Dr. Forbush Thinks

Human Beings are emotional animals. However, civilization requires us to tame our emotions to some degree. How much do we tame them? Which ones need to be tamed the most? Different people have their own opinions. Plato was a stoic and shunned emotion to a great extent. Latin culture finds virtue in passion as I wrote on Friday. Americans culture accepts more passion than British culture but less than Latin culture.

But, even the emotions that are controlled is a cultural issue. Who and what should we hate? Who and what should we admire? Some religions tell us to hide the natural sexual tension, but they pump up the hatred of "sin" even though the definition of “sin” changes from religion to religion. Is it a “sin” to imagine the leg of another person? What if the person is the opposite sex? What if they are the same sex? How far up the leg can you imagine before it becomes a sin?

Can you imagine killing another person? Is that a sin? What if they did something evil to you or your family or your country? Are any of these passions sinful? Remember, these are just thoughts that enflame your passions, but they aren’t actions in themselves. Culture tells us where to draw those lines.

But these same passions are the anger or love we feel for champions and those who destroy the things we love. Sometimes this passion drives us to jump to conclusions that could be wrong and act out of passion and not logic. Taming the passions help to keep us from irrational reaction. Then again sometimes-irrational reaction makes life worth living. For example, spontaneous romance certainly ranks higher in experience than a planned romantic encounter.

Obviously, moderation of emotion is how man became civilized. But, like anything else, one can take this to an extreme. Cultural elimination of public display of emotions is what happened under Queen Victoria in the 19th Century.








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