Passing Judgment

Even the worst murderers in history spent a very small percentage of their lives actively engaged in murder. People are complicated. Everybody acknowledges this; it's not really a controversial proposition. People who do a lot of bad things probably do a lot of good things. People who have bad qualities also have good qualities. I know: your minds = blown, right? Duh. Of course. Nobody with half a brain would disagree. And yet socially and legally, modern society is still quick to condemn a person outright as being unworthy: unworthy of freedom, unworthy of attention, unworthy of respect, unworthy of our time, unworthy of our company, unworthy of employment, unworthy of our trust.

How can we reconcile the undeniable fact that humans are complicated with this fairly practical need to decide who is worthy and who isn't?

Maybe it's my Christian upbringing, but I'm extremely loathe to write people off as worthless, even people who say and do really terrible things. And I feel like it's not just me who clings to this moral and spiritual commitment to the intrinsic worth of every being. To borrow a phrase from Quakers, the idea that there is "that of God in everyone" is not just some radical view held by religious extremists, but actually a fairly widely endorsed proposition. And yet condemnation abounds! In all arenas of society, we find rampant trigger-happy condemnation.

Part of our penchant for aggressive condemnation stems from a desire to stand up for what is right. The condemners think they are doing something noble by writing people off as being totally depraved, because objects of scorn have become for the condemners symbols of evil. Donald Sterling is a symbol of privilege and racism. George W. Bush is a symbol of violence and imperialism and right-wing ideology. A sex criminal is an embodiment of sexual violence and perhaps patriarchy. Justin Bieber is an embodiment of shallow corporate pop music.

Whatever it is, trying to stand up for the intrinsic value of other human beings becomes synonymous with defending some sort of reviled force in society. Nuance becomes the enemy of righteousness. And we get things like having 2 million people incarcerated in the United States. Seeing the good in people becomes a sign that you are not properly committed to the cause.

This is a tendency for all groups, and I see very little reason to think it respects political or ideological boundaries of any kind. Plenty of scholars and artists have recognized this "othering" process, for instance, in war propaganda. Paul Sabatier, discussing his idea of advocacy coalitions in public policy, calls this the "devil shift." Opponents become enemies become monsters. Same as it ever was.

It would be facile to condemn our condemning without acknowledging that condemnation serves some very practical purposes. Who in society is worthy of resources? Like my time, and my attention? Like freedom? Like being my employee, or being my friend? Like being invited to a party I'm throwing? Like my money, in exchange for their art, or ideas?

The sad truth is that we HAVE to pass judgment on others because our resources are scarce, and we need some mechanism for rationing them. People who do destructive things, or hold destructive views, are not demons, but neither are they innocent or necessarily safe to be around!

I honestly don't know how to reconcile the need to pass judgment on people (both as a practical matter of rationing resources, and as a method of advocating a righteous worldview) with the truth that people are complicated beings with intrinsic worth! I don't think society has figured this out either. I don't even think society bothers facing the cognitive dissonance. We just pretend there's nothing contradictory about, for instance, saying that lengthy incarceration is a horrible over-used evil, and yet being angry when rapists receive light prison sentences.