(The Nationalist, 1 February 2002)
How did you and I learn the difference between right and wrong? We were taught by our parents. They said to us, ‘Don’t do that; it’s wrong’. Or, ‘Do this. It’s the right thing to do’. If they, and others such as teachers, had not taught us, we would never have learned the difference between right and wrong. We would have grown up without direction or moral bearings.
When we were small children, we accepted what our parents said about right and wrong. If they said something was wrong, we accepted that, often without understanding why. They had told us, and that was good enough. As we grew older we began to think for ourselves more and more, and we came to understand, for example, not only that lying, stealing, killing and so on were wrong, but we came to understand why there were wrong.
If we had not done that thinking for ourselves we would have remained at a childish level of morality. We had to learn to judge, to discern the rights and wrongs of various actions.
What is a different matter altogether is judging people rather than actions. If, for example, I say that so-and-so is a hypocrite, I am putting myself in the place of judge over him. How can I claim to know what is going on in his mind, or what motivates his actions? (Isn’t it often hard enough to understand what motivates my own actions, never mind someone else’s?) The truth is that we have no right to stand in judgment over the attitudes of another. We can, and sometimes, must judge their actions, but not their attitudes or motivation. We cannot know another’s motivation, and, even if we did, judgment belongs to God alone. Jesus said, ‘Judge not that you may not be judged’. (Matthew 7.1)
There is a sting in the tail: the faults we condemn in others are usually those we refuse to acknowledge in ourselves. For instance, if Joe Soap is a thief, his conscience will tell him he should do something about it. If he doesn’t, he will likely be the first to condemn real or imagined stealing by others. He hits out by proxy at the fault he fails to challenge in himself. William Shakespeare had a neat phrase for it, ‘Suspicion haunts the guilty mind’. So, if we go around habitually condemning others for a particular fault, we are letting the whole world know what our own faults are.
Instead of burning up moral energy examining other people’s consciences for them, is it not better to challenge what is wrong in myself? My self is the one part of this world that I can do something about.