When did we get so freaking judgmental? It's not just famous people - we judge people who have a different perspective on the vax debate, or parent differently, or eat differently. Why are we as a society so judgy these days and what is the damage done? By Ruth Spencer.
Are you a good judge of character, or just a frequent one? I'm not judging you for being judgmental; judging people is how we form community. Part of being a group is working out who to ostracise from that group. That sounds immediately worrying but, if your list includes murderers, predators, and people who pop round without texting first when the house is messed up, suddenly we can see the upside. Shun!
Shame incentivises behaviour the society wants and is its own torturous punishment for those who transgress. In childhood we're deliberately shamed for anti-social behaviour, such as eating things mined from one's own nasal cavities. The shame remains deep in our psyche as an ingrained aversion, so that we only indulge it, if at all, in the privacy of our own car at a red light. This is as it should be.
We're talking about all this because of Will Smith's latest hit, which unfortunately wasn't his Oscar-nominated film but his absolute lapse in judgment at the Oscars. The hot takes are selling like hotcakes: almost no one has missed the opportunity to point out the nuances in the situation. There have been points made about the historic shaming of black women's hair; the unkindness of the tradition of comic roasting that's so popular in American comedy; the grossness of mocking a medical condition, even when the mocker was unaware of the condition; the painfully chauvinistic gallantry of Smith yelling about "my wife's name" as though demanding pistols at dawn. Smith has been publicly shamed but also publicly lauded and, in a smaller way, so have the various opinions burst on to social media. Everyone has had a lovely time condemning or supporting Smith and judging each other for doing the same.
This is where the snake of public ridicule turns to eat itself. Instead of Smith being the focus, the venom of our arguments has been aimed towards anyone who disagrees with our own opinion. In the course of a single day I watched a Facebook friend confidently declare his stance on the slap, be taken completely and articulately apart for his stance, then painfully retract his stance while claiming everyone else was just as bad as him for having any stance at all. He judged, was judged, and judged us back for being judgy.