Trump and the Nonjudgmentalism Problem

The Democrat majority in the House of Representatives has once again chosen to impeach President Donald Trump, this time, in the eyes of many erstwhile Trump supporters, with much more justification than the disgracefully political previous attempt.

Set aside for now the merits of the present case and consider that it's based not only on an explicit judgment of illegality but also on an implicit judgment of moral turpitude. The legal claim is pretty thin since it'll be extremely difficult to prove in the Senate that the president deliberately incited a riot on January 6th, but the moral judgment that his actions were so reckless, irresponsible and morally reprehensible that he cannot be allowed to finish out the last week of his tenure and must be prevented from ever serving in public office again packs a more compelling punch.

There's an interesting irony here, though. Frank Furedi, Professor Emeritus at Kings College, has an article in the January issue of First Things (paywall) in which he traces how Americans have developed an aversion to making moral judgments, associating them with "judgmentalism" and authoritarian personality types.

Furedi explains the genesis of our current "nonjudgmentalism":

Since the early 1920s, Western culture in general and American society in particular have become increasingly hostile to the conscious act of judgment. It was at this point in time that the term nonjudgmentalism was invented, used by progressive educators, social workers, and therapeutic professionals as a core axiom of their work.

By the late 1930s and especially the 1940s, judgmentalism was linked to authoritarian behaviors and deemed the cause of totalitarianism. Judgment, that is, was at the root of conflict and war. Moral truths firmly stated and the acceptance of moral authority were depicted by progressive pedagogues and social scientists as symptoms of a sick personality.

No one wished to be regarded as a "sick personality," of course, so a reluctance grew on the part of everyone in authority - parents, teachers, clergy, politicians - to make judgments about right and wrong. Today only those judgments which conform to accepted political fashion can safely be voiced, and yet here we are passing a moral judgment on the President's behavior:

This devaluation of judgment contributed to the steady unravelling of moral authority in the cultural imagination of the West in the mid-twentieth century. From the interwar period onwards, but especially since the 1940s, moral authority shifted from a necessity many regarded in a positive light to something increasingly ominous.

As one might expect this unravelling of moral authority has had calamitous social consequences:

Without an authoritative moral source, judgment loses cultural currency. Not surprisingly, when confronted with the claim that moral judgments are merely an expression of the personal opinion of a closed-minded individual, many citizens in the mid-twentieth-century West decided to keep their views of what is right and wrong to themselves.

With so many experts challenging the value of moral absolutes, the very idea of obedience to normative authorities became suspect. Social scientists adduced powerful historical reasons for warning against (presumed) moral authorities: The willingness of civilian populations to obey totalitarian leaders leading up to World War II proved to many that obedience was inconsistent with a democratic form of public life.

The desire to avoid appearing judgmental or authoritarian had ludicrous consequences as well:

For young adults, nonjudgmentalism is likewise a worldview, a paradoxical one of absolute relativism. An important study from 2011, Lost in Transition: The Dark Side of Emerging Adulthood, demonstrated this widespread prevalence of moral indifference among young people.

The majority of subjects interviewed believed that since morality is a matter of individual choice, it was inappropriate to judge others. Those who insisted on doing so were perceived as legitimate targets of condemnation. The prevailing sentiment among these young interviewees was that judging was associated with “condemning, castigating, disparaging, or executing.” One young adult thought people who sought to impose their moral beliefs on others were “sick.”

In other words, judging others is sick, but judging others for the sin of judging others is righteous. Furedi adds this:

Nonjudgmentalism leaves a vacuum in the consciences of human beings, a moral indifference that provides no satisfaction other than the fleeting virtue of showing one’s liberal forbearance, but that was enough for them. They would never think that their enlightened tolerance is a species of moral cowardice.

It's a shame Furedi's article is free only to subscribers because he says much of importance that I can't include here. Instead I'll append a few thoughts:

A moral judgment has to be based on some moral standard, but in a secular society with its adamantine determination to scrub public discourse of all reference to objective moral authorities, i.e. God, either no such standard exists or no such standard is deemed relevant. Yet that doesn't prevent many individuals from being "judgmental" by reproaching the president's actions.

In fact, secular folk, who have no grounds for criticizing the president's behavior beyond an expression of their own subjective disapprobation, make moral judgments all the time. If judgmentalism consists in making groundless moral evaluations of other peoples' conduct then our secular friends are among the most judgmental people in our society for they haven't been shy about expressing their contempt for the president's moral faults over the last four years or more.

Even so, notwithstanding that people do it all the time, denying any transcendent, objective basis for moral judgment while nevertheless voicing moral judgments can only be described as irrational behavior.

Whether Trump should be impeached or not, censured or not, the matter can only be argued on tenuous legal grounds by our secular friends. Having purged our public square of any transcendent moral authority, secularists have left themselves no resources with which to make a moral argument for impeachment, or for anything else, for that matter. Moral arguments depend on judgments of right and wrong, and not only does the secular citizen have nothing upon which to base such judgments other than their own tastes and preferences, but by their own lights declaring someone to be morally corrupt exposes them to the charge of "judgmentalism" and being "sick."

Of course, few of them realize the logically untenable position they put themselves in by pronouncing their moral deprecations of Trump, and so, thinking they're putting their virtue on display for all to see, they actually make themselves appear intellectually shallow and foolish.