麻豆社

Good morning. Discrimination has got a bad name. For the first half of its life in the English language, it denoted something positive. To discriminate meant to discern, to make sound judgements. While it can still be used in that way, today it inevitably means the opposite. It means prejudice.

I鈥檝e been wondering about this semantic shift as election fever grips the globe. Pakistan went to the polls yesterday, and 2024 will see more than 60 countries follow suit. For the first time in human history, elections in a single year will affect nearly half of the world鈥檚 population. With billions of people charged with such an important decision, it seems more needful than ever to challenge the assumption that human judgement is necessarily prejudicial.

I blame postmodernism, the influential worldview that assumes there are no objective values, and that reality itself is merely a human construct. This bizarre belief is cherished almost exclusively by people with university degrees.

But blame lies also with a more general, well-meaning worry that judgement of any kind is always invidious. Some Christians, for instance, can be guilty here when they wield the question, What would Jesus do? as if it were entirely rhetorical: the answer being that he would just be really nice, and so suspend all judgement. An admirable desire to avoid stigmatizing people, cultures, systems of belief, is thereby turned into the stigmatization of judgement itself.

Jesus鈥檚 example is not so cosy. The Gospels show him tipping over the tables of the money-men in the Temple. The twenty-fifth chapter of Matthew tells of how, at the end of days, he will deliver final judgement, separating out the saved from the damned, like sheep from goats.

The larger point is that making judgements is not necessarily at odds with compassion. When Jesus welcomed outcasts and sinners, that was not because he had stopped discriminating. It鈥檚 because he had become even more discriminating than those around him: distinguishing not only between groups, but also between individuals and their group, as well as between the sinner and their sin.

Following that example means becoming more, not less engaged, with the world. There is no alibi for avoiding consequential decisions, even when political parties can sometimes seem difficult to distinguish. In such contexts, 鈥渋mpartiality鈥� is, as Chesterton once wrote, 鈥渁 pompous name for indifference which is an elegant name for ignorance鈥�.

2024 has been dubbed the year of the vote. Let鈥檚 hope it鈥檚 also the year we learn to have faith once more in the ethical good of discrimination itself.

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