Judgment
The cunning of certainty.
I will never forget a remark I came across years ago in a devotional commentary on the Bible. Reflecting on the famous verse in Matthew — “Judge not, that you be not judged” — Oswald Chambers simply notes: “There is always one fact more in every life of which we know nothing.”
That sounds like a good putdown of narrow-mindedness, a common criticism of those who disagree with us. But I’m so busy being open-minded, I forget. I extend easy tolerance to the struggling addict, the difficult colleague, the person who voted differently than I did. But the moment someone cuts me off in traffic or snaps at me in a meeting, all that generosity evaporates.
The evidence seems obvious. I think I know the story. What I don’t have is the phone call they received an hour ago, the diagnosis they haven’t told anyone yet, the thing that happened to them at seven years old that quietly shapes everything they do at forty-three.
Open-mindedness is a curious virtue: nearly everyone claims it, and it is most loudly celebrated by those who have quietly stopped practicing it.
What defines our moment, more than anything, is doubt. So much the better. Certainty is deceptive, and it can make conversation difficult. The spouse who is absolutely sure they know what their partner meant by that comment has usually stopped listening. Politicians who rail against the other side while refusing to negotiate are often guarding a conclusion they had already reached. Believers who bemoan the godlessness of culture while treating those who disagree with contempt make faith ungodly.
In The Crack-Up, F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote of his struggle with mental health: “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.”
Truths, he might have added, often depend on one another—each incomplete without the other, each clarified by the other’s pressure.
Justice without mercy becomes cruelty; mercy without justice becomes indulgence. Freedom without order collapses into chaos; order without freedom hardens into tyranny.
But holding opposites requires humility—not a popular virtue. Certitude is cunning. It turns principles into mere possession of principles, much as God can be reduced to belief in God. Absolutes may be unchanging; our apprehension of them is not. Certainty renders faith beside the point—if not unnecessary.
“There is always one fact more in every life of which we know nothing.” This is not an argument against judgment. It is a check on confidence.
Whitman understood this. “Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself. I am large, I contain multitudes.” This is not a confession of incoherence but a statement about what we are. Black Americans who love the country and rage at what it has done to their people are not contradicting themselves. They are telling the whole truth.
May this be true of the rest of us. Those who despise liberalism depend on the very thing they criticize to argue with impunity. Conservatives who deplore the loss of values in modern society depend on its pluralism to be heard at all. Liberals who believe in progress forget that the great catastrophes of modern times were not failures of reason but its most confident expression.
What critics most need—you or I, friend or foe—is what has been called an “enlarged mentality”: the capacity to think from someone else’s position without surrendering our own—not agreement, but the imaginative discipline of taking seriously what another person takes seriously.
To know all is not to forgive all, but to condemn with less confidence. Among the more polite, the “velvet fist” may be the most perilous: the smile already decided, the open door leading nowhere, the tolerance that never quite extends to being wrong.
There is always one fact more about you that you wish others understood.
Notes and reading
Daily Devotional Bible—Oswald Chambers (1992). A widely read evangelical devotional classic by the Scottish preacher, known for its emphasis on surrender, discipline, and the searching demands of Christian discipleship.
The Crack-Up—F. Scott Fitzgerald (1993), the chapter by that title. A posthumously collected set of autobiographical essays. Fitzgerald reflects on exhaustion, failure, and the fracture of confidence.
On Bullshit: Anniversary Edition—Harry G. Frankfurt (2025). A brief philosophical essay arguing that indifference to truth corrodes public life—moral language certain in posture, careless about reality.
The Divide: How Fanatical Certitude is Destroying Democracy—Taylor Dotson. A contemporary work of political theory that diagnoses how absolutist moral certainty corrodes democratic pluralism and proposes humility and institutional reform as remedies.
Uncertainty—Boston Review Forum 20 (46.4 - July/August 2021). A multi-author symposium exploring the political, moral, and cognitive dimensions of uncertainty in public life.
On Revolution—Hannah Arendt (1963), “The Social Question.” Between Past and Future (2006), “enlarged mentality”—the essential faculty for political life and the exercise of “representative thinking.”
Your post captures my difficulty with following Jesus' "judge not" injunction:
"Oswald Chambers simply notes: 'There is always one fact more in every life of which we know nothing.' That sounds like a good putdown of narrow-mindedness, a common criticism of those who disagree with us. But I’m so busy being open-minded, I forget."
I plead guilty.
I love your thoughts on Whitman's statement and on what appears to be a contradiction in how Black Americans process life in the United States.
"To know all is not to forgive all, but to condemn with less confidence." What a thought-provoking aphorism! It's an effective follow-up to your Oswald Chambers quote as well.
Thank you for this gracious reminder!
Thank you for your ongoing encouragement!