Delphic Maxim 66: Know the judge
I’ve set myself the challenge of responding to each Delphic Maxim for 15 minutes a day.
66. Know the judge
I must confess, my brain isn’t working as well today, so I find this maxim a little difficult to interpret: forgive me if this becomes a ramble!
There are two tensions that I think sustain this maxim: the idea of the judge as an arbiter of justice (and at the same time, mercy), and the fact of knowing the judge, a kind of strategic imperative. We don’t live in a society were ignorance of the law is an acceptable reason to break it (though occasionally it might be appropriate to lessen consequences for breaches of a lower order). Knowing the judge in this context involves being aware of ‘the judge’ as an embodiment of the law to which we are all subject. The judge stands in for the social contract — what Hobbes would call the Leviathan of the state, a powerful authority that maintains social order between otherwise violent and chaotic relations.
But judge can be understood in a broader sense. If I translate it into educational terms — since that’s my area of expertise — you might think of the ‘judge’ as the marker, or the embodiment of assessment. This helps us to understand some of the broader ways in which we experience ‘being judged’. Knowing the judge here involves understanding what is expected of us in different contexts and situations.
Let me give you an example from media. Conservative radio host Alan Jones is usually the ‘judge’ on his program. When people call him, they are placed at his mercy — he typically mutes the volume of his interlocutors if they’re disagreeing to loudly or effectively with him, he talks over the top of them, and he passes aggressive, clear and critical judgements of his guests and major political figures (likewise if he agrees with them, he is very clear about that too). And he almost always takes a strong conservative position, because he knows his audience.
When he first appeared on the ABC’s Q&A program, we saw a different side of Alan Jones. He knew that his audience — who are the ultimate ‘judge’ on Q&A — was a broader public than the small and politically engaged listenership to his radio show. Knowing this, he became something of a chameleon — he dialled up his emphasis on more popular and palatable views, and restrained his usually aggressive and pompous style. He played to his judge — and his first appearance was a success. Subsequent appearances he let slip, and he wasn’t received as well.
Similarly, the recent ‘intellectual showdown’ between psychologist Jordan Peterson (who I’ve critiqued previously) and Slavoj Žižek (of whom I am quite a fan) was an exercise in both not quite knowing the terms of the engagement, but also (on Peterson’s part) not knowing the judge at all. Peterson showed up woefully underprepared — having not read any of Karl Marx’s oeuvre save for The Communist Manifesto (his briefest and most polemical — rather than theoretically rigorous — text). Nor had Peterson read, as far as I could tell, anything written by Žižek. At a minimum, he should have read The Sublime Object of Ideology to get some grasp of Žižek’s thinking, and engaged to some degree at a minimum with Marx’s Kapital and Theses on Feuerbach (which are actually really, really brief).
Peterson bombed. He looked unprepared. He didn’t know his judge, or his brief, and he essentially missed the point of the debate (so it is hard to say someone ‘loses’ an argument when they aren’t equipped to participate in it — he simply lost credibility). I suspect he had little credibility with fans of Žižek anyway, but how does this relate to knowing your judge?
I think the point here is that the expectations and assessments that are made of us vary from context to context, and to know the judge means not only understanding the standard to which we are being held, but preparing for it also. Unpreparedness is not only unprofessional, it’s pretty stupid. At a minimum, knowing the rubric against which we are being assessed can help us engage tactically with our environment (or even whether a tactical mindset is necessary). This maxim is helpful advice when we’re in a situation where we will be judged, but it’s also a nice reminder of the need to be strategic and clever whenever a situation demands it.
