315. "Judgment" and "Prejudgment"

"Why is it so hard to pass judgment these days?  Use a name that's not neutral or complimentary and you get a rebuke."  That's a friend, retired from the Ohio University philosophy department, speaking a few weeks ago.

Then in a recent post (311) I was trying to draw a line between kinds of people.   When it got hopelessly tangled a younger friend broke in: "That'll teach you not to draw lines.  Why make judgments about people?  Why categorize them?"

That word "judgment."  The first friend takes it in the broad sense where synonyms jump out at you from any thesaurus: appraise, assess, evaluate, grade, rank, critique, etc.  Look at them and you see right away why he might be disturbed.  They state what we all do to make a success of our lives, materially and morally.  Followers of Socrates, if they do this carefully and well, have a chance at The Good Life.

Those words in the thesaurus may also suggest how the first friend becomes, at times, irritated.  While he's doing what the word means in his sense he hears "Judge not lest ye be judged."  From one of those people who conveniently take Jesus's rebuke of hypocritical judgment — you know, casting the mote out of your neighbor's eye without noticing the beam in your own (Matthew (7: 1-5)) — as a rebuke to judgments they don't like.  It's like "innocent until proven guilty," plucked from the legal code and slammed into a conversation.  Irritating as hell.

Then, before the poor geezer can even begin to point out that Jesus also rebuked failure to judge (Luke, 12:57), somebody calls him "judgmental."  He's a personality type whose bad action, as any student of psychology knows, has become a bad habit.  He's in a class with those church ladies who peer from behind window curtains and cut you down at church socials.

"Pay closer attention," he says. "Your preachers and your teachers are not saying what you think they are saying."  And then he gets a rebuke from somebody paying extremely close attention, one equipped with newer techniques, postmodern techniques.  They show him bias in what  he thought were his own most objective statements.  He's absolutely astonished.  "I mean, these guys can pick up attitudes in outer goddam space."

This explains the old man's irritation, but not much beyond that, I think.  The world has never been short of students carrying teachers' words beyond their meaning.   Nor of congregations doing the same, for a longer time, with the words of preachers and prophets.  Nor of people sensitive to minor slights, taking, like Robert Frost's conjectured bird, "everything said as personal to himself."  My friend ought to be used to it.  He's been a teacher.

More importantly, those responses that irritate him don't represent what my younger friend intends.  When she rebukes she means to rebuke intolerance, bias, callousness, inhumanity, insensitive stereotyping, hostile attitudes.  Heard in the judgment she hears.  And judgment to her is "judgment" in a special sense, where the only synonym is "prejudice," or prejudgment, forming "an adverse opinion before or without sufficient knowledge."

This friend is not so naive as to deny the need for appraisal and assessment ("judgment" in the broad sense) to those facing life's options, or the need to judge individuals.  It's judgment of groups of people that she wants to rebuke.

So, do we just have a simple misunderstanding, cleared up when each understands what the other means by "judgment"?  No, because she has put his judgment of groups of people under "prejudgment" and he wants it under the "judgment" necessary to those facing life's options.

Profiling Muslims at airport security is the case he is most likely to offer.   He is in favor of it because he has studied the religion, deduced from its teachings the behavior encouraged or allowed by it, compared the bomb-planting percentage of its followers with that of followers of other religions, figured the cost-risk against other options, and decided to support profiling.  Anybody who rebukes him for prejudice will get a counter-rebuke.  "Judice, man, judice.  Not pre-judice.  Pay attention."

As you might guess from my preceding posts I join my colleague in putting judgment of groups of people under "judgments necessary to those facing life's options."  The parents I knew in Norwood needed to warn their children about "bad company" at the Roller Rink — as a parent today might warn against heroin-tolerant partiers or, for that matter, racism-tolerant fraternities, like the one whose pledges sing N-word songs on their bus rides (Washington Post, 3-10-15).  In the novel that started this string of posts, Harper Lee's Go Set a Watchman (see posts 306, 311), one glimpse of a white-supremacist magazine is enough for Jean Louise to judge the group of people her father is associating with.  If she has children with inclinations to attend the meetings her father goes to I think she will warn them as the parents of Norwood warned their children about the Norwood Roller Rink (Post 311).

Though she is not likely to be accused of prejudice (the opposite, in fact) she is, strictly speaking, guilty of it.  Hasty judgment.  She glimpses the magazine and judges her father.  Her shudder at the sight of her father associating with the "bigots" in the meeting hall is the same as the shudder the Norwood parent is trying to avoid when she warns her son against associating with the "trash" at the Roller Rink. (That's "strictly speaking," I know, but the unsettling differences between that and "speaking" are too much to get started on here.)

My old friend in the philosophy department has spent too much time in seminars not to hear questions coming thick and fast.  Are the "bigot" shudders and the "trash" shudders equivalent?  Morally equivalent?  Are the two words equally signs of hasty generalization?  Equally signs of prejudice?  Suppose the trash happens to be a minority?  And "prejudice," my heavens, define it as "an adverse opinion before or without sufficient knowledge," ask when knowledge is sufficient or when a generalization becomes hasty, and you'll never settle on an answer.  Which allows me my own guess: that ninety-nine percent of the judgments made in the world today could be classified as "hasty." 

As for rebukes to such judgments, I can't help seeing them in the light of an old Scottish saying: "A maiden's bairns are ae well-raised."  Visions of the perfect way she would raise children.  Her criticisms and rebukes represent a pre-motherhood judgment.  I see my old friend clearly now, as he confronts the postmodern academics plaguing him ("experience-ignoring liberals," "over-sensitive humanitarians").  "Yer a' maidens, ye are.  Get some bairns.  Ye'll find out."