Judgment and superficiality

I have recently given a reference for a colleague that led me to struggle with the imperative of saying what was true against what would be favourable. It made me ponder exactly what a judgement is and what it should do.

We should not be swayed by pithy proverbs such as "Judge not lest you be judged". If the only motive not to judge is empathy with those who are judged, then this is feeble grounds indeed for our actions. I suggest a stronger, more resilient ground for judging. Put simply it is "Judge only on the facts."

The problem with our judgements is objectivity and fairness. If, in a moment of rage, I yell at someone and say things I later regret, does this characterise me as an angry person? On any objective measure, it does not. In purely mathematical terms, if an event represents less than 0.0001% of the all events, it is insignificant and does not characterise the subject being examined. The other 99.9999% does. Therefore, if 99.99% of the time I am calm and collected, I MUST be judged, objectively, as a calm person, no matter how dramatic the anger, nor its consequence (for example, it leads to someones death). In fact, to be objective, if that dramatic anger occurs, I must, applying science, look for factors that create the anomaly.

Narrow judgements, therefore, are not bad because they may give offence. They are bad because they are arrived at stupidly, without applying good sense and science.

How many times do we glibly judge people presented in the press because of an horrific outcome? That man who drowns his children by driving into a lake is clearly a monster. We build a mental profile of someone who we find almost inconceivably evil. Yet what do we actually know?

Even we we have reports from the press, we know that the press will often selectively choose details to either position a person as hero or villain. Without having lived inside a person's skin for their life, we cannot know what they usually are. We cannot know whether the man driving his children into the lake is in a stupor or completely lucid and vindictive. It is simply unscientific and irrational to judge him as either.

Where does this lead us then? Must we never judge? Does this leave us crippled, unable to detect real danger?

I assert that, in every judgement, we must necessarily count our judgement as provisional. We must be prepared, when judging others, to be completely open, at any moment, to discovering a completely different person. We must remind ourselves, at the moment of judgment, that we may be, profoundly and scientifically, wrong.

Do not avoid judging, as it may be what stops you acting on suspicions someone is preying on our daughter. But in all judgments consider all the facts, especially those you do not yet know.

The Evolutionary Function of Feeling Like Shit

I have a bad memory at the best of times. It gets worse when I engage in many activities at once. Its as if, in order to release processing capacity to engage in complex activities, my brain chooses to jettison memory.

Inevitably, my memory disability gets me into trouble. The other evening, a teaching colleague whom I respect greatly, phoned to say that she would be absent the next day. Could I pass a message on to my wife, who handles teacher absences in my school.

I thanked her for the notice and promised to pass it on. Of course, no sooner had the phone been returned to its cradle, I had forgotten. Next morning, in a moment of great panic, I realised I had forgotten and passed the message on, only just in time for a substitute teacher to be arranged.

My emotional reaction was extraordinary. I burst into tears. Of all the people I would never want to let down, this teacher was one. And the late notice put pressure on everyone in the process. But my mind went to the "what if" of having forgotten completely. A class without a teacher, the teacher panicking when called about their absence. The whole scenario overwhelmed me.

In a contemplative moment I reflected on how shitty I felt. Not discomfort, tiredness or pain - just plain shitty. And it didn't leave quickly.

Which led me to think what was going on, biologically. Loyalty to others is vital to maintain a community of humans. We would not be able to maintain large complex societies if it were not so. We develop, over our life, the capacity and framework for loyalty - and the main driver is pain and feeling shitty. Thus, the "silver lining" on this inherited behaviour is that it keeps is together.

This is not "Pollyanna" thinking. The good feeling we get is when we are valued and we value others. It would not be possible to have this without the shitty side, not because without contrast there is no definition, but by the mechanism that uses "feeling bad" to ensure that we have an opportunity to "feel good".

I can see natural extrapolations of this thesis. Without disgust, we would be happy to live in our own shit and hence lose the opportunity of ever "smelling the roses". Without pain, we would not be warned of life-threatening consequences of certain behaviour. Without despair, we would never value any system of thinking or moral position.

To say it another way - but for the mechanism of our minds that gives us pain, despair and disgust, we would never, as a species, arrive at a point where the beauty we see in our world would be physically possible. We would only be rats.

The next time you feel shitty, down, despairing or disgusted, don't turn to God and ask to be delivered from it - take out your Beethoven and play it and realise that, without what you feel now, none of the glory of what you hear would have been possible.