Sound judgment is an essential characteristic of wisdom. It is the ability to weigh, soundly, competing values, alternative courses of action and different ways of looking at things. A person of judgment may be recognized for her self-assurance in the face of seemingly overwhelming amounts of information. Yet a caveat is in order: the claim to sound judgment is a common hallmark of the charlatan.
Real
True Narratives
Judgement on a grand scale:
- Richard Brookhiser, John Marshall: The Man Who Made the Supreme Court (Basic Books, 2018): “Marshall famously transformed the judicial branch into one fully equal to the president and Congress in stature and legitimacy. And he did so by declining to pick political fights he couldn’t win in the short term while declaring broad constitutional principles that would shore up the authority of the courts in the long term.”
- John Paul Stevens, The Making of a Justice: Reflections on My First 94 Years (Little, Brown and Company, 2019): “He was the last of a group of Republican appointees . . . who breathed compassion into the law and put the impact of their decisions on real people above arid theories.”
Bad judgment on a grand scale:
- Andrew J. Bacevich, The Age of Illusions: How America Squandered Its Cold War Victory (Metropolitan/Holt, 2020): “Too much was riding, psychologically and financially, on the economic policies, military posture and cultural orientation that had outmatched the Soviet Union. As a consequence, when that pole star suddenly winked out, we didn’t consider changing course.”
- Fred Kaplan, The Bomb: Presidents, Generals, and the Secret History of Nuclear War (Simon & Schuster, 2020): “It is the story of how high-level officials, generals and presidents have contended with what Kaplan calls “the rabbit hole” of nuclear strategy, whose logic transforms efforts to avoid a nuclear war into plans to fight one, even though doing so would kil millions of people without producing a meaningful victory for anyone.”
- Brendan Simms and Charlie Laderman, Hitler’s American Gamble: Pearl Harbor and Germany’s March to Global War (Basic Books, 2021): “The Decision That Cost Hitler the War”.
Colonialism reflects both egoism and, often, poor judgment; query which feature is the more dominant and germane.
- Kwasi Kwarteng, Ghosts of Empire: Britain’s Legacies in the Modern World (Public Affairs, 2012): on the “catastrophic choices of British colonialists . . .”
Technical and Analytical Readings
Photographs
Documentary and Educational Films
- Rolling Stones – Gimmee Shelter, a documentary chroniclingthe Stones’ tragic decision to employ the Hell’s Angels as peacekeepers at their rock concert
Imaginary
Fictional Narratives
From the dark side:
- Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote (1604): “When Don Quixote decides to take up the cause of knight-errantry, he opens himself to a life of ridicule and defeat, a life that resembles Cervantes’ own life, with its endless reversals of fortune, humiliations, and hopeless struggles. Out of this life of failure and disappointment Cervantes created the ‘mad knight,’ but he also added the curious human nobility and the refusal to succumb to despair in the face of defeat that turns Quixote into something more than a comic character or a ridiculous figure to be mocked.”
- Ian McEwan, Lessons: A Novel (Knopf, 2022): “. . . the hero is seduced by his piano teacher when he’s 14, then abandoned by his wife while he passively watches history unfold.”
Poetry
- Edgar Lee Masters, “Carl Hamblin”
Music: Composers, artists, and major works
Franz Koglmann is known as a champion of cerebral jazz, in a style called “Viennese cool”. He “has spent his career investigating the space between the Viennese school and the cool school, writing and performing intricately detailed, beautifully arranged chamber-like works marked by a stunning elegance of line that one might expect from a former architect.” “He manages to marry his love for the West Coast cool jazz with elements from European modern and classic music composers, especially Franz Schubert, Alban Berg and Anton von Webern.” He has created an impressive set of playlists.
George Szell was a conductor known for his analytical approach to music. An early demonstration of good judgment came when he turned to conducting, after recognizing that he was not likely to succeed as a pianist or composer. Another was in focusing on “those works which I thought I'm best qualified to do, and for which a certain tradition is disappearing with the disappearance of the great conductors who were my contemporaries and my idols and my unpaid teachers.” “With this sharp baton he made incisive patterns that his musicians could read instantan eously, without having to won der at what precise point in the downbeat, for instance, he meant the music to begin.” “His cultivation of the Cleveland Orchestra set an example of discipline and hard work that gradually helped raise the standards of orchestras across America.” His playlists are extensive.
From the comically dark side:
Richard Strauss, Don Quixote, fantastische Variationen über ein Thema ritterlichen Charakters, for cello and orchestra, Op. 35, TrV 184 (1897) (approx. 37-43 ‘), tells in music the story of a man with grand aspirations, and abysmal judgment. “Few characters have captured our imagination than Don Quixote, the befuddled knight—a pathetic, aging oddball who dreams of righting the world’s wrongs. The knight is the protagonist of Miguel Cervantes’ novel Don Quixote or ‘The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha’ of 1605 . . .” “Cervantes tell us briefly about his character and how he became who he was: ‘Through too little sleep and too much reading of books on knighthood, he dried up his brains in such a way that he wholly lost his judgement. His fantasy was filled with those things that he read, of enchantments, quarrels, battles, challenges, wooings, loves, storms . . .” “The old Don has been reading every word he can find on the subject (of chivalry) . . . until his poor old head is so crammed with giants, ogres, enemies, infidels, evil magicians and the like that he is impelled to set forth on his skinny old nag Rosinante, suffocating in his heavy, rusty armor, and put all evil to the sword -— all, of course, in the name of his fair beloved, Dulcinea, whom, needless to say, he has completely made up.” “The work is presented in three sections: an introduction that depicts the gradual deterioration of Don Quijote’s mental health, a group of ten variations corresponding to ten episodes in the novel, and the Epilog which describes Don Quijote’s return to sanity and eventual death.” Top recorded performances are by Strauss and Mainardi in 1933, Reiner and Piatigorsky in 1941, Reiner and Janigro in 1959, Karajan and Fournier in 1965, Boult and du Pré in 1968, Kempe and Tortelier in 1973, Karajan and Meneses in 1986, Schwarz and Harrell in 2001, Zinman and Grossbacher in 2003 ***; and Petrenko and Tuck in 2017.
From the dark side:
- Rodney Lister, Complicated Grief (2014) (approx. 24 ‘): “Grief is necessarily part of the aftermath of war, but Lister is looking deeper into the American psyche, pondering how a nation whose self-image is one of peace somehow never escapes the next war.”
Music: songs and other short pieces
- Green Day, “Wake Me Up When September Ends” (lyrics)
- U2, “Walk On” (lyrics)
Visual Arts
Film and Stage
- The Caine Mutiny, about a ship captain who loses his sense of judgment
- Damn Yankees is an updated musical version of the Faust legend
- Dr. Strangelove, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
- David Holzman’s Diary: way too much information
- Rolling Stones – Gimmer Shelter, a documentary chronicling the Stones’ tragic decision to employ the Hell’s Angels as peacekeepers at their rock concert
- Raising Arizona, about a young couple who cannot conceive, and decide to kidnap one of a set of quintuplets; adding to the theme of poor judgment, the wife was a police officer who repeatedly took her future husband’s mug shot
- Avaze gonjeskh-ha (The Song of Sparrows): a man loses his job, then his judgment