One aspect of the word involves the notion of exercising good judgment, as in making smart decisions or assessing situations with wisdom and intelligence. That’s a positive aspect of judgment. The opposite would be to exercise poor judgment, meaning the person makes foolish decisions or “misjudges” a situation to his detriment. Moving to an entirely different context, often time I am chided by a person for my having weighed in on an idea, a concept, or a trend. If I criticize the idea in question, a critic, usually on social media, will chastise me for being “judgmental.” What they are saying, in essence, is that I should not ever render judgment on anything, regardless of how insane the idea might be. Critics such as those seek to shame others into silence so that a bad idea can take root in the marketplace of ideas. We should all remain unpersuaded by such antics.
Of course, the delicious irony is that such critics are themselves exercising judgment all the while they are being critical of criticism. Such irony, of course, is lost on such persons, until I point that irony out to them.
But the critics almost have a point.
What we should not do is prejudge, and often we are guilty of that.
I recently dodged a very big bullet in that regard.
I had been having an email exchange with a new friend. We had been having a rich social life recently and had planned to belatedly celebrate our recent birthdays which were only a few days apart from each other. This friend had always been relatively responsive. If I sent a text message, I received a response the same day, often within the hour, and certainly before the day ended.
However, when I sent the email outlining the plans for our joint-birthday celebration, I received no reply that day. In fact, over the next 24 hours I received no reply. Judgmental thoughts started to enter my mind, thinking that this new friend may not be such as good a friend as I had been led to believe. I started to assume that this friend had lost interest. I started to assume that this friend had written me off. I started to judge that this friend had changed her mind and didn’t have the common courtesy to communicate that to me. All of these thoughts represented pre-judgments because I didn’t really know for sure what was going on; I was merely making assumptions – assumptions that could well prove unfounded.
Fortunately, I resisted the temptation to act on those assumptions.
After 24 hours had elapsed from the time I sent my previous message, I did hear from my friend. It turned out she had been struggling mightily with a lot of unfortunate mishaps that hit her from all sides, all in a very short period of time. She was overwhelmed. She was carrying around very heavy burdens. She was simply trying not to fall apart. Imagine how insensitive I would have been, how callous and short-sighted I would have come across, had I chastised her in any way prior to my finally hearing from her. That would have been a classic example of being judgmental – pre-judgmental to be precise.
Not all judgments are created equal. Good judgment is a good thing. Bad judgment is a bad thing. And pre-judgment is unwise.
Now you know.
