Judge Thy Neighbor
Judgment sounds so judgy. But judgment, standards, shame, and honor are essential to good communities that raise good people.
Hello Bar-Setters!
The following is an excerpt from my book, Setting the Bar!
When you’re seated at a restaurant and see an entire family sitting at the table staring at their phones—be honest—do you nudge your spouse and share a look of disapproval? Do you begin to discuss where and when screen time is acceptable, or how parents these days are dropping the ball? When you’re walking down a grocery aisle and see a five-year-old playing phone games as he walks behind his mother—his toddler sister strapped in the top compartment of the grocery cart, entranced by a tablet—do you shake your head in dismay? On a hunch, do you peer into the grocery cart and, yep. No surprise. Cinnamon Toast Crunch, Coke, Hot Pockets, and frozen pizzas. Based on this experience, alone, do you presume a general impulsiveness defines their lives? Do you feel a certain superiority? Reader. How could you?
This is where we remind ourselves that it is not right to judge. First, take the log out of your own eye and all that jazz. But wise as these aphorisms are for our own personal development, they can’t be applied at the group level. Judging other people is the very backbone of humanity’s success. Gossip helped groups determine who was loyal, capable, and trustworthy. It helped society determine which behaviors were fruitful and discouraged those that were destructive to the long-term success of the community. In fact, the fear of social judgment is what lets us know that we are not supposed to publicly discuss condescending internal monologues like those mentioned in the previous paragraph. Fear of being labeled smug helps discourage pettiness and condescension.
We’d all do well to stay humble and focus our judgments on actions rather than people. But group success is predicated on a capacity to discern between better and worse paths and to create norms that influence productive behavior. When there aren’t enough people judging parents for letting their kids stare at phones at the dinner table, then behaviors like this become common. And this makes it far harder on all those parents who want to set healthy boundaries.
In The Happiness Hypothesis, Jonathan Haidt, argues that the deterioration of a shared moral sense has removed much of the judgment from daily life, but, rather than make us happier, the result has been alienation and anxiety—what Durkheim (the sociologist who called humans homo-duplex) called anomie. Anomic societies lack a sense of norms, standards, or shared values. Their institutions lack gravitas. People get to behave however they want to, but they feel disconnected and struggle to find purpose. Durkheim found that as anomie increases, so do suicides and antisocial behaviors.
It sounds nice to live in a judgment free world, but this is devastating to the human spirit. As Haidt explains:
“One of the best predictors of the health of an American neighborhood is the degree to which adults respond to the misdeeds of other people’s children, rather than look the other way. When community standards are enforced, there is constraint and cooperation. When everyone minds his or her own business, there is freedom and anomie.”
The failed parenting paradigm is defined by parents who put no virtue above their child’s immediate wants and who frequently question school authority in an effort to make their children’s lives easier. Schools have exacerbated this trend by prioritizing parental appeasement over any sense of standards. But, despite their failings, schools are the institution best positioned to reverse anomie-producing trends. As our cultural nucleus, schools have the opportunity to clarify standards and shape what we deem acceptable. Just as the food giants changed the nation’s eating habits by targeting schools, we need schools to intentionally craft more fruitful societal habits.
For the sake of this excerpt, I am omitting a section titled Where is Your Honor which preceded the next section…
The Baby and the Bathwater
“If you want to make a society work, then you don’t keep underscoring the places where you’re different—you underscore your shared humanity.” - Sebastian Junger
Following World War II, consumerism grew and shared notions of virtue gave way to a more morally relativistic ethos. Community-driven, producer-virtues were gradually replaced by an emphasis on seeking individual preferences and personal happiness.
At the same time, the counterculture movement gained steam and Americans began a long overdue interrogation of its misogynist and racist norms. The need was undeniable. But, as so often happens, the pendulum swung to a new extreme. Increasing diversity and tolerance became indisputable trump cards, on the same level as safety. Suddenly, presuming to teach character education reeked of intolerance. Schools began to intentionally avoid promoting values, instead encouraging students to discover their own sense of right and wrong.
This “values clarification” movement, which still reigns today, was another case of utopian delusions gone awry. As Haidt explains:
“... it cut children off from the soil of tradition, history, and religion that nourished older conceptions of virtue…. Asking children to grow virtues… looking only within themselves for guidance, is like asking them each to invent their own language. Even if they could do it, the resulting isolation would be crippling.”
Haidt argues that there are two distinctly different types of diversity—a good diversity and a socially destructive form—and that the failure to make distinctions between the two has had dire results. Good diversity (demographic diversity) is best thought of as justice or equality. This means working to include and respect previously excluded groups. By contrast, bad diversity (moral diversity) emphasizes differences between groups and aims to delegitimize value norms so that every other lifestyle is more viable. It effectively neuters the power of a common moral realm, which is the glue that binds people into a community. Lacking any unifying values, society devolves into tribalism and anomie.
We are right in wanting to resist oppression and keep our society open to new ideas, but that can’t come at the expense of the social cohesion we all depend upon. For a society to work, we have to be bonded by more than space and legal codes. There has to be a shared moral sense that transcends race or any other identity categories. The genius of Frederick Douglass, Martin Luther King Jr., and Nelson Mandela was that they embraced a common legacy and pointed to a common future. King studied the same classical rhetoricians that the founders did and found some of his greatest inspiration in the American Transcendentalist, Henry David Thoreau. Despite their flaws, King saw genius in our founders’ work and made the fight for equal rights a movement about fulfilling the founding promise, rather than an inquisition of past hypocrisies.
Likewise, in his 1894 speech at the dedication of the Manassas Industrial School, Frederick Douglass encouraged African Americans to embrace education by highlighting its power to promote equality and greater freedom. He then acknowledged the great wrongs done to African Americans but called on his audience to transcend their preferences for “race pride,”... “race men, and the like.” As he explained:
“... at the risk of being deficient in the quality of love and loyalty to race and color, I confess that in my advocacy of the colored man’s cause, whether in the name of education or freedom, I have had more to say of manhood and of what is comprehended in manhood and in womanhood, than of the mere accident of race and color; and, if this is disloyalty to race and color, I am guilty. I insist upon it that the lesson which colored people, not less than white people, ought now to learn, is, that there is no moral or intellectual quality in the color of a man’s cuticle; that color, in itself, is neither good nor bad; that to be black or white is neither a proper source of pride or of shame.
Our culture has no future if we can’t restore this shared common-sense and work to redefine values that pull us together. Pride and shame are essential social mechanisms that must be at the center of our efforts, but to elevate and bond us, these efforts have to focus on shared expectations of conduct irrespective of identity groups.
Thank you for reading and sharing!
If you haven’t yet read Setting the Bar, I hope you’ll pick up a copy or listen to me read it to you on the Audible. If you have read it and are willing to write a review, I greatly appreciate that!
Carry the fire!
Shane