Sometimes I judge. My judgments take on the character of whatever pole I happen to occupy at the extreme ends of my bipolarity. As such, I consider incessant judgment to be a weakness, a weakness that should be exercised away at every conscious opportunity.
One problem with judgment is that it often washes back onto the judge. Each of us is many different things at many different times. It is well-documented that we imply psychological bias often, attributing extrinsic circumstances to our failures and intrinsic circumstances to our success or vice versa depending on personality. The same goes with what we think about others.
We are indeed products of the environment, but we also act on that environment, changing it ever so slightly to bring it in line with our own characters, characters that are in turn formed by exertions emanating from the said environment. There is no clear way of determining the direction of causation. To determine causation, to state for example that I am who I am because of the environment I grew up in, is to construct an artificial narrative, a narrative that is useful for navigating and manipulating the real world but that should be recognized as a disposable fiction, should the facts point in another direction at another time.
It is OK to create such fictions. If a man lunges at me with a knife, perhaps it is not cosmically true that he is my absolute enemy - maybe he is hallucinating that I am a demon, or maybe he is swinging at something behind me, or maybe he is in a temporary state of great pain and must exercise his anger - but it suits me just fine to judge him as an enemy for the time being. Both of us cannot exist at the same time in such an instance.
But getting into the habit of proclaiming judgments is highly problematic too. A judgment can function as a transgression, with the judged altering their behavior to repay the perceived judgment. For example, if I tell someone they are not trustworthy, that person is less likely to value my trust in the future, acting in ways to spite me. Judgment creates a closed circuit that limits ranges of behavior.
Things get very dangerous when we crown our judgments with the air of the absolute. When we begin to believe our judgments take their justification from eternal laws, we act to fulfill those laws even when the behavior contradicts other corollary moral laws.
For example, nestled in Christian ideology is the belief that sex is unclean. Such a judgment varies in its intensity depending on the personality interpreting the abstract principle. Certain rules and procedures crop up to ameliorate the effects of the judgment, such as marriage, or at least the Christian conception of marriage. Now such a judgment was understandable at a time when the decadent denizens of the Roman Empire instrumentalized the act of sex and debased its meaning, with a polarity arising around who gets to enjoy the act: the rich vs. the poor.
But such a judgment when calcified into an eternal law becomes constricting and damaging. Repressive attitudes on sex have probably warped our cultural sexual health in profound ways. Wilhelm Reich argued somewhat persuasively that such attitudes contributed to the rise of fascism in Germany.
So what is to be done? Perhaps in order to avoid over-judging in intellectual matters or under-judging in life or death matters, we should endeavor to strengthen our regulative apparatus that judges judgments. Agh, but such a solution carries problems of its own. To each his own then.
