21 Why we should be slow to judge

The thing which amazes me nowadays is how judgmental people have become in public life. Whole professions have developed around casting aspersions, such as the RTI activists, the serial public fasters, the media bloodhounds, and so on. All the talk is of how others are useless, and this has bred armies of the idle self-righteous. A lot of retired persons have jumped on to the bandwagon, a panacea for their boredom and irrelevance.

There was a time not so long back, that people realized that good and bad are not distinctly distributed. Each person is a bundle of both, mixed together. We were told to examine ourselves first, before passing judgment on others.  My favourite story is that of the father with three boisterous kids on the train. When asked why he didn’t keep them in control, he replied that they were just coming back from having the mother buried, and the kids hadn’t still realized that she wasn’t coming back and that their lives had irrevocably changed… he was allowing them an afternoon of carefree play before the reality hit them, as it would…

So we need to be careful in passing judgment, even in our minds, for we do not know what is passing over others’ lives. There are many examples of this idea in the wisdom literature of the world. The most familiar is Jesus’ advice to judge not, that we be not judged. Let him cast the first stone, he said, who has not sinned. In today’s world, on the contrary, we are all too eager to make examples of stray individuals, in a form of witch hunting or scape-goating, on a whole range of scales from a small community or group, to relations between nations. The accusers are often no better than those they accuse and revile.

Popular judgment is often a form of gossip-mongering, which can make or break individuals without possibility of restitution or revision.  This is all the more reason that we should suspend judgment if we are not sure of the facts. In my own experience, for example, the way the media project developing events (or non-events, too, for that matter!) need not have any relation to reality. The media often create their own news, or their own version of matters. Film stars and celebrities, of course, are frequently at the receiving end, but because the news channels constantly need to find something interesting, even ordinary people like teachers and doctors and ward assistants become grist to their mill. So we need to take all this with a slight pinch of salt, or a healthy dose of skepticism.

Of course, this doesn’t mean we should be completely neutral between right and wrong, or that we should ignore or condone wrong-doing. But modern democracies do have a rigorous division between different roles, such as prosecutor and judge, or law-maker and law enforcer. We should not collapse these roles unthinkingly, the way the public media are prone to do.  The judge listens to the accusations, but he is not swayed by emotion; he can afford to take a broader, dispassionate view, thereby preserving a sense of proportion in meting out punishment. We do not say “off with their heads!” for every small infraction; there is always a second chance given, a fresh start possible.  To err, as they say, is human; every one of us is undoubtedly guilty of some sort of crimes, small though they may be, which could attract severe penalties if pursued to the logical end.  The separation of accuser and judge, therefore, is a crucial one in modern civilized societies, and any dilution of this will lead to over-zealous application of the law, oppression of the lay people, misuse of power by functionaries, and dysfunctional societies.

One of the sobering things about post-modern life is the realization that any person or society can fall into grievious error. The most civilized, god-fearing society in the most enlightened part of the world, may (in fact, did) come up with the most efficient killing machine that finished off common people in the millions as an act of national duty. Ask not for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee, said the poet. Smugness in our own virtuousness is the one thing that we cannot afford to adopt. It was shown ordinary, normal students could be induced to administer lethal shocks of electricity to innocent experimental subjects if they thought they were under orders from a white coat; the propensity to obey persons in authority seems to be built into us, with a corresponding readiness to suspend our own moral thinking. That’s why we should be slow to pass judgment, and why our judgments should be laced with compassion and understanding rather than with the red-eyed self-righteousness of prophets.