Critique of Non-Judgment
“We manage to tremble; but to know how to orient our tremors is an art: all rebellions proceed from it.” (E.M. Cioran)
1.
We bear an ambivalent relation to judgment. To judge is seen as an audacious act, which necessarily concerns and implicates others. Who among us is arrogant enough to assume the station of the judge, presiding, scrutinizing, pronouncing from the self-given seat of authority? At best, it’s unseemly; at worst, an act of supreme aggression. Yet, we understand, at the same time, that judgment is a sine qua non of the life of mind and community, a premise of reason, moral courage, and aspiration. Without judgment, we lack values; without values, we lack integrity and a defensible ethical orientation. These conflicting intuitions about judgment, existing side-by-side, produce contradiction, hypocrisy, and a pervasive unease. We rely on intellectual, ethical, and aesthetic judgments to live well; but, unable to justify judgment itself, we profess an ideal of non-judgment.
2.
The ideal of non-judgment has taken root in American consciousness over the last two decades, becoming a “common sense,” a dogma, a hollow ethos in itself. It courses through the culture, sometimes as a maxim (“I don’t judge”), but more often in fretful qualifications, setting up boundaries to contain the implications of the judgment being made (“Well, for me…,” “That’s just my opinion,” “To each their own”). Judgment, disavowed, continues, of course, but the official line holds: do not judge and be not judged.
3.
Such an exaggerated aversion to judgment speaks to a deep cultural anxiety about selfhood. This anxiety is the culmination of the development of an historical consciousness: from the Romantic celebration of the authentic self, through the modern interest in self-creation, to the late-modern turn toward performance, today we are more conscious than ever that the self a project fraught with tensions and complications and dangers. The vitality of the modernist spirit has given way to a widespread suspicion of the will, of the imperial “I” that asserts itself against others, as against nature; an “I” that deigns to know, capturing others in its gaze. For much of the liberal left today, a pedantic relativism tempers the will, insisting on the limitations of the “I,” chastening and disrupting its outward reach, deflating the claims that it makes on the world.
4.
Non-judgment functions as a defense mechanism against the contemporary subject’s anxiety about the limitations of the self. Now, the exhilarating freedoms of self-creation have given way to the dread of groundlessness. How can one bear knowing that the self is a contingent and unstable amalgamation of identifications, whether given or chosen? Facing the impossibility of eliminating the gap between the “I” and the “self,” a double consciousness takes shape. On the one hand, a consuming, almost hysterical preoccupation with specific identities, which provide a precarious sense of security; on the other hand, an “ironic” distance from them, a performative self-awareness that anticipates and defends against the destabilizing judgments of others.
5.
The ethics of non-judgment is an expression of the co-existence of the contradictory tendencies toward intense identification and a generalized dis-identification. It is a solution that enables each person to take pleasure in identity without shaking the sense that all values and beliefs are compromised by their subjective origin. The subjective thus becomes a site of freedom: within the sphere of the self, the “I” claims absolute autonomy, the right to self-creation and self-determination, yet without the temerity to make claims that extend beyond its own limited plot. From this perspective, to judge others is to go beyond the remit proper to a subject cognizant, and fearful, of its own arbitrary nature. To apply intellectual, ethical, and aesthetic criteria to others is to exceed the jurisdiction of the individual conscience. Solipsism and myopia are transformed into virtues.
6.
Non-judgment is a particular route taken in the very uneven history of our flight from responsibility, emerging from various traditions in which abstinence from judgment is practiced as a means of achieving inner peace and a kind of freedom, including the Pyrrhonist conception of ataraxia, the Epicurean and Stoic doctrines, and the Buddhist goal of non-reactivity. The Judeo-Christian tradition has offered an alternative route via monotheism, in which one achieves a kind of freedom by arrogating the ultimate role of judge to God, deemed creator and final arbiter of a divine law. Both approaches represent attempts to check human hubris; and, crucially, they hold out the possibility of relief from the serious burden of judging for ourselves and, more importantly, the pain of uncertainty about our judgments.
7.
Today, the ethics of non-judgment has come to function as a social contract. It accords each person the right to be free from the judgment of others and the corresponding duty to refrain from judging in turn, thereby guaranteeing each person’s “moral autonomy.” Unencumbered by the judgment of others, individuals are free to pursue their own interests and pleasures, so long as they do not infringe on the rights of others to enjoy. This conception of individual autonomy has hegemonized and flattened our intellectual, moral, and aesthetic imagination. At root, it is the spirit of the market that coerces judgment into indifference, rendering personal beliefs, actions, and tastes as formally equivalent preferences, occluding their independent value. Non-judgment thereby provides an ethic for a period of disorientation.
8.
At their best, non-judgment and judgment comprise two moments of a single iterative process, by which we clarify our thinking. In the first moment, we try to see something – object, action, structure, event, or complex – as it really is by shedding our biases and prejudices, bracketing the well-worn grooves of ordinary thought. But this non-judgment is purposive, driven by the aim of refining our judgments, beliefs, etc. We suspend our judgment in order to be more receptive to the world, so that we may judge better in the future. We step outside the flow of automaticity in order to decide how best to reconfigure and re-enter it. By contrast, it is irresponsible to strive to remain suspended in a state of non-judgment, to accept whatever is given. It is unethical.
9.
Taking other seriously requires this alternation of non-judgment and judgment. Through engaging with others, we hope to learn from them, supplementing our inescapably partial knowledge of the world and amending our misunderstandings. But it is just because human knowledge is partial and fallible that we must not defer to the judgments of others, thereby abnegating the responsibility to judge for ourselves. Of course, there is ethical value in listening to others; but the real difficulty lies in deciding how to make sense of and evaluate what one has heard. Was the account true? Was the explanation plausible? Were the actors reasonable? Were their actions just? We ought not forsake these questions for new masters.
10.
The possibility of knowledge – corresponding to an objective reality, however difficult to discern – is the basic premise of any act of judgment. A judgment is correct insofar as it accords with the true nature of the things concerned. An atom, a person, a painting: all are real things that exist in the world, with their own distinct powers, caught up in various kinds of relations with other things. Intellectual, ethical, and aesthetic judgments are ultimately concerned with such relations: the relations of which things are comprised, the powers things have by virtue of these relations, and the relations they bear to other things.
11.
The pursuit of justice requires mature and responsible judgment regarding the true nature of things. Yet, lacking a unified worldview, much of the left have adopted the meager ethics of non-judgment and turned it inside out, transforming universal indifference into universal affirmation. The celebration of an ever-widening field of identity-based diversity – that is, the increasingly indiscriminate affirmation of all particular expressions of difference – is the poor but pliable substitute for a substantive set of commitments, beliefs, and judgments that make real claims on various aspects of the world. This “affirmative non-judgment” unleashes and concentrates judgment solely against negation itself. Various forms of social negation, new and old, and of diverse origin – racism, sexism, classism, elitism, ableism, and myriad phobias – are concatenated and reduced into a single homogeneous evil, stirringly dubbed “hatred.” This suggests that the horizon of non-judgment is “love,” conceived as affirmation.
12.
Affirmative non-judgment, at root, is mere nihilism couched in a middling niceness: enthusiastic agnosticism as style and armor. It is the position of an “I,” or a “we,” wary of itself, caught in an unstable oscillation between passionate attachment and the void; between the desperate need for affirmation and the terror of exposure; between the desire to know and a haunting uncertainty. Benign in appearance, non-judgment signals the eclipse of conviction and responsibility amidst the tumult of social transformation. Casting ourselves in a future-gaze, and desiring to be on “the right side of history,” we hurriedly swallow our intellectual, moral, and aesthetic reservations about the latest orthodoxies that are packaged in the style of progress. In order to “catch up,” we suspend our judgment indefinitely, seeking not dialogue, not true education, but instruction in the new.
13.
The fallibility of judgment is not the rock on which seriousness founders. Rather, it is a condition of seriousness, a reality to which seriousness responds. It mandates a measure of humility and openness – but it does not resign us to agnosticism, enthusiastic or otherwise. Instead, the place of judgment is elevated, the responsibility to judge made _more_serious. For if we do not decide, then others decide for us; and if we do not, in good faith and when reason demands, interrogate the new as well as the old, then errors of judgment begin to amass and pass for culture.
14.
The ethics of non-judgment is an obstacle to progress. To live responsibly in the world and better discern reality, we must make, act on, contemplate, revise, and, ultimately, be accountable to and for our own judgments.
15.
Living well requires judging well.