Judging Blind.

Something that irks me is what you might call 'third person judgementalism.' I’ve seen it a lot in life, and I see it a lot on blogs – especially young women’s blogs. The form it usually takes is this:

A young woman posts something on her blog about how badly her boyfriend is behaving, or how he did something that really upset her. That’s fine. The poor girl is in pain and she has my sympathy. What I don’t do is judge the boyfriend, because I have no right to judge him nor any basis on which to do so.

Within hours, however, she’s inundated with comments from other young women telling her what an asshole the boyfriend is. They often go on tell her that she is ‘too good for him’ and he ‘doesn’t deserve her.’ I do understand that they’re giving her a form of support, but that support is badly directed.

For a start, they’ve only heard one side of the story. However honest the blog author has been in the telling of events, her view is still essentially biased and unlikely to give the full facts of what is likely to be a complex situation. But even if the facts are simple and clearly indicative of some wrong or inappropriate behaviour on the boyfriend’s part, other people still have no right to judge him. They can’t know what emotional pressures or cultural conditioning led him to that behaviour. They can’t get inside his head and see things the way he does. How many of us can honestly say that we’ve never done anything reprehensible because it seemed like the right thing to do at the time?

It’s inevitable that we will sometimes be moved to judge those whose actions or attitudes affect us directly. Although I believe even that to be wrong – and I’ve learned that lesson the hard way – we’re only human, and high emotion reveals human frailties better than anything else. It still needs to be said, however, that we should never be moved to judge people at a distance. That’s one human fault that is very easy to correct.