The metro system of a major North American city boasted recently of “a safe and judgment-free space” for the “2LGBTQQIA+ community.”
What is the most striking and damaging ingredient of this confection? It is neither the alphabet soup nor the reflexive virtue signaling on gender, both of which are common enough. Indeed, they are routine elements in half the press releases issued on any given day.
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What is profoundly important, though hardly new, is the implication that judgment is a bad thing. It is treated as though all good people agree on the proposition that one wraps oneself in approbation by avoiding judgment and incurs censure if one volunteers comment on the relative merits of this and that.
“Judgment” has not merely replaced “prejudice” as the epitome of bigotry but repudiates and reverses its central idea, rather as equity has replaced and repudiated the virtues of equality. The evil of prejudice is that it draws conclusions without exercising judgment; what was previously demanded is now not merely dispensed with but intolerable.
A left-wing relative once rebuked me after I expressed an opinion. “That’s a judgment,” she snapped, beginning and ending what she thought a decisive debating point with those three blunt words. She did not think it necessary to explain. I had judged something, so nothing more was needed to put me in the wrong. Being “judgmental” is now a sin — perhaps I should say “offense,” for “sin” is an antiquated word — wherever people behave badly or talk nonsense.
Judgment and its siblings, discrimination and reason, used to be understood as the highest and worthiest qualities. They were recognized as necessary for the proper functioning of coherent and civilized people.
Nearly two millennia ago, Marcus Aurelius advised, “Reverence your faculty of judgment. On this it entirely rests that your governing self no longer has a judgment disobedient to Nature and to the estate of a reasonable being.”
Judgment, the exercise of reason, is the bedrock of America’s founding. Our rights and mode of government are based on it. The Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights depend upon it. They are logical deductions from noble principles.
This is why the woke world the Left is building around us is not merely unattractive but un-American. I know, I know, “un-American” is a phrase that scares the horses because it was used viciously early in the Cold War. But because America was founded on reasoning from noble ideas, there are other ideas incompatible with it.
One of them is the idea that judgment is reprehensible. It is, of course, rejected by the Left only when it reaches a disagreeable conclusion, such as when the Florida government decided after due consideration that children should not be subjected to ideological propaganda before they reach fourth grade.
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In truth, the Left passes judgment all the time, finding reasonable conservatives guilty and dishing out punishment.
The next time someone accuses you of being judgmental, shrug and say, “Sure, I’m doing what thinking people do.”