"Don't be judgemental." How often have we heard this? How often have we said this? But, do we truly understand what is meant to be conveyed by this?

Judging someone (or something) involves evaluating where they fall within a certain "range" that we have defined for the purpose, with recommended behaviour and outlawed behaviour at the two ends of the spectrum - the "limits" we refer to when we say that someone has crossed them. This range is usually defined generally by the society we live in (or the one in which we were brought up) and specifically by our own experiences, preferences and more often than we like to imagine, our attitude towards the person or thing being judged.

"Value judgement" is a term anthropologists and other social scientists use to refer to those components of the judgement process where "values" are involved. To a person from a society where any marriage between close blood relatives is taboo, the practice of marrying cousins in another culture may seem barbaric. In this case, the person cannot but make a value judgement.

If, with all this in mind, we take a second look at all the times we have made judgements, whether they be passing comments or considered opinions, we can see that a lot of the time, our "sound" judgement is nothing more than an evaluation of whether or not someone or something fits within certain preset patterns we consider ideal.

Michael Crichton's fictional account of Ibn Fadlan's journeys with the Norsemen has an episode that perhaps best illustrates this point. Fadlan, an Arab unused to rainfall of any kind, is annoyed and troubled by a continuous drizzle and complains that the rain is cold, whereupon his Norse companion tells him, "How can the rain be cold? You are cold and you are unhappy. The rain is not cold or unhappy."

Cheers.