eThoughts : Judgment, Discrimination, and Dehumanization

Part of the problem with judgment seems to involve our inability to distinguish between judgment and dehumanization.

Dehumanization is an important word, one that I think we should use rather than discrimination. It would help with keeping our filing straight. Discrimination, like judgment, is a necessary and intricate part of living. Use of the word discrimination when we really mean dehumanization may inadvertently lend credibility to the process of dehumanization.

Making a judgment (discriminations) about whom we’ll marry or whom we’ll associate with, or about another’s contribution, or about the level of our own comfort around another, can be an appropriate undertaking. But dehumanizing or demonizing others as part of the process is nothing more than a rationalization designed to prop up our judgments and entrench our hierarchies. The veracity of our decisions is not based on the demeaning of ourselves or others. However, our worth—almost always benchmarked in relation to others—seems to be measured by how many are worse off versus how many are better off than we are. Maybe there’s another unit of self-worth measurement.

When we make appropriate judgments and discriminations, we say something about process, about finding keys and locks. When we dehumanize, we say something about the essential worth of ourselves or another, and we say something about product—about outcomes and categories and things having a “place.”

How can we possibly learn to listen to another, how can we possibly elevate our own “status,” when we are not even in the same ballpark as another? Oh, we might listen if we see another as one of the “great” ones, but we’re not so likely to listen if we see another as one of the “lepers.” In either case, we are stuck with our fundamental view of position.

What if we consider the “great” or the “leper” to have information rather than status? We will have to make judgments about the quality of that information, but we might avoid dehumanization of any kind.

Product and process are intertwined of course. And position—location—is a part of living in duality—we need to know where things are and what they’re up to. And judgments—valuations—are part of freedom and choice. We can be free to determine our choices, but what do we do to that freedom when we devalue another’s very essence?

We can do bad things, but that does not make us bad. We can do good things, but that does not make us good. But we are all already human. Our job may be to learn to live in the midst of so many attentions, remembering what we already are, poised to add to the beauty of our being, rather than to focus on the regulation and delegation of that beauty. After all, when we try and keep others from the wonders of creation, all we do is keep ourselves from those wonders.