about the need for balance. Our emotions can either work for us or they can destroy us. I hesitate to use two musical instrument illustrations in one sermon since I cannot play any of them, but obviously, for the strings on a guitar to make music, there has to be the right amount of tension on them. If they are too loose, they don’t play at all, if they are too tight, they will break the instrument, and in between those two extremes, there are many wrong ways to tune a guitar string but basically only one that is right.
Babies cry when they are hungry, they cry when they are wet, they will cry when they are lonely, bored, sick, or scared, and a part of growing up is learning that you don’t have to cry about everything.
A generation ago, when I first started writing opinion columns for the NewsLeader, I was outraged by many of the letters the opinion editor would publish in response to my thoughtful and well-researched columns. Many of them were quite personal, they were often mean and inaccurate . . . honestly, they should not have been published but of the dozen or so editors I had over the years of writing for the paper, my first one was indisputably, the worst. I literally lost sleep over some of them . . . I was angry, but I was also hurt, embarrassed, I felt rejected, and scorned.
The editor I did not care for just said, “If you are going to put your name on a controversial article, you just have to take what you get in response.”
Learning to live with public criticism wasn’t easy and even now I don’t like it but, if I had ever gone to see a doctor to tell them about the stress I felt as an opinion writer, the pressure, the public scorn . . . I have little doubt that I would have been given a prescription for some anti-depressant in the serotonin family, and some kind of benzodiazepine – something like Xanax for anxiety, and maybe something for sleep, like Trazadone or Ambien, both highly addictive sleep aids.
About 60 million Americans take some kind of prescription sleep aid, about 10 % of adults take some kind of benzodiazepine anti-anxiety drug. And I’m not saying that there are not people who need these medications, I’m just saying the numbers are awfully high.
I am not a medical doctor, but what I know of providing medical care to about 40,000 people in the rural parts of Nicaragua through the Rainbow Network is that none of our doctors dispensed anti-depressants, sleep aids, or medication for panic attacks or anxiety. I can’t tell you exactly how to tune that guitar string but somewhere between 0% and 10 or 20% of the population, there is a lot of room for abuse. And that is without even mentioning how many people use alcohol or marijuana to dull their awareness of their feelings.
Just as Paul Thomlinson and I were talking about in July when we talked about depression treatment, your emotions are not your enemies and they are not the stagecoach driver of your life. Your emotions should be listened to before they are medicated away.
One author I read suggested that the Trump administration itself is to blame for the rapid increase in anxiety medications and I can sort of see that, but I can tell you that politics and economics in Nicaragua is pretty rough too and I just never hear about anxiety disorders.
What I am looking for here is balance. I believe that I have seen men die young because they were so stoic that they never allowed themselves to feel and to express themselves. I believe that I have had any number of emotional terrorists in my life who regularly give themselves permission to cloud up and rain down their emotions on whoever happens to be at hand.
Obviously, some people are more sensitive than others and everyone is sensitive about some things. I have some emotional triggers. There are ways that people sometimes try to tease me that make me seethe, but I won’t let any of them force me to take medications. As are most adoptive parents, especially in inter-racial adoption, I can channel my inner lion if someone says something demeaning about my daughter.
As my friend, Dan says, I sometimes feel compelled to explain to someone exactly how the cow ate the cabbage . . . I consider it to be a free educational service that I provide when it is needed. But I am alarmed when people just seem to be willing to catalogue their triggers. I have a hot button that you can find if you try hard enough, but you shouldn’t become covered in hot buttons.
You have heard me quote Jung before, where he said, “All neuroses are a replacement for legitimate suffering.” Maybe Jung overstated his case a bit, but I don’t think he miss the mark by much. We need to understand our negative emotions, not just turn over the steering wheel to them.
We should probably have Paul Thomlinson come back to deliver a more comprehensive description of what psychologists mean by Emotional Intelligence, but the 4 main pillars are:
1. 
Self-Awareness
2. Self-Management
3. Social Awareness
4. Relationship Management
It is easy for me to see that virtually no one in my family of origin was ever aware of hillbilly rage and might not believe it if they heard me explain it. Many people think that their emotions just come out of thin air, that they are what they are, and you simply inflict them on the rest of the world. That is not true. We all have to work to be aware of our emotions and to learn how to manage them . . . we are not, after all, babies still crying about everything, and we don’t have to be alarmed by having feelings to the point that we medicate them away. Self-awareness and self-management involves examining your own life and choosing to learn from and manage your emotions through your own powerful decision making.
If we use our feelings to be able to empathize with members of our society then it can meaningfully change our society, so that, for example, we stop tolerating a government that imprisons 2 million citizens and tens of thousands of immigrants for profit . . . just for an example.
And emotional intelligence should include a relationship awareness that helps us not to inflict our most irrational feelings on those who are closest to us. My public role, both in print and internet media, means that an awful lot of people give themselves permission to try to take a pound of flesh out of me as a way of compensating for their own fear, prejudice, and ignorance. So, I have to conserve emotional energy such that when someone in casual social settings also gives themselves permission to make a withdrawal from my emotional bank account to compensate for their insecurities or malice, then I have to put some distance between me and that sort of emotional terrorism.
We should all have sufficient emotional intelligence not to inflict emotional harm on others, and we should all have enough self-respect not to tolerate it out of others.
There is a middle path between Stoicism and some kind of hysteria in which you can express yourself rather than embracing heart disease, and you can grow beyond the kind of hillbilly hostility which is little more than an infant crying in a poopy diaper. You can manage your emotions without either suppressing them or medicating them away.
I’m not trying to defame pharmaceuticals, Socrates or Jesus . . . I’m just trying to advocate for being healthy in the most natural way possible with as few trips to Walgreens as we can manage.
