The Loss of Judgment Goes Mainstream

Hannah Arendt feared that our unwillingness to judge and to make decisions was the great moral and political danger facing our world. In her essays and books, Arendt gave voice to what she called the “fear of passing judgment, of naming names, and of fixing blame—especially, alas, upon people in power and high position.”  The Arendt Center has written extensively about our unwillingness to judge, here, here, and here.

Today in the NY Times, Thomas Friedman expresses his exasperation at the lack of judgment by our political leaders. Here are two core quotations from the essay:

No leaders want to take hard decisions anymore, except when forced to. Everyone — even China’s leaders — seems more afraid of their own people than ever. One wonders whether the Internet, blogging, Twitter, texting and micro-blogging, as in China’s case, has made participatory democracy and autocracy so participatory, and leaders so finely attuned to every nuance of public opinion, that they find it hard to make any big decision that requires sacrifice. They have too many voices in their heads other than their own.

At a time when, from India to America, democracies have never had more big decisions to make, if they want to deliver better living standards for their people, this epidemic of not deciding is a troubling trend. It means that we are abdicating more and more leadership to technocrats or supercommittees — or just letting the market and Mother Nature impose on us decisions that we cannot make ourselves. The latter rarely yields optimal outcomes.

Read the whole of Friedman's column here.

You can also view a TEDx talk on the way that technology is replacing and threatening human judgment here.

RB