What I notice most in reality television is the shocking swiftness of the judgment that contestants or participants render on one another. They slam down their opinions with the thunder of a hammer blow. On The Apprentice or The Real World, half the comedy can be found in how fast they size each other up: "weak" ... "loser" ... "pushy" ... "mean" ... "two-timing" and so forth. In the case of The Real World it's basically a function of the immaturity of the housemates, plus whatever behind-the-scenes strings MTV pulled to generate conflict. In the case of Trump's extended job audition, it's the competition that brings out the predatory sting of judgment. As you watch the contestants start each task, they are clearly less concerned with the mechanics of completing the task then they are with formulating a strategy of casting blame and passing judgment. "I don't think you're a good leader!" shouted one of last season's semifinalists. "Well, you're lousy at taking orders!" came the reply.
Ultimate judgment rested with the Donald, who fired them both.
Famous people are careful about judgment—the judgment they exercise is in keeping their mouths shut. This is why gossip has such value. When some celebrity passes public judgment on another, it's like a loud hiss of steam issuing from a kettle. Professional athletes are notoriously bland interview subjects in this regard. They rarely pass judgment on anything, especially their opposition, lest they find their disparaging comments on the blackboard of the next team they play. Politicians are even more clever in judgment. They, too, will issue forth nonjudgments, but they will add into the mix statements of judgment designed for political gain along with judgments that they genuinely believe in.
Judgment, it turns out, was one of the key issues of the last presidential election. Democrats led their attack on President George Bush on the grounds of his faulty judgment in leading the nation into war in Iraq. The Republicans, of course, portrayed John Kerry as a flip-flopper, which is to say a man incapable of judgment. The election hinged not only on the content of judgment, but on its nature. At the very least this suggests that judgment contains two components—the decision itself, and the way that it was made.
A majority of voters returned Bush to the White House. Whether or not they were impressed by his handling of the war in Iraq, one sensed a certain respect among them for Bush's willingness to judge at all. His campaign successfully sold unwavering judgment as a symbol of integrity and equivocation as an indicator of weakness. Kerry was unable to sell his own complexity of vision as a sign of moral sophistication and maturity.
Judgment is everywhere. Critics of every stripe no longer just weigh in on books and movies and the other arts. Now there are an ever-greater number of sports pundits (do we need opinions about bowling and fishing and ultimate fighting and the world's strongest man?), opinion-makers of every kind, bloggers left and right. My God, everyone has an opinion. Everyone must not only pass their judgments on the world to find their place in it —this is normal—but they now have the means to express themselves to ever wider and wider audiences. Perhaps our democracy is as strong as it's ever been.
We do judge, all the time, of course, but it's not judgment in a morally neutral way that is at issue. I'm not talking about judgment in the sensory notion of someone making a decision whether to notice stimuli at all —when we hear what we want to hear or see what we want to see we are making a judgment, albeit an often unconscious one, about what is worth hearing or seeing. Nor do I mean judgment as a matter of taste—is this movie better than that one? The red blouse or the blue one? Do we eat Chinese tonight or pizza? Instead, it's judgment as an act of stating one's own value system or, more to the point, imposing one's value system on others.
We value judgment. We value it as a form of character. People who exercise good judgment are worthy of our respect. With judgment comes a certain air of upright, bold action, commitment and engagement. We gravitate toward people who make judgments, to their gravitas, their stone-like resistance to going with the crowd, to snap judgments. Amid the swirling entanglements of life, they plant their flag in the wind and announce that they stand for this or oppose that. Maybe they do neither to the point of, say, imprisonment or death, but as the wind whips into their flag, there is the feeling of standing against the ease of vacillation and vacuousness.
And yet, in the interpersonal sphere, a lack of judgment is often seen as a plus. We seek lovers who accept us as we are, who do not pass judgment on every little eccentricity or foible. We seek out friends who will lend a sympathetic ear and hear our side. They may play devil's advocate, but they will do so gently, and they will take pains not to tell us what to do. We don't like nags or busybodies or know-it-alls.
What is behind our world of individual judgments, moral or otherwise, is this tension between feeling a need to judge and a need not to. This comes out most easily in family dynamics, where every day gives us a dozen instances of the same underlying dilemma: Do I open my mouth and throw down my opinion, or do I say nothing—assuming that silence is essentially nonjudgmental, which it often isn't. The first makes us feel we've staked out a position; the second makes us feel like we remain open and unencumbered.
I mean, judgment is unavoidable, but it can be rigid. It closes, for at least a moment, the mind open to everything. Just like buying a new car entails the opportunity costs of all the things you might have bought but no longer can, judgment moves us out of that position where we have room to imagine multiple choices of action.
By comparison, the absence of judgment is light, certainly. Live and let live, we sometimes say, and it's as if we've sprouted wings or can dance out of a rigid or narrow perspective. Much of our generosity as humans comes when we do not pass judgment on our fellow humans. We give a few bucks to the beggar with a smile; we help someone out of a jam, oblivious or indifferent to the part they may have played in causing it. We do things because it seems like the right thing to do. That is a kind of judgment, but it's also a nonjudgment, an act that is more instinctive than deliberate.
The need or desire for judgment in some quarters represents a desire for a presumed simpler time, when someone, a benevolent father perhaps, laid down rules and judged you thoroughly and fairly on how well you adhered to them. Right and wrong, in this world, were easily divided. On the other hand, how do you exercise judgment in a world whose lines seem so fuzzy? In pop culture, the lines between right and wrong have been entangled for years; as often as not, morally unscrupulous antiheroes are our best guide to right action. On top of that, in the culture in general, there is a constant fusing of the real and the unreal, between fact and fiction—a permanent condition of entertainment, of politics, of journalism. Faced with this foggy landscape, it seems on the whole easier to exercise a lot of latitude in judgment, or to refrain from judgment altogether.
Talk of moral absolutism and moral relativism is itself probably a bit too cut-and-dried. It seems to me that few of us are absolute moral relativists—i.e., that our relativism is so tolerant that we will fall into the slippery slope of anything goes. The presumed permissiveness of those who are less willing to judge others doesn't stem so much from any kind of moral hedonism. Instead, I think it comes from a desire to escape the pressures of judgment. This can take the form of a discomfort for the actual mechanism of carrying out a judgment. One old boss of mine, for instance, was never very good at the actual act of firing someone; the execution of this task always was left to someone else. Or it can just take the form of a desire to escape the psychological feeling of being pinned down. Sometimes we walk out of a movie and are throwing down our opinion to anyone who will listen. Other times, the very question, "What did you think?" makes us cry foul, beg off the question, run for cover, if our thoughts are still percolating, or confusing, or uncertain. Better to pass on the whole dilemma altogether.
I once served on a jury in Colorado. The case was nothing but a traffic accident, and no one was hurt, so the stakes were not high. Still, when the judge explained the long list of rules and laws we were to adhere to in working through to our decision, his litany took several minutes and felt far out of proportion to the case at hand. But it made perfect sense. The rules of the court were designed to take as much of the personal responsibility of judgment out of our hands as possible. We were not autonomous individuals making a judgment, although that's how we looked, and since no one was coercing us, that must have been how we felt. We were representatives of a system, set to render an opinion on a carefully prescribed set of standards. I can imagine this would be especially useful in murder trials, where judgments of convictions can bring penalties of life in prison or death. Jurors discharge their responsibility seriously enough but in an environment that absolves them from some measure of responsibility.
In one definition of judgment, from 1340, the word means "a trial of moral beings by God." And that gets to part of our antipathy about judgment. Being human, filled with the desire to be thought of by others as superior, it's all too easy to think of our fellow humans as the moral beings and us as, well, you know. Among those who believe in the power of judgment, in the swiftness and certainty it brings, the bearing of righteousness or pride is reminiscent of the divine as it's revealed in religions. This is judgment that comes from hubris, from the supposition that one knows more than another, that one person is better than another.
As one ages, the need to judge in some cosmic sense seems to grow—if only to answer the question, "What kind of world do I believe I should be trying to make?" And at the same time, the reluctance to judge seems to grow. Maybe the underlying question there is, "Does anything really make a difference?" We make our judgments and the world shrugs and moves on. We state our opinions and the next guy yawns and says, "That's nice. I still disagree." Why bother?
Ah, you say, there is a third option that is always available to us. Say something, but say it in a way that is nonthreatening. State an opinion about what someone else could do, might do, even should do, but do not condemn them if they don't make that choice. Yet that strikes me as insufficient. How are we to balance the competing desires to judge with the desires not to? Maybe what we're left to do is understand the inevitability to judge, the need to find a position, but at the same time maintain a healthy skepticism for our pronouncements, which are almost always products of insufficient information. Or to quote activist and author Rita Mae Brown, "Good judgment comes from experience, and often experience comes from bad judgment."