On Judgment
“He stood up, pointed towards his bedside table and replied:
‘I cannot, in good faith, keep this Bible on my nightstand and judge another man at the same time.’”
That statement was from a man I met on my travels four years ago. It lodged itself in my brain not just firmly, but permanently.
This is rare. A lot of posts here fall under a category that I would define as Q’s with no A’s. They are topics that I continue to go back and forth on, updating my own beliefs when others find holes in the logic, but they also tend to be topics which humanity has gone back and forth on for thousands of years with no conclusive answer.
On the topic of judgment, I believe not only that this answer is my final answer, but that it is the same final answer wise men arrived at thousands of years ago. Yet when I look around at how people behave, I don’t feel that most of them have arrived at this same conclusion.
Hence, today we render judgment on the topic of judgment.
I don’t judge people today. It is tempting to say well, you’re in no position to, but it runs far deeper than that.
I should never have judged anyone, ever, to begin with.
Neither should you, but I can’t inject this lesson into your veins. You have to see the light yourself. All I can hope to do is push you a little bit closer.
Nonjudgment is a tricky subject because while it’s one of the most important things I’ve ever studied in my life, I always stop and ask myself before I publish something: would a younger version of you have listened to this? And there’s multiple barrels to that gun.
One, I’m more obtuse and thick-headed than average. The only way I’ve ever internalized a lesson is for the hammer to smash my skull. Like, I read a lot, and I fully buy into the idea of studying others’ mistakes because doing so is cheaper than making them yourself. Then, I go out and make those exact same mistakes anyway. Sometimes you hear a guy referred to as one of those dumb smart guys, or perhaps a smart dumb guy, and I’m not sure which of those two I am but I’m one of them. So either way, this whole rubric of would I have listened isn’t always a good one.
Two, the answer to that question — would you have listened —may come down to the quality of the writing. Would I have listened to it many years ago, it depends. If it was poorly written, probably not, but there’s a way of rearranging words, a strength of argument, a tone of voice and an authorial background where perhaps the message would finally sink in.
Three, the question may be fruitless because it depends on YOU, the reader. Nonjudgment is something you either understand already or you don’t—and in either case, this post will only serve to tickle your confirmation bias.
It all reminds me of that one quote:
Now, on judgment, I spoke about this briefly in On the Laws of Thought:
“...The last is nonjudgment, to not prejudge those you meet and to not pass judgment on a man’s actions without knowing what factors led to those actions. Nietzsche: ‘a single act very rarely characterizes a man…acts are mostly dictated by circumstances; they are superficial or merely reflex movements performed in response to a stimulus, long before the depths of our beings are affected or consulted in the matter.’”
…and in On Forgiveness:
“There is one thing I can promise you for certain: if all the dirt that you have ever done in your entire life was revealed for the world to see, your opinion on what should and shouldn’t be forgiven would be rendered null and void. Hence the saying ‘let he who is without sin cast the first stone,’ and hence why the harshest condemnation comes from the mob and not from the individual, because the mass of the unforgiving mob eliminates the concept of individual accountability.”
We can start by breaking this idea down from the angle of logic. Let’s say you and I are in conversation:
—
Me: Have you ever made a mistake in your life?
You: Yes, it was [doesn’t matter]
Me: How do I know you’re not going to do it again?
You: Well, because [blah blah blah canned answer]
Me: How do I know you’re not lying?
You: Like…I’m not. Trust me. I won’t do it again, I promise.
—
This, for better or worse, is the exact position you are putting someone else in when you judge them. You are not being consistent. You are applying a different standard to others’ behavior than to your own, colloquially known as being a hypocritical cocksucker.
You see this a lot on the topic of crime and punishment. A lot of it comes from ignorance, to be fair. As someone who has been through the system, I can promise you one thing: if you give me a Federal prosecutor badge, full access to your iPhone, full access to your computer, full ability to subpoena everyone you’ve ever known, and then place me in front of a grand jury — where you aren’t present to defend yourself — I will not only get you indicted, but right hand to God, I will guarantee that you spend multiple years in prison. There is a common saying in law that an overzealous prosecutor could indict a ham sandwich. Someone who knows nothing about the system may be skeptical of this, but as I said, the hypocrisy stems from ignorance, and as you learn in the courtroom, ignorance of the law is not a valid excuse. People are extremely naive as to how many times they were inches away from going to jail, and they are flat-out ignorant of what constitutes a felony under America’s laws. And so, in the spirit of On Forgiveness, I forgive people who run off at the mouth on this topic: Forgive them Lord, for they know not what they do.
This was how I put it in reference to Rikers Island:
“I’m not here to act like jail is full of perfect angels who shouldn’t be there, but I also won’t act like the normal perception from society and from the media—the one that you likely hold and that I held as well before this whole experience—is anywhere near accurate.
I can confirm that every single person I met in there is a human being. Someone’s son, someone’s father, someone’s brother, all certified Angus grade-A human beings with hopes and dreams.
I can also confirm that good people sometimes do bad things for good reasons—far better reasons than my own, like supporting families or communities—and many of these individuals ended up in a criminal lifestyle before they were old enough to know right from wrong. Culpability comes down to the amount of free will involved. When someone is dealt a god-awful hand at birth, pushed into a life of crime by virtue of their environment, their upbringing and their circumstances, it becomes much harder to label them a bad human being.
If you were born in their shoes, and they were born in yours, how different, if at all, would each life trajectory have been? And even if you disagree with this rationale, if you were to look in the mirror and take an honest inventory of all the wrong you’ve done in your life, what is your house made of? Is it stone or is it glass? Are you in a position to pass judgment on decisions another man has made? Or are your blind spots causing you to judge others with a different lens than the one you use to judge yourself?”
Implicit in this entire post is a belief in God, as demonstrated by “I cannot keep this Bible on my nightstand and judge another man at the same time." The Bible on the nightstand can be metaphorical rather than literal: you either believe or you don’t, you’ve either accepted the risk/reward of Pascal’s Wager or you haven’t…yet. And if you do believe, even if you aren’t well-read in theology, you most likely understand the principle behind all of this: it is God’s place to judge and not ours.
Old Testament: You shall not be partial in judgment; hear out low and high alike. Fear no man, for judgment is God’s.
New Testament: Judge not, that you be not judged. For with the judgment you pronounce you will be judged, and with the measure you use it will be measured to you. Why do you see the speck that is in your brother's eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye? Or how can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when there is the log in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your brother's eye.
And so, when I hear someone judging others, the following back-and-forth takes place (the end of it silently in my mind):
I suppose that is a judgmental thing to think, but I would emphasize that you are still allowed to have judgmental thoughts — anyone who says they don’t have them is lying. You can’t stop them. They are part of human nature in that we are always sizing one another up. All you can do is keep these thoughts to yourself rather than express them, and try to improve the quality of your thoughts going forward; as a friend often reminds me, “it’s okay for your first thought to be wrong. It’s not okay for your second thought to be wrong.”
Finally, note that this same concept ties in with forgiveness and with revenge: “Vengeance is mine,” saith the Lord, “I shall repay.” When man steps in to assume that role himself, he is playing God. And again, you see this type of spiritual transgression all the time in the realm of criminal justice, with people weighing in on “oh, he didn’t get enough time.” The punishment wasn’t severe enough for you, huh? Okay — so you’re not only playing God, but you’re playing judge, jury and executioner as well. How fortunate are we, oh Lord! How fortunate we are to bask in the presence of this one-man human government, this heavenly penance machine, this divine arbiter of retribution blessing us with his edict from on high. When you step back, what this person is really telling you is that they don’t believe in the rules and laws of this country. And you know what we call those kinds of people, right? Criminals. Just saying, fam.
And so, as far as regulating your own conduct, I will leave you with some wisdom from Montaigne.
“It is a rare life that remains orderly even in private. Everyone can play his part in the farce, and act an honest role on the stage. But to be disciplined within, in one’s own breast, where all is permissible and all is concealed - that is the point! The next step, therefore, is to be orderly at home, in our common actions, for which we are accountable to no man, and in which there is no study or artifice. That is why Bias, describing an ideal household, says that it is one where the master is the same alone in his house as abroad, where he is afraid of the law and of what men will say. And it was a worthy answer that Julius Drusus gave to the builders who offered for three thousand crowns so to alter his mansion that his neighbours could no longer overlook him, as they then did. ‘I will give you six thousand,’ he said, ‘if you will make it possible for everyone to see into it from every side.’”
Judge not, lest ye be judged,
GB
