There were many funny little things to notice, such as seeing folk wandering around the streets clutching enormous paper mugs of watery coffee, or consuming endless bottles of “spring water”. But those were easy to brush off. This was more serious: “Don’t be judgemental!”
I don’t think I heard this advice levelled at me more than once, to be honest, but I have heard it many times, ringing in my ears and eyes, as I observed everyday social interaction in my beloved home country. What does “Don’t be judgemental!” mean?
There is a long debate on Reddit about it, for those who are interested: Apparently, according to an AI Overview, it means: ” … stop being harshly critical, condemnatory, or quick to label someone’s behavior as wrong or bad, especially when you do not have all the facts. It is a call for more empathy and open-mindedness, rather than a request for you to stop thinking entirely or to hold no opinions.”
This qualification – “rather than a request for you to stop thinking entirely or to hold no opinions” – is very debatable. On the one hand, the premise is that one should stop being “HARSHLY critical, condemnatory, or QUICK to label someone’s behaviour as wrong or bad….” [my capitals], implying that a negative “judgement” is actually OK providing it is not “harsh” or “quick.” But who decides what is “harsh” and “quick”? The recipient of the “judgement”? Surely not. Most people, when faced with criticism (Hitler? Trump? Thatcher?) will be the first to stonewall their defence of their behaviour. I mean, are we being asked to be totally dumb?
One solution to this log jam has also been suggested on Reddit: “Saying that it’s not correct to judge it’s like saying that it’s not correct to think at all. What we can say instead is: To not EXPRESS eventual judgements. This makes more sense and hurts less people’s feelings.” OK. Fine, So we have moved on from “don’t be judgemental” to “it’s ok to be judgemental, just don’t say it, otherwise it might upset some people.” So the whole issue of being judgmental is not that the judgment is actually “wrong”, but that some people, on hearing it, might get upset.
There are of course ways and means of “expressing judgement” in a non-threatening way, as I remember from my teaching days. Nobody is exempt from occasional lapses of patience, of course: a badly-behaved child, in an extreme classroom scenario, does not need to be “harshly criticised” but will certainly not have praise heaped upon him or her – however much we want to “examine the broader context” – and will likely be asked or told to remove him- or herself from the classroom presto presto in order to preserve social peace and the learning process. That in itself is a form of “negative judgement”.
Another way of dealing with behaviour that is deemed to be bad, however, is by making constructive creative suggestions: eg “please think about what you might be doing to annoy me”, rather than “don’t be annoying”. Or “stop acting LIKE a spoilt child” rather than “you’re a spoilt child”.
In sum, all these techniques, both in the classroom and out, are possible ways of being “constructively judgemental.”
But the most important issue I have is with the assumption that in the UK, at least, being “judgemental” means being “negative”. It’s almost as if they are saying: “we only want to hear nice things about ourselves”. And almost like they believe “out-of-sigh-out-of-mind”: if you think something negative, don’t say it! If you think something positive, say it!”. Almost as if there were no longer two sides to a coin, as if there were no longer night and day, there were no longer shots that became goals, and shots that missed their target.
It cannot be possible to dumb down on judgements, because it implies that there should be no positive judgements either.
At least here in the UK, the people who are most likely to say “don’t be judgemental” are also most likely to be hyper-critical of politics they don’t approve of, and have certainly not spent time thinking about re the “broader issues”. I have in mind their attitude towards Trump and – in the UK – Farage. I am a supporter of neither, I despise them. But I have to be careful because there is a reason why these two figures have become so popular amongst voters (they were voted in democratically, you know!) and much of that has to do with a general dislike of the “don’t be judgemental” culture.
My own gut feeling, intuition, after spending a lot of time outside the UK, is that since Thatcher’s infamous quote from 1987: “There is no such thing as society,” and its emphasis on the individual and family responsibility over state dependency, the heady ideals of Flower Power, Love and Peace, and even Christianity itself, have been gobbled up by what people simply perceive to be updated versions them. Thus, it feels like the UK has truly become a country where people exist in smaller isolated groups, occasionally bound together by economic interests or privileges, gender or sexual identity. Yet, even within those groupings, we are now witnessing a hell-for-leather evacuation towards even more endocentric and egocentric clusters: “my space”, “self-connection” rather than “connecting to society or to others”. Those days are long gone.
I compare this to the country where I lived – Italy – where society does still exist, albeit in danger of extinction. Values do still exist, and are believed in: alongside capitalist values of making a profit, political ideals such as communism, socialism, christian democracy still sit comfortably. And then there is the Church itself, a dinosaur maybe, in many peoples’ eyes, but still exerting an enormous influence not – as protestants will unreasonably observe – by laying down the law about what people can and cannot do in their bedrooms – but by reminding everyone of the inviolability of the concepts of right and wrong, of Good and Evil. I’m not a Catholic, and those fundamental distinctions exist even for atheists and agnostics.
Simon Pocock – Blog 
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