Our world forms us to become judgmental. This happens simultaneously with our ongoing training as Americans to be non-judgmental—that is, tolerant—of everyone else. That we’re taught it is important to be non-judgmental (tolerant) is rather obvious. It’s an explicit value articulated in the media and our educational system, and even (perhaps often) within the Christian tradition. So I won’t say much about that here.
To make my point, however, that we’re formed to be judgmental, I must reflect on something that’s not so obvious. And to do that, I have to say a few other helpful things first.
A book that’s been critically important to my thinking about Christian formation (and cultural theory) in recent years has been Jamie Smith’s Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation. I’ve suggested it to so many people who’ve also liked it—and with the help of some colleagues made it required reading at my seminary for worship students. But it’s not the simplest read. It takes some wrestling and pondering.
I’m now using it with my undergraduates to think about how culture has formed us. In the book, Smith argues that culture often forms us unwittingly through ingrained habits and rituals that function like liturgies. He calls them “secular liturgies.” The analogy to the church’s liturgy is quite intentional. And if you read the book, his argument that culture can be understood as constituted by “secular liturgies” is quite compelling. So I encourage you to read it. And I promise you’ll get more out of it than that if you invest the time in reflecting on Jamie’s work and the various sundry applications of it to your life. He makes it easy, using examples from popular literature, movies, the mall, TV, the university, sports, and even the Pledge of Allegiance to make his points concrete.
One of his main arguments is about how we are formed as human beings to be particular kinds of people in a manner that operates at a pre-reflective or pre-conscious register. On this point, he means to push back against the rather staid position in Western thinking that, as autonomous agents (which we imagine ourselves to be, since that is what we’ve been taught we are in the story of Western anthropology), we deliberately come to believe everything we believe by choice. Or, in terms of the things we do, they are done as matters of intentional deliberation. Jamie rejects this position. And he is not alone in pushing back on this view. Even recent NYT bestsellers are telling us otherwise—mind you they’re doing so by making the case scientifically borrowing from psychology, neurology, and cognitive philosophy: check out David Brook’s The Social Animal and/or Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow (I recommend both).
The French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu has also argued convincingly that our formation as human beings is not primarily a cognitive phenomenon, but something much more bodily oriented. Thus, for Bourdieu, our thinking and reflection emerges from our primal and chief means of engagement with and comportment toward the world—our bodies. He uses the language of “practice” to help us understand this. His work gives an account for why we do what we do, not by accounting for our “thinking and deliberation” regarding our actions, but by accounting for how the logic of practice is pre-cognitive and pre-reflective. Bourdieu describes our embodied lives as trained toward certain dispositions through regular habitual practices in which we participate. These dispositions structure our engagement with the world. He gives a name to these dispositions, calling them habitus. Our habitus governs our actions at a level below the cognitive and reflective register. The focus isn’t on our brains or minds but on our bodies.
At the risk of scaring some readers off, it’s worth quoting Bourdieu on this very central idea within his work. If this passage doesn’t seem very clear, keep in mind part of the problem Bourdieu has in his writing is that he is trying to challenge deeply ingrained assumptions, ways of thinking that we simply take for granted and which have been rooted in the West for three centuries. Our present condition as captive to a certain way of thinking about and imagining “why we do what we do” prevents us from understanding him easily.
The conditionings associated with a particular class of conditions of existence produce habitus, systems of durable, transposable dispositions, structured structures predisposed to function as structuring structures, that is, as principles which generate and organize practices and representations that can be objectively adapted to their outcomes without presupposing a conscious aiming at ends or an express mastery of the operations necessary in order to attain them. Objectively “regulated” and “regular” without being in any way the product of obedience to rules, they can be collectively orchestrated without being the product of the organizing action of a conductor. (The Logic of Practice, 53)
Here we see Bourdieu explicitly pointing up the nature of habitus as an ordered, structured and structuring register of our lives that functions explicitly at a non-cognitive level. There is no need for a “conductor.” There is no need for the intentional “following of rules” or “aiming at certain ends.” These are not, however, ruled out as impossible or dismissed, but Bourdieu’s point is to reorient our imagination of what it means to be human actors who explain why we do what we do, forcing us to take into account a substantial part of who we are that does not emerge from our “free will,” our freely made decisions, or rational deliberations about what is to be done.
From the time each of us was very young—I mean, from moment after we were born (and now we ought to be paying attention to our formation in the womb it seems)—our dispositions were being created. We were developing a habitus, or better, a habitus was happening to us, on account of how we were engaged with others in our experience of the world. In the same way, this still happens. In fact, it’s ongoing throughout our lives. Our habitus continues to be shaped as much as it shapes our engagement with and comportment toward the world. We constantly engaged with the world in a variety of ways and this engagement is always rubbing off on us. Our world is full of “liturgies” according to Smith—that’s part of what constitutes and forms “culture” in his argument—and human beings are always formed by the cultures in which they participate. Smith’s Desiring the Kingdom argues that our engagement with the world, as it is inevitably communal, shapes our dispositions, and thus forms us to be certain kinds of people. Liturgies of any kind foster habitus.
Thus I’ve reached a point where I’m ready to make my suggestion of how we are passively trained to be judgmental.
Our culture provides many opportunities for us to be trained—to develop a disposition, a habitus—to become judgmental. Since this post has gone on for some time, in the next day or two, I’ll supplement this one with some concrete examples of how I see this happening.
Lived Theology 
I too have read and appreciated Smith’s book, but I have a question. While I am familiar with some contemporary French thought, I haven’t read Bourdieu. A brief internet scan left me wondering, what does Bourdieu’s idea of habitus give us that Aquinas via Aristotle (or, if you prefer, Macintyre) does not? To me it seems, not much. Perhaps you could rouse me from my dogmatic slumber? (BTW I enjoyed your New Blackfriars article on Pieper and challenging the cultural imaginary.)
This is a great question. And I’m happy to answer, but I’m at best only familiar with MacIntyre, and Aristotle on practice through him.
MacIntyre’s take on practices is indeed different from Bourdieu and I think Bourdieu thus extends the conversation on practices. This is because in a sense, they overlap. MacIntyre focuses his discussion of practices within the confines of his discussion of understanding communities, traditions, and virtues. He wants to deal with the issue of why we do what we do, but he really wants to handle the issue of how we justify our narrative for explaining ourselves. (His main concern it seems, is recovering a good moral tradition to help us find a way out of our modern moral morass) We do what we do because we are members of a community that shares a common narrative, out of which certain practices emerge which aim us toward the good life. Those practices foster in us the ability to attain the good life (i.e., make us virtuous).
Bourdieu’s contribution I think, goes toward the reasons for “why we do what we do” that verge on the unexplainable. As I noted, we can get at how we came to be shaped to do the things we do by looking at our habits or rituals or the liturgies in which we engage (secular or otherwise), but they might not help us answer every time the question is posed “why did you do that?” That’s because such formation teaches us the rules of the game at a bodily level. This is deeper than MacIntyre’s narrative and tradition. Indeed, there is overlap, but that’s why I say I think Bourdieu “extends” the conversation on practice. By taking us into some reflection on the pre-cognitive and pre-reflective register of our practice (the logic of practice that is different that the logic of the logician [Bourdieu, 86]), he teaches us that there is something that is irreducible about our formation which comes through practices. Our dispositions/habitus that emerge via rituals and liturgies might not always be articulable via narrative. They may still fit into a narrative and be intelligible according to one, but I might not always be able to explain why or how I do what I do because on the level of reflection such an explanation is just out of reach. Rather, Bourdieu helps us see that there is still a place for understanding ourselves in this way, and the logic of our practice, but does not require us to craft an explanation that stands up to the rules of the intellectualist game (that is, one wherein everything is explicable to the most minute detail). Bourdieu leaves room, in a scheme that cooperates with and extends MacIntyre, for practices and reasons for doing things, that operate at a bodily level, known by “feel,” and expressed as “skills” or “know-how” rather than “know-what.”