Judgment versus Being Judgmental

The motivation for this piece occurred to me from a somewhat remote sphere of our social life that I was reminded of when I heard a TED talk by Radhanath Swami, a senior monk of the International Society of Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON).  

As a nineteen year old wandering sadhu the Swami was once aggressively surrounded by a group of leprosy affected people, demanding that he give them "bhakshish".  

When they finally realised that the sadhu was penniless and let him go, he saw an elderly woman. She was just as badly affected by the disease as all the rest who had accosted him.  

The sadhu's interaction with her, which he describes in his talk as well as in his book The Journey Home, will melt the heart of anyone.  In those few minutes of his interaction he came to looks upon her as a mother because of the stream of kindness that she washed him with.   

It was a fine example of exercising sound judgement.  That was possible because the young sadhu had an open mind that was not being judgmental.  These are two important ideas that are often thought to be so different, but in reality are so related, that crossed my mind as I read about this incident.

Reading about it also brought to my mind yet another incident from Swami Rama's book, Living with the Himalayan Masters.  The young Swami Rama once approached a woman who made a living on the banks of the Holy Ganges by selling her body.  She mistook the Swami for a prospective client since many young sadhus consorted with her.

The Swami being an enlightened soul saw divinity in this woman and initiated her into mantra deeksha.  The poor woman took to it in all earnestness. Within fifty days she shed her mortal coils and attained salvation.  She had achieved in a relative jiffy what many spiritual aspirants take several lifetimes to attain, if ever.

Clearly, it must have been the result of her many good deeds of several births in the past.  That makes the incident even more striking and illustrative:  It took the vision of the Swami to see such virtue and spiritual ripeness in a woman who would have been despised by most of society.

So what is this business about judgement and being judgemental? 

The Oxford English Mini Dictionary defines judgement simply as the ability to make sound decisions. The idea of exercising judgement has also come to connote choices that are consistent with one's call of duty, social standing and so on.  

For example, a public official would be said to have exercised poor judgement when he accepts illegal gratification for doing an out of turn favour.  Similarly, an immoral act would be seen as an act of bad judgement even if it be an action within one's personal space. 

Choice pervades every aspect of our life, from the trivial to the sublime, to use a cliche.  As long as we have a choice to make there is need for judgement. 

Now take the case of being judgemental.  The Oxford English Mini Dictionary describes being judgmental as being excessively critical of others.  As with judgement, the idea of being judgemental also connotes that the criticism is unwarrantedly harsh, or worse misplaced.

So a forming negative opinion about a person's professional competence based on his attire is probably being judgemental.  Or, when we making a sweeping inference about the probity of an individual because of a careless inaccuracy that he articulated in a public statement would be a case of being judgemental.

Now comes the trickiest part.  Exercising judgement, which we argued is so central to the conduct of modern life, can often run into the zone of being judgemental.  Let me explain how.

One of the key areas where we are required to exercise our judgement is in terms of who we engage with in our personal and professional lives.  

For example, we are expected to choose people who have shared values and interests as our friends.  Similarly, when we choose a job we are increasingly being counselled to ensure that we share an organisational ethos and a sense of ethics with the superiors we will work for and others that we will work with.

In forming these judgements the line that divides sound judgement from being judgemental becomes extremely fine.  Thus, we may draw unwarranted references about an individual's character based on a misjudged view of some personality trait.  

For example, we may easily mistake someone’s frugality which is a virtue for parsimony or even greed.  Similarly, we do often run the risk of mistaking a person's economy in usage of words for superciliousness.

In both the examples above we may imagine that we are exercising sound judgement when we are actually being judgemental, to start with, and are applying poor judgement.

As I reflected on these two incidents over the past week, I reminded myself how often I must have been judgmental people about and as a result must have exercised poor judgement.

That risk is even more pronounced in matters of religious and spiritual pursuits.  Our family upbringing and social circumstances influence our notions of right and wrong.  They lock us up in a little chamber of virtue that we seem to create for ourselves. 

We tend to look upon anything less "virtuous" as depraved.  We may look upon anything that claims to be more virtuous as impractical or hypocritical.

What is required perhaps is for us to say is that every individual may after all be the seat of virtues that we simply fail to see.  All that we need to do is to expand the walls and pillars of that chamber of virtues that we have built to ensconce ourselves, so that we allow more people to occupy it - well expand just enough so that we will not include deeds that run afoul of the law or that are indecent to other fellow humans.

I do not write this as a homily.  On the contrary, as someone who has lived a life of countless vices and is still counting them, my constant prayer to the Lord is to help me to be careful not to be judgemental about people because of the boundary walls of my chamber. 

In short, I pray to Him to help me exercise sound judgement that I may not be judgemental after all.  But to be able to do that I also pray to Him to give me the requisite compassion.  For the fountainhead of good judgement is compassion.  It helps us not to be judgemental to begin with.

Hare Krishna....Jai Gopijanavallabha...