Monthly Archives: January 2019

Laughter in the Time of Despair

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Humor has as many varieties as love, God, and the weather. It cannot be pinned down, though philosophers and psychologists have tried through millennia. Aristotle, Plato, Sophocles, Kant, Descartes, Schopenhauer, Freud, and Kierkegaard are only a few, plus gaggles of comedians. 

Everyone has a theory. Some link humor’s beginnings to the aggressive play of young apes. Others believe it is bestowed as a divine gift of a beneficent god. Plato protested the “divine gift” theory, claiming laughter was demeaning especially of gods.

  If anyone represents men of worth as overpowered by laughter we must not accept it, much less of gods.—Plato’s “Republic,” c.380 BC

Plato thought laughter overrides rationality and self-control, but what is rational? Things fall apart. Earthquakes, floods, fires, catastrophic illnesses, financial loss, wars, ethnic cleansing, soap in the bathtub, crazy people with guns, crazy people who don’t want gun control, love turned to disinterest.

Early theories of humor include the Superiority Theory claiming the cause of laughter is feelings of superiority and the Relief Theory claiming laughter is the release of nervous energy. Freud felt we laugh as a way to release the tension in our bodies from suppressed feelings—dirty jokes being an example. Ha ha.

The most commonly held theory today is the Incongruity Theory. We expect one thing to happen and something else is delivered up, violating our mental patterns. Somehow this is funny, though mostly when we see it rather than when it happens to ourselves. Then it may take a while, or never, to laugh.

Being amused may not be rational, but it is lifesaving. Sometimes humor simply rushes in to preserve our sanity and our ability to make it through another day. 

  Perhaps humor’s largest function is to detach us from our world of good and evil, of loss and gain, and to enable us to see it in proper perspective. It frees us from vanity, on the one hand, and from pessimism, on the other, by keeping us larger than what we do, and greater than what can happen to us.—Editorial in the “American Journal of Psychology,” October 1907

The siege of Sarajevo lasted from April 1992 to February 1996. Snipers in the Bosnian Serb forces killed over 10,000 people, primarily Muslims, in the city by picking them off one by one from vantage points in the surrounding hills. I was there in 2002. A young man and I were walking along a sidewalk when he started to laugh.

“My friend was killed in exactly this spot. We were right here. He was afraid of being shot so he made me walk on the outside. Bam, he’s the one they got.”  Laughter. “I warned him he should stop being so afraid.”

Oppressed people are experts of dark humor. Humor steps in when hope is small. It is a moment’s detachment from the dark, a kind of enlightenment. 

  Humor is not a personal or a national monopoly. It’s as free as salvation, and, I am afraid, far more widely distributed. But it has its value, I think. The hard and sordid things of life are too hard and too sordid and too cruel for us to know and touch them year after year without some mitigating influence, some kindly veil to draw over them, from time to time, to blur the craggy outlines, and make the thorns less sharp and the cruelties less malignant.—Mark Twain, 1905

It seems this writing should have more humor in it, but I’m taking humor seriously.  

When my father was dying, I slept on a cot next to his hospital bed. One night he began laughing—a rollicking laugh through cancerous lungs. I jumped up.

“Dad? Dad?”

“It’s all been a joke! The whole thing has been a joke!” 

He was lit up, joyous. He saw an ultimate incongruity. He saw love, peace, and harmony before, after, and around his life’s pains, troubles, losses, illness, even his death. It made his life with its difficulties a divine joke. The injuries were of no consequence. At least, not anymore.

There is a reason the Buddha smiles.

  A bird sings in the silence after a disaster and we do not know if it is a rejoicing for the return of quiet or if the bird is checking where the other birds are—as family members check to see who is alive under the rubble. 

This is not a joke. They are just words as I finish writing about what we do not know but find life-giving. 


GOODNESS IS A CHOICE: a lesson learned from Trump

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Only recently have I come to believe goodness—with its accompaniments of honesty, generosity, and inclusion—is a choice rather than an innate state of being. One might even say “state of grace.”

Perhaps I am late to this lesson, grounded in the mystical as I am, but having the character of our president smashed like a poisonous cream pie into our faces daily, the lies, the meanness, the duplicity, has shaken my faith in innate human kindness. He has no inner moral compass and, as he rants, hatred and division grow. Vast numbers of people are reveling in their darker selves. 

In my mind’s eye I see a graph with a straight horizontal line that represents a more or less benign baseline, though it feels more alive than benign. Moving over, under, and along it is a second line that may be wobbly, or as erratic as an EKG printout, or as jagged as a stock market index. It can roam or slide. It can meander but, if watched carefully, you see it tends upward or downward.

This second line charts the acts of goodness v. acts of selfishness of any and every individual—sometimes me. Simultaneously it measures what the person believes and feels because actions, beliefs, and feelings are co-joined. A continuing “state of grace” is not a guarantee.

Above the horizontal mid-line is the area of the graph showing compassionate, constructive actions of goodness—an acting out in our lives of love towards others—respect, generosity, doing unto others as you would wish them to do unto you, even basic politeness. Below the line are varying degrees of the opposite—selfishness, ignoring, harming. 

The very existence of this graph shows that in my personal striving for truth—a construct I am dependent upon—I have moved from a belief of goodness as an abiding impulse in everyone to a choice of individuals. This was, especially at first, a profound disappointment. A mooring is gone.

Still, I have always thought that people who have done great harm and then decide to change their lives, outlooks, and actions are the bravest among us—the addict that rises into caregiving, the criminal who becomes a reformer. I understood they made choices. They knew what they were capable of and they chose to do good. I do not expect the same of our president.

Watching the evidence, I felt my certainty of human goodness slip away. We are feebler and stronger than creatures with guaranteed impulses toward goodness. Feebler because we are not imbedded with hard and true morals, and stronger because we can rise to goodness as a choice even if the benefits to ourselves are not immediately apparent.

The world presents plenty of evidence that good actions are not a given. We with food let people starve, we with opportunity shut out desperate people at our borders, we with fear let innocent people be bombed, we let animals be harmed and the earth be sacrificed. We choose not to see that we are the terrorists, the selfish, the withholders. Most of us justify ourselves blindly and shamelessly. 

Through our free will we determine not only how we will act, but, first, how we feel and what we believe. We make non-stop decisions that craft our lives. We cannot avoid this, but we can choose our options, decision by decision, action by action. We can build habits—venues is perhaps more accurate—of perceptions and actions that build the world we experience as real. We can curse what is dark and promulgate it or embrace what is light and share it.

Love is the resource, but free will determines if we access care, empathy, inclusion. It determines what we do about education for all, health care for all, financial means for all, care of our planet, and protection of the innocent. It allows us to see strangers as friends.

Goodness may be an option, but it is not a fantasy. It is real and the only viable option.