Content warning: This essay features dozens of judgements. If you are ideologically opposed to judgement you may be offended. I have attempted to defend all judgements but, at the end of the day, these are just judgements and subject to error. My only defense is to quote Rowan Atkinson: “… in my view, the right to offend is far more important than any right not to be offended.”
I woke up early this morning. I thought about lying in, it was still dark, but I had lots of things to do so I made a judgement to get out of bed. After coffee, but before breakfast, I went out for my aerobic training. I judged that I was not so hungry that I could not do this brief bit of training without eating. When I got home, I did have breakfast – salad with smoked salmon and two hard boiled eggs. I judged that would be enough protein to kick start some muscle protein synthesis. This judgement I can back up with some data as my nutrition calculator informs me that my breakfast had about 31 grams of protein (all favoured animal protein) and the research literature supports the contention that about 30 grams of protein at a single meal is necessary to induce muscle protein synthesis. I had a lot of things to do, so I made a judgement about the order in which I would pursue these chores.
At this point, you must be wondering, judging if you are smart, why you are reading about the dull minutiae of my day. That is a very good question and the answer is to illustrate that there is no such thing as not making judgements. Humans make judgements all day long and we would very quickly cease to exist entirely if we suspended judgement for even a few minutes during the average day. Our lives are literally a series of judgements, some are better supported by objective data than others, but every single decision or failure to make a decision (which is making a decision by default) we make throughout the day is based on a judgement. Anyone who tells you they do not judge is engaged in one (or both) of two things: self-delusion or false-hood.
Right away, there are two judgements book-ending the podcast which immediately negates the opening statement that the episode is presented “without judgement.” The first judgement is that learning lessons and managing risks is valuable, and the second is that land acknowledgements somehow absolve us from the responsibility of returning any unceded land that we hold back to its rightful owners. You may, or may not agree with these judgements but every listener has, within minutes of listening to any and every episode, made multiple judgements.
My judgement is that the first statement (judgement) is valid but sadly unsupported by the presenter because we can neither reflect and learn nor manage risk without making judgements. The second judgement rings hollow and I judge to be performative nonsense to appease white settler guilt unless it is accompanied by actual concrete and substantive actions such as paying a portion of your monthly salary to the Gondungara people to compensate them for the loss of their land or, even better, returning any property you own to the Gondungara people.
The reality is, of course, that Caro makes judgements on every single episode of the podcast – as do we all. Sometimes, the judgements are obvious, as when she will nod along “so good, so good” to a judgement that fits her preferred narrative, other times the judgement is buried in the exhortation to “not judge.” But every non-judgement is simply a judgement by default (much like not making a decision is actually making a decision). And the default judgement is that the guest(s) is (are) too emotionally fragile or intellectually incompetent to reflect on their experience or to learn any lessons. The guests, and by extension, every listener to the podcast, is stuck now in the trap of continuing to make mistakes, have accidents (some extremely serious) for the rest of their lives because if we were to make a judgement that, for example, suspect anchors should be backed up before abseiling, we are guilty of the ultimate crime against humanity: judgement. Personally, I judge this to be a depressing world view wherein we are all stuck in a never ending cycle of unpleasant or outright dangerous consequences of events which we are completely unable to control. If we accept this judgement, we must also confront the fact that we are both very, very stupid and very, very emotionally fragile. None of these conclusions are appealing.
The act of “non-judgement” is both the bigotry of low expectations and the imbuing of a moral value label to a non-moral act of cognition. If you look judgement up in the dictionary you will find three definitions:
The cognitive process of reaching a decision or drawing conclusions;
The determination by a court of competent jurisdiction on matters submitted to it (law);
The mental ability to understand and discriminate between relations.
None of these definitions imply or specifically explicate a moral opinion. We can, and do, judge all the time without adding moral dimensions of good and bad to our judgements, although most, if not all, of us are able to recognise the differences between outcomes, some of which are most definitely good or bad. Breaking your pelvis I judge to be extremely bad and, my personal judgement is, that if there are actions I can take which will avoid this complication I will most certainly take them.
Caro’s podcast is, of course, a derivative of Ashley Sharpe’s very popular Sharp End podcast, which is itself a derivative (all work is derivative) of “Accidents in North American Mountaineering” published annually by the American Alpine Club. The annual volume of accidents (a selection only) has always included an editorial judgement as to the contributing causes of the accidents. This is because the editors are climbers (often very high level climbers) who understand that when you play risky games you might take home unwanted prizes if you do not use judgement, wisdom and intelligence to manage risk.
The difference between the two podcasts is stark. The epilogue of every single episode of the Sharp End podcast includes the lessons learned. In fact, the entire podcast is structured around the concept of learning from the mistakes of others so that the listeners do not have to make the same mistakes themselves. These lessons are most often advanced by the guests themselves although Ashley will also note lessons learned. Many times, I have thought that the real lessons to be learnt have been missed but that is a relatively unimportant detail when compared to Sharpe’s staunch adherence to the concept that accidents can be prevented by better knowledge and judgements. Ironically, the Rescued podcast with it’s exhortation to make no judgements, encourages us to become the podcast equivalent of accident voyeurs without redeeming qualities. We become the ghouls (a judgement) who slow down to stare at accident sites without offering to help. Gawking spectators to the tragedies of others with no moral constraints, but at least we aren’t judging.
I don’t believe (but I could be wrong) that Caro is truly committed to non-judgement – an impossible state of affairs – she simply suffers from the intellectual and moral confusion which comes from identifying strongly with certain ideologies. Anytime we adopt an ideology we abandon reasoned thinking and allow our ideological beliefs to make our judgements for us. I am reminded of the quote attributed to G. K. Chesterton: When men choose not to believe in God, they do not hereafter believe in nothing, they become capable of believing in anything. If we are forced to suspend judgement we become both morally vacuous and intellectually stupid, a state of affairs which we should judge to be abhorrent.
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