Weighing Others through Judgment and Finding Them Wanting
How cognitive bias keeps us from seeing our shared humanity.
Let’s begin with one of my favorite thinkers, meander a bit through reflections on the nature of moral judgment, and bring the point home.
From Jonah Golderg in his article “Do Bad Guys Always Win?”:
To the extent anyone thinks about rhetoric today, it’s a stand-in for a very slim slice of political speech, and even then we tend to view it contemptuously: “Oh, that’s just rhetoric.” But rhetoric matters. Rhetoric is the story we tell ourselves about ourselves. My favorite definition comes from the literary critic Wayne Booth, who said rhetoric is “the art of probing what men believe they ought to believe.”
If your kid’s high school basketball or soccer coach told your child that he or she should have nothing but contempt for other players or teammates; that they should look scornfully at compassion, empathy, and remorse; that they should consider themselves better than everyone else, you would, I hope, be outraged. That is not what our kids—or anybody else—ought to believe. But when a multibillion-dollar corporation beams that straight at your kids, just to sell sneakers, we mostly shrug. Because in our culture today, anything that doesn’t have a political point is shrug-worthy.
The commercial in question is from Nike during the most recent Olympics:
At first watch, I wasn’t overly concerned because the notion of grit and determination are both characteristics I think are sadly diminished in modernity and wrongfully chided in the ascendency of victim-first thinking so pervasive in Western culture these days. Particularly where it concerns mental health, with the primary focus on diagnosis being the defining feature of an individual, so much so that in social settings, it’s likely better to start with “What diagnosis are you going to use to rationalize how you treat me?” rather than “What do you do?” At the very least, it’ll certainly set the tone for how you want to be treated, and you won’t accept a label for excuses regarding behavior.
However, when I came across Goldberg’s article, like any good writing, it made me pause and reconsider, though not wholly dismiss, my original thoughts. As has been noted elsewhere by Goldberg, most recently in an excellent interview with Sam Harris, there is a certain level of moral frailty when limiting one’s thinking to a basic binary and/or attempting to explain everything by a social ‘force’ typically indicated by it being an -ism. Nuance and the, in my mind, parallel process of critically holding disparate ideas at any given time with the result of changing one’s mind, is the mark of a morally-focused person. Yes, I realize this declaration is like a peacock strutting its tail, but this is more than a declaration of a personal agreement with Goldberg and Harris or an indication of one of my principles. There is simply far too much in the world for any one of us to hold enough of it in a single or even multiple perspectives, meaning that at any given moment, we are vastly ignorant of things, some of which will, upon identifying it, or should, result in us holding our judgments lightly.
Judgments Concretize Our Future
Returning to Nike’s commercial, the resonance with a certain facet of it shouldn’t be used to address every nuance of its message. As Goldberg notes, there’s something insidious about a message that was it coming from a teacher, minister, or other purveyor of socially accrued moral authority, we would justifiably find it suspect if not ethically alarming, but when it comes from a company predicated on the notion of separating one person from another based on athletic status games, we don’t blink. That people interpret messages based as much, if not more, on the source they come from than on a more objective reading of the content is not only a feature of how our brains parse out what is colloquially referred to as truth but should tell you everything you need to know about how politics works. There’s a lot more there, but it would be its own article and will be.
Let’s attempt some clarity here so we don’t get lost in thinking, “Well, why is he still ok with the message if he has such a problem with it?” Judgments are a means of solidifying a future vision of what we believe is possible. They’re a socially mandated and cognitively inevitable attempt at concretizing a bias that, in most cases, simply resolves to ‘confirmation bias.’ When we make a judgment, particularly when it's a moral one, we’ve largely set in stone how we’re going to first behaviorally respond to the thing/person/situation we’ve judged, but also how we’re likely to interpret any subsequent information/experience that shows up. The common declaration of “I knew it!” when applied to the behavior of someone that seemingly confirms our previous judgment about them is undoubtedly one of the sweetest feelings of one’s own righteousness. This feeling also exists when we use the phrase “I told you so,” though with an additional element of condescension and dismissal.
Considering judgments in this way is why I’m attempting to hold competing ones in the same mental space, so one doesn’t gain ascendancy and paint over future considerations with a single color.
Thing is, winning ISN’T for everyone, that’s the damn point of winning. It is based on a formalized status game, where being a loser is a judgment based on the game's rules that all have agreed to. We celebrate these events precisely because we recognize an attempt at purifying the experience we’re all going through all the time. The rules for social status are a lot less clear, far more prone to influences outside of our control, and, therefore, a whole lot messier. A sport is an idealized status game, which is undoubtedly why cheating is met with so much vehemence and why the armchair reffing occurring in households and bars across the country spurs such passion. We want, we crave, simplicity in process and outcomes.
But what happens when we take the desire for simplicity in process and outcomes from within a highly structured environment and place it in a less structured one? What happens when the judgments of winning and losing go from outcomes of an agreed-upon game with easily enforceable rules to declarations of being a winner or a loser as an identity in the far more variable-intensive and non-enforceable rules space of society? The result is where the line gets crossed from appreciating success to ignoring context, from celebrating winning to mocking losing.
We Want Better from Our Leaders and for Our Children
This mocking of losing, the celebration of a loss by another, is essentially what social media pile-ons are all about, but they’re also what so much of our social discourse has turned into. By abdicating nuance, by diving deep into black/white judgments and single-variable thinking, we do no so much celebrate when a win as glory in the loss of the other or enemy.
It’s why the Nike ad eventually becomes pernicious when looked at from a broader social perspective. The lyrics spell out what has become the common narcissistic parlance of the terminally online:
I have no empathy.
I don’t respect you.
I’m never satisfied.
I have an obsession with power.
I’m irrational.
I have zero remorse.
I have no sense of compassion.
I’m delusional. I’m maniacal.
You think I’m a bad person?
Why yes, I do think you’re a bad person. Any other simple questions? A lack of empathy is nothing to be proud of. Being delusional and lacking compassion for the suffering of others is not how we build a democracy of the people for the people. It’s the siren song of authoritarianism, where empathy is considered weakness, mockery is confused with discourse, and delusion is considered rational.
And if you’re sitting there thinking, “Yeah, preach it, those guys are awful!” you’ve completely missed the point. I like a good parody as much as the next person, and there’s certainly a venal pleasure in hearing the dumbest things uttered by someone and being able to spread that person’s inanity onto anyone associated with the attached social label and dismiss them as cranks and fools.
When does mocking become hope that such people never go away? When does highlighting the foolish become yet another influence for their continued existence? The reality is that we all have held foolish ideas at some point in our lives and made judgments that blinded us to possible experiences that could have benefitted our lives. We may acknowledge the role chance plays in sports, but it doesn’t disappear in other areas of life. We are at the mercy of influences on our behavior; our mental lives are simply another form of action.
What we should want is a world where it is possible to be wrong and be supported for both the questioning process that got us there, and the humility of response that results from it. This means engagement even when we’re certain we’re right. This means, at times, holding multiple judgments at the same time, of using cognitive dissonance as a tool for humble reflection and acknowledgment that barring positive influences on our own lives, we’d believe all sorts of ridiculous things. For that matter, we may already and just not know it.
Wouldn’t it be nice to know that we can change our minds, in part or in whole, and know that we’ll be congratulated? We should demand leaders own up to their changing opinions, not because we want them to be cardboard cutouts of position statements, but because we want the humility that comes with recognizing life is a whole lot damn bigger than any single ego, no matter how big. We should want our kids to succeed, to be resilient, to strive for excellence, and to, yes, win, but not at the cost of their appreciation of the people around them.
This only happens when we consider the cost of judgment and curtail its excesses. When we see that judgment locks us into a single perspective, we can actively seek other avenues of inquiry. When we see something that makes us feel righteous, we can consider alternative explanations based more on human foibles than on the othering of another through a declaration of ‘evil.’ When we find ourselves thinking of another as ‘brainwashed’ or part of a ‘cult,’ we should look and consider just how much we’re allowed to criticize the groups we belong to.
Look in the mirror. We just might see the flames we’ve been ignoring.
