Will Smith, Chris Rock and the online slap-downs: When did we get so judgmental?

Here we go again ... Will Smith, right, hits presenter Chris Rock on stage at the Oscars on March 27. Photo / AP

Opinion

When did we get so freaking judgmental? It's not just famous people - we judge people who have a different perspective on the vax debate, or parent differently, or eat differently. Why are we as a society so judgy these days and what is the damage done? By Ruth Spencer.

Are you a good judge of character, or just a frequent one? I'm not judging you for being judgmental; judging people is how we form community. Part of being a group is working out who to ostracise from that group. That sounds immediately worrying but, if your list includes murderers, predators, and people who pop round without texting first when the house is messed up, suddenly we can see the upside. Shun!

Shame incentivises behaviour the society wants and is its own torturous punishment for those who transgress. In childhood we're deliberately shamed for anti-social behaviour, such as eating things mined from one's own nasal cavities. The shame remains deep in our psyche as an ingrained aversion, so that we only indulge it, if at all, in the privacy of our own car at a red light. This is as it should be.

We're talking about all this because of Will Smith's latest hit, which unfortunately wasn't his Oscar-nominated film but his absolute lapse in judgment at the Oscars. The hot takes are selling like hotcakes: almost no one has missed the opportunity to point out the nuances in the situation. There have been points made about the historic shaming of black women's hair; the unkindness of the tradition of comic roasting that's so popular in American comedy; the grossness of mocking a medical condition, even when the mocker was unaware of the condition; the painfully chauvinistic gallantry of Smith yelling about "my wife's name" as though demanding pistols at dawn. Smith has been publicly shamed but also publicly lauded and, in a smaller way, so have the various opinions burst on to social media. Everyone has had a lovely time condemning or supporting Smith and judging each other for doing the same.

This is where the snake of public ridicule turns to eat itself. Instead of Smith being the focus, the venom of our arguments has been aimed towards anyone who disagrees with our own opinion. In the course of a single day I watched a Facebook friend confidently declare his stance on the slap, be taken completely and articulately apart for his stance, then painfully retract his stance while claiming everyone else was just as bad as him for having any stance at all. He judged, was judged, and judged us back for being judgy.

I personally didn't contribute to this public judgefest, preferring to judge him privately from a distance. While I love watching internet conflict, I hate to engage in it. Our nervous systems can't tell the difference between real physical danger and online conflict, and so the fight or flight kicks in just the same. With nowhere for the adrenalin to go, low-stakes arguments become pointless ragefests where personal attacks quickly sub in for reasoned discussion. Much more fun to secretly dock a few friendship points and keep his file under advisement.

I'm not sure I have a problem with the Smith uproar itself and the maelstrom of judgment that has come with it. But as a result of his reaction, we've had some interesting public conversations about what's permissible in terms of both comedy and violence. For perspective, in this country we've done away with provocation as a defence in violent crimes. That means as a society we've agreed that humiliation is not permission to hit someone. You can't mitigate the legal consequences of your actions by claiming someone gave you big feelings. In America, "fighting words" is still a legal defence that in some cases supersedes the much-vaunted right to free speech and, even though it seldom succeeds, the fact that it's still on the books is a tacit cultural acceptance that getting lippy can get you a punch up the bracket.

A surprising number of my own online acquaintances have revealed interesting attitudes towards "justified" violence and the appropriateness of "defending" the honour of an adult woman, even when that woman is Jada Pinkett Smith. Articulate, successful, terrifying Pinkett Smith is a woman so capable of her own defence that Smith's stupid reaction was more of an insult to her than the joke was. The only reason they haven't weaponised her death-stare as a new form of taser is that the CIA are too scared to ask her.

Unlike a slap, there are no legal consequences for "punching down" or making someone less powerful the butt of your joke, but it's increasingly frowned on in comedy. It's no longer as acceptable to make jokes at the expense of race, gender, weight, sexual orientation, or disability. Some people think that means today's comedy is being cancelled or gagged, but in this country we've never had a more thriving comedy scene, with emerging diverse, delightful, interesting, even kind funny voices. American comedy though loves a roast, and they've brought that gleeful genre of public humiliation into their awards night banter as though bullying is fun for everyone. They've forgotten, perhaps, that the victim of a formal roast gets a right of reply at the end, the chance to annihilate the roasters and have the final say. Smith helped himself to that opportunity, but unfortunately forgot to use his words.

In any case, the Smith debacle was just the latest in a long line of events that encouraged us to review our goalposts of acceptable social behaviour and also invited us to edit our friend lists. The problem with doing this is that it reduces people to a single issue, something we've seen frequently with the opinion minefields of parenting, pandemics and policy. Anti-vax? Out you go! Don't like immigrants? Delete! You were smacked and you turned out fine? Bye! Never mind that the person you're throwing away is also kind to animals or does marathons for charity or is just, you know, a complex and fallible human being capable of love and growth. Shun! What is it doing to us, this ubiquitous platform for judging each other?

On the one hand, the internet has given us a wider range of voices which is, overall, a positive. That includes bigoted ranters but it also includes billions of people who were traditionally marginalised. Our overall perspective is widening and we have access to ideas and ways of thinking we've never encountered before. But that's also scary, so we intensify the process of acceptance and ostracism. Criteria for belonging narrows and becomes niche.

One slightly divergent opinion can mean a rapid pile-on followed by a shunning, a public shaming equivalent to being put in stocks in the village square and pelted with tomatoes as an example to others. Groups are refined and honed to a tiny perfect consensus of like-minded individuals until the admin makes a dramatic post about burnout and shuts down the whole thing.

On the whole, some judgment is healthy, especially because we can see you doing that at the red light. It's how some people find out, to their surprise, that the rest of us think violence isn't okay, even dressed up as gallantry. It defines the fringes: what's desirable, what's tolerable, what's borderline, what's intolerable. Making judgments is how we learn who we are and who we want to be, especially as a society, and the conversations around it can be opportunities to grow. Some of you will disagree with me and you can feel free to write a devastating tweet about it.

I'll judge you for it.