People love to judge. Everyone has an opinion. And these days we are swimming in it; opinions, judgements, and even more perilously; opinions and judgements masquerading as facts. How can we tell the difference? Sometimes we have to fall back onto our intuition, that sixth sense that tells us that in some way we are being manipulated. It’s not easy, but the mind is clever; deep down it knows something’s up, if only we could take a moment to listen. When you see, or hear, or read something and the first reaction is some kind of strong - usually unwanted, emotion - it’s a good sign that the other party is pulling a trick, trying to make me feel a certain way. On the other hand I find that useful information doesn’t normally provoke a judgement, or outrage, or anxiety. An interesting fact or insight tends to provoke a different kind of reaction, almost one of discovery, where possibilities are opened. Judgements tend to do the opposite. They stifle our curiosity, by telling us what we already know, or more accurately, what we think we know.
Judgements are not like intuitions. They are not innate, part of our legacy of evolution which has given us all manner of subconscious skills. Children don’t judge, they are taught values and norms, and by adulthood if we are not careful we have learned so many rules and 'norms' - which are really cultural rules - that we become mentally stiff. The wisest people tend to be those who learn how to withhold judgement until the facts are known, and even then realise that the judgement is no longer valid, because facts have a way of dissolving the certainty of our opinions in the messy flux of reality. The wisest thinkers are those who admit that they ‘don’t know’, that the more we expand the circumference of our knowledge, we are expanding the boundary of the unknown. “All I know for certain is that I know nothing” as Socrates supposedly said, or as the Zen masters would instruct: “Only don’t know!”
It takes a lot of knowledge and experience to realise that what I think I know about the world is really just a best guess, a working hypothesis, and not a rule. They are mental concepts that I learned usually when I was too young to know better, but which have stuck. Psychologists say that most of our mental models are in place by the age of seventeen, and after that it takes conscious effort to keep our minds agile and open. This is one reason why as adults we struggle with change and uncertainty; we need the world to be a certain way and, for the sake of convenience, we seek out only that information and experience that conforms to those mental constructs we have already formed. Contradictory information is shunned, or rejected, sometimes passionately. We become fierce guardians of values, opinions and judgements that are not even ours.
The problem with judgements is they get inside our heads. We internalise the opinions and values of our culture, our society, even our economic system. Nowhere is this truer than when we talk about worth and value. ‘Am I a valuable person?’ we ask ourselves. Am I being productive? Am I making the most of my time? Am I worthy, have I earned it, do I deserve it? Or our self-judgements have a more moral tone: am I good, or bad? We may feel guilty without any concrete sense of why, or feel that in some unspecified way, we are failing at life.
All of which, we can see, is the legacy of our culture. A culture which only a few generations ago was deeply religious - where a judgemental God watched your every move - and whose message still lingers on in the back of our minds. We are mistaken if we think we have escaped this angry god: ‘He’ still exerts ‘His’ baleful influence on so many of our lives. It is a God that loves violence and hates sex. If you don’t believe me, look at the TV, at our films and box-sets, where blood and guts are all okay, completely justified in their own right, but where sexuality, or any other manner of pleasure is confined to the shadows, always with some ‘price to pay’. No free lunch when it comes to feeling good, it seems. Laying on the sofa, doing nothing useful, I cannot escape the sensation that someone is watching me, perhaps an angry God, taking time out from making black holes to glower at me. Judgemental and incredibly micro-managing.
Perhaps all this nonsense about worth is because ours is a culture embedded in an economic system based upon the creation of value. To use an example from classic economics, wheat is grown by the farmer, who sells it to the miller, who sells the flour to the baker, who crafts a loaf of bread, and at each step this mystical quality of ‘value’ is added to the final product. It is not really important what is being made. The process of creating value is similar in post-industrial societies. Be it iron or information (or even people) being ‘refined’ in some way; in each step value is added to some raw material, and that is eventually what is bought or sold, or which sells itself if it is a person. And so we have the thing, and then the value we attach to it, which really has nothing to do with the thing. We have a mystical loaf. The mind is able to impart this magic via the use of language. But then we start using this language against ourselves. Whether we are aware of it or not, we are assessing ourselves continually on our worth to this system or to others. We ask ourselves, what is my value in this game?
But the interesting thing is that value in and of itself has no reality in the world. It is an agreement, along the lines of ‘we agree that this has the quality of that’. In this way it is entirely symbolic. We have attached increasing value to the loaf of bread, but the loaf of bread is just what it is. Beyond that it doesn’t care what we think of it. If it is an expensive sourdough the price of it may, upon eating it, impart some sense of satisfaction in addition to the taste, though this is really only because we are probably paying more attention to it, much in the same way we appreciate the food more at an expensive restaurant because we are anticipating the whopping bill at the end. Knowing what went into a product can certainly make us appreciate it more, though not always, as anyone who has eaten a sausage can attest to.
We can say the same about all values and judgements. They are symbols (word symbols, or even ‘emotional symbols’) that we attach to things, people and experience. But they in no way explain the thing. They simply describe our reaction to it. What makes a piece of music ‘good’? What makes a person ‘bad’? Taken to its conclusion, this leads to the realisation that there is no such thing as morality, that good and bad are just opinions like anything else, and of course this invariably leads to the ‘but what about...’ argument, say about ‘bad people’; sadists and narcissists and so forth. Are you telling me such people aren't bad!? But even here we are not explaining anything - a certain person or people may be dangerous for our survival or well-being in which case obviously action needs to be taken - but what exactly is the ‘badness’? Is it like a mysterious fluid? Perhaps it is a mis-wiring of the brain. But even if this were the case we are talking about an anatomical anomaly, and I can ask again, ‘where is the badness’? If we examine it we see that when we use the word 'bad' it is little more than a mental short-cut, allowing me to make a quick description, but not actually saying or explaining anything. The same is true of any judgement.
For a more pleasant example you could ask me to explain why ice cream is nice. I will probably start off by using other ‘value words’ like delicious, or rich or silky, because much in the same way that a dictionary can only describe words using other words, we can only really describe emotive values using other values. You press me to explain this lovely ice cream without using value statements. I am wise to your game now so I will give you a scientific explanation; I explain that this chemical excites my taste buds and that my brain interprets this as nutritious and good for my survival, rewarding me with feel-good chemicals. Yet, although I have managed to avoid emotive language, I have now failed to explain why the ice cream is nice, in much the same way it is near impossible to describe why I love a piece of music by talking about the notes, rhythm and so on. It just is!
Of course, we can ask what’s the harm in a nice colourful, evocative judgement? When it comes to positive experiences this isn’t really a problem. If I stand by the ocean and start attaching words and meanings to it, I may be taking myself out of the experience by thinking about it rather than experiencing it. But then this is what the mind likes to do. I can always gently steer it back to being in the moment. If we’re saying positive things about ourselves and others, then values can be a kind of metaphysical oil, both binding and lubricating society. However I think values become an issue when they start to play a hidden or corrosive role in our lives, steering us down dark paths, making us angry and bitter. We can get carried away with judgements and opinions - which let us not forget are not ours, but impressed on us by society and culture, or even political actors. Our tendency to judge can, and often is, used to divide and conquer. It is the fuel that drives the politics of ‘them and us’.
Let’s go back to worth. So many of us suffer from low self-worth, or feel like failures, or feel guilty when we are enjoying ourselves, or anxious when our life seems stuck in a rut, or even when things are going well, feeling deep down that we don’t deserve it, or that it won't last. This is bad enough, but then often we will act on these judgements - we punish ourselves, or sabotage situations or relationships. But all of this is based on a delusion: the delusion that ‘worth’ is some real quality that we can somehow have. To see why this is not so we need only ask ourselves how we could ever refute someone who says they feel ‘worthless’. What measure of worth are we using? Usefulness? But ‘usefulness’ is always relative. A spoon is useful for stirring coffee, but rubbish for combing hair. Financial worth? Here we are just replacing one symbol with another; money is still just value-token, a symbol representing worth, but not of any value in itself.
‘It’s all very well…’ you might object ‘...to say that good and bad, or beautiful or ugly, or valuable or worthless and so on are all delusions, but if enough people agree on something, does that not make it real?’ Like money for example, which is real enough for most of us, especially when we don’t have enough of it. Of course, there’s no denying the ‘reality’ of money, but it is important to bear in mind that money is still just a token of information that only becomes ‘real’ when something is being done with it. Very well, but what about certain actions like lying? If we both agree lying is wrong, and you’ve told a fib, then is not that proof of ‘wrongness’? Possibly, but the problem is that it is always possible to contradict a judgement, for instance there are ‘good lies’ and ‘bad truths’, as anybody who has given the answer to the question ‘have I put on weight?’ will attest.
So a value statement is only ever really a statement about my personal reaction to something, or a description of a social or cultural norm. It is ironic that, beyond this, the language of worth does not add any ‘value’ to any statement. In many cases, it can interfere with a clear picture of the world. It can cloud clear thinking, and make us behave reactively. If I am guilty of drinking too many glasses of wine last night, if it was wrong of me to talk with so many crisps in my mouth, if I shouldn’t have eaten that cake etc I will be filled with an abject sense of shame and regret. I will promise, for instance, never to drink again, I will immediately abstain, I will go on a detox, or a diet, or start running etc. In other words, I am a bad person today but I will be a better person tomorrow. And of course this fails. We rinse and repeat. The self-lacerating has not worked, and it never will work, because basing our action on values is like trying to navigate using the wind, or finding an address in an unknown city by going down streets you like the names of, rather than using a map. Judgements add nothing to the facts of the case. ‘I am guilty’ of drinking the wine or eating the cake is just a tortuous way of saying ‘I drank the wine’ or ‘I ate the cake’. The ‘guilt’ adds nothing, it provides no factual information, it makes no statement about the world; in short you can’t do anything with it. So why bother with it at all?
To finish with another Zen quote 'When white appears, just see white; when blue appears, just see blue.' And when a loaf of bread appears, break out the butter!
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