(The Nationalist, October 2004)
We love to do it – to sort others out. We can be aggressively busy putting their conscience right for them. We think that blame, criticism and condemnation are the ways to get people to improve. ‘I let him know what I thought of him…’
Maybe we should have second thoughts about that. The faults we criticize most readily in others are usually those we refuse to acknowledge in ourselves. If I go around condemning others for a particular fault, I’m letting the whole world know that I am guilty of the same fault. It’s the old story of the accusing finger with three others pointing back. William Shakespeare had a handy phrase for it. He wrote, ‘Suspicion haunts the guilty mind’.
But there is another angle as well. John Powell, an American priest and psychologist, wrote, ‘We have laboured so long under the delusion that corrections, criticism, and punishments stimulate a person to grow. We rationalize the taking out of our unhappiness and incompleteness in destructive ways’. If we install ourselves on the moral high ground and, from there, dispense judgment on others, we may think we are helping to make the world a better place. All we are really doing is making the accused defensive and unlikely to be receptive to what we have to say.
By doing so we are also evading the challenge of sorting ourselves out. Instead of burning up energy condemning others, is it not better to face up to what is wrong in myself? My self is the one part of this world that I can do something about. Should I not try to make myself into the kind of person I think others ought to be? That should keep me busy for a lifetime.