Elevating Ourselves By Judging Others

Being A Red Sox fan has allowed me to see an illustration of a certain truth. That illustration is found in comparing last year's and this year's batting performances of certain players. Take Mookie Betts for example. Last year he batted .318 and hit 31 home runs. And though this year is not yet over, it looks like he will not come close to last year's average though it is somewhat possible for him to come close to hitting the same number of home runs. For he is batting .263 and has hit 22 home runs.

Or take Jacking Bradley Jr. for example. Though the disparity between his last year's batting average and this year's average is not as large as it is with Mookie Betts, his number of home runs is down from 26 to 17. And his number of other extra base hits is down significantly as well.

What has caused the drop off for these two players? There are obviously a number of factors, but one of them is context. Last year, David Ortiz also played for the Red Sox and he deservedly became a very feared clutch hitter who batted over .300 and hit over 30 home runs. But without his presence in the lineup, how pitchers could pitch to the other players, like Betts and JBJ, changed and that contributed to how their batting performances changed.

The above is rather a simple illustration, but we should realize that much of how we behave is determined by the context of our lives. This is a fact of life we prefer to remember when we come face to face with our own sins and faults, but we forget to return the favor when judging others, especially those who commit egregious sins. When it comes to people like gang members and terrorists, our attitude is to judge them as if they lived in the same context we did. And in so doing, what we also do is to elevate ourselves. For we say that we would never do what they did as if we grew up in the same family.

Jason Burke, in his book on Al-Qaeda, makes a point that when one considers what is involved with terrorism, that terrorists are made, not born. The context we don't see often involves oppression, marginalization, extreme abuse, deprivation, death of loved ones, and political hopelessness. And all of that has been experienced by either the terrorists themselves or people with whom they have a significant affinity. 

The context is similar for many American young men who join gangs or who otherwise commit violent crimes. Many of them grew up in single-parent homes where the remaining is sometimes on drugs. They must deal with a political-economic system that has abandoned them. They are profiled and sometimes abused by the police and discover that survival of the fittest describes their life in the hood.  And many of the drugs of choice they take to escape the reality that we would call hell  are illegal while those of us with enough wealth and privilege can hide from reality by immersing ourselves in banal entertainment.

Though we won't admit that context plays a significant role in the life choices of those we consider undesirable, how we treat our friends and family and how we raise our children shows what we really think. We read books on parenting, make sure that our kids hang out with the right people and are involved in the right activities, and we try to send them to good schools. These behaviors show how much we attribute behavior to context. But we only do so for our own. And we do so so that we can elevate ourselves when we see others sin.

This principle of context greatly influencing actions just doesn't affect those who are violent, it affects all of us. It affects duplicitous politicians, corrupt bankers, coldhearted corporate executives, dishonest lawyers, and ordinary sinners like ourselves. That context greatly influences our actions is a truth for all of us. And thus, though we would prefer to condemn people right away, we need to understand the contexts of those who cross us or do what is wrong in order to see if the context of their lives could change in ways that would help them do better.