Thou Shalt Not Judge
Every few months, a story appears that feels like a symptom of something larger—not madness itself, but our refusal to name it.
Announcement: Oxford Sour is now full time.
Oxford Sour is now my full-time job. For too long, this publication has coasted on that millennial malady: potential. Those days are dead. Over the coming six weeks, I’ll publish 25 essays. No more Millennial dithering. No more bullshit.
In an age of artificial slop, Oxford Sour stands for what makes us human: the real, the imperfect, the ridiculous.
Here’s the fourth essay of the new era. See you on Thursday and Saturday.
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Without the tireless efforts of my old maths teacher, I’d be a cliché statistic treading the tired track between failing school and jail. Put bluntly, I was a teenage reprobate. But with a sense of humour. One night, the police rang the house. My mother answered the phone.
“Leon who?”
“Mrs Gage. We have a Leon Trotsky here at the station. He’s in the cells. Drunk and disorderly. He says you’re his mother.”
“Well,” she said. “You can tell Mr Trotsky to stay put and enjoy the view.”
My high school was in ‘special measures’—bureaucratese for ‘failing.’ My scallywag friends and I modelled ourselves on Alex and his droogs from A Clockwork Orange, minus the violence, the robbery, the serious crime. At worst, we once pilfered a roll of magnesium from the science labs, wrapped it around a tree, and lit it up. Fireworks.
Despite my guerilla warfare, the school refused to kick me out.
Mrs Dalloway, my old maths teacher, had other ideas. Her selfless intervention was not the sort that wins teaching awards. This isn’t an am-dram rendition of Good Will Hunting. Dalloway, a rodentine figure whose face hung with the grim acceptance of life’s unfairness, loathed all life-forms and especially me—for good reason.
One afternoon, in the early 2000s, Dalloway scored a point for the good guys. Me and my dickhead friends—bleached white hair, Biro obscenities scrawled on our shirts and skins—played a game. The trick was to dangle an unlit cigarette from one’s mouth and saunter across the yard, lighting up the moment one’s foot touched the gates. Bored with this rigmarole, I took it further. A Marlboro Light hung from my perma-grin; I lit it forty paces from freedom. For all of twenty paces, I basked in transgressive glory.
As the last bell rang, Mrs Dalloway would scan the crowds for untucked shirts, loose ties, any indictable signs of civilisational decay.
The wisps of smoke billowing above my head were a dead giveaway.
Dalloway locked on:
“Put that cigarette out and come with me. NOW!”
As she swung my body 180 degrees toward her, a plume of smoke exploded around her time-bitten mouth. A thundering right hand knocked the cigarette to the gravel. Tears carved cooling tracks down my cheeks. Time slowed to a trickle. The blurred faces of around two hundred pupils all spelled the same five words: You, Christopher Gage, are fucked.
“You just—! Sir!” I turned to Mr Postman, my form teacher, stood beside the grinning Mrs Dalloway. “She just hit me! Sir! You saw that!”
Mr Postman smirked. “You’re off your meds, Christopher. I didn’t see a thing.”
Mrs Dalloway was the last footsoldier of a time when a child was not a tabula rasa of goodness corrupted by a cruel world, but a prototypal adult prone to malfunction. Dalloway remedied such issues like one would a flickering TV: with a whack across the chops.
As she dragged me to the headmaster’s office—past the desk I’d scarred with anarchic doodles—she piled it on thick.
“You’ve terrorised my colleagues for years,” she thundered. “You got what you deserved, you little prick.”
A letter arrived days later, printed ironically in Comic Sans—the neurotic font of bake sales and children’s parties—permanent exclusion.
The Taboo of Judgement
Those two words today carry an alien quality. In our therapeutic age, there is little permanent or exclusionary. Mrs Dalloway wouldn’t get within eight miles of a school today. Her willingness to judge others by their behaviour contravenes the reigning creed: infinite compassion. Dalloway is guilty of the gravest modern sin: forming a moral conclusion.
One of the sacred commandments of modern teacher-training handbooks is non-judgemental practice. One must never draw from one’s own experience anything that might inform the behaviour of another. The fact that one pupil has seven suspensions in one year must not suggest that he is prone to misbehaviour.
This fear of judgement stems from faulty premises. Our self-esteem, goes the prevailing wisdom, is a finite resource fixed at birth. Any judgement or criticism saps this reserve, leading to trauma and permanent scarring. Hence, we must avoid the highest crime: to be judgemental.
This doctrine of infinite compassion extends far beyond the schoolyard. It is our national religion.
We see its rotten fruits everywhere: the paranoid man arguing with invisible enemies on the Tube; the shoplifters stuffing steaks and vodka into rucksacks as staff look away. A few weeks ago, a man waving a machete in a barber shop allegedly went on to stab ten people on a train.
The reaction was telling. On social media, the chief commandment was not “Thou shalt not stab,” but “Thou shalt not judge.” The pieties arrived on cue—wait for the facts, don’t stigmatise mental illness.
Such indulgent restraint, of course, is cost-free. Others pay for it.
As with pacifism, the creed of infinite compassion survives only by the courage of those who do not share it.
Reports say the alleged attacker had, the day before, stormed a barbershop brandishing a machete. Police, paralysed by the therapeutic mindset, let it slide.
This is the logical end of a culture held hostage by relativism. Tom Stoppard, the great playwright, once said the difference between a lump of wood and a cricket bat isn’t shape, but purpose. Civilisation itself is a shaped thing—judgement is the plane and chisel.
We now treat every lump of wood like a prized cricket bat, every opinion and behaviour as valid as the rest. To question this is elitist; to criticise it, cruel.
Yet all serious cultures sought the truth as their highest ideal. Judgement is the only way to distinguish signal from noise, genius from impulse, the prized cricket bat from driftwood. Far from corrosive, criticism is, after all, the sharp-elbowed sister of truth.
That’s not to be judgemental, of course. For all we know, a man waving a machete in a barber shop is merely demonstrating its superior cutting edge.
The real crime is to pass judgement. To assume future behaviour on account of past behaviour. To judge is to brand. And that, in the new moral order, is as bad as slashing through skin and bone or clearing shelves of goods which tickle one’s fancy.
After all, what could be more damaging to one’s truth than to be judged by those who haven’t lived one’s lived experience? Who are you to judge?
A culture that refuses to judge will one day have judgement thrust upon it. After all, electing for ‘non-judgement’ is a judgement. It is the woeful belief that there is no better or worse, only different. That a lump of driftwood is indeed a cricket bat.
Only children demand a world without judgment or consequences. The tragedy is that many adults now agree.
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Who was it who said if you keep an open mind people will throw trash into it? Judgement is the most critical part of reasoning; it's the act of forming a conclusion and, therefore, closing your mind. It doesn't mean it's closed forever. It's just closed to trash.
Dear Leon, this is a message from your former English teacher, Miss Pedant. “Me and my dickhead friends …”. I am passing judgement on your grammar here. Otherwise I loved your essay.