You Didn’t See Much

The old man watched the boy from across the parking lot and he knew what the boy was before he knew his name. He knew it the way a man knows weather. The boy didn’t look up. That was enough.

We are very good at this. We see one thing and we build a world from it. We do it fast and we do it quietly and we rarely notice we are doing it at all. The old decide about the young. The young decide about the old. Nobody asks how many people either side actually sat with before the verdict came in. Nobody asks because nobody thinks a verdict needs that kind of evidence. You saw what you saw.

But you didn’t see much.

There is a word for this. Not a clinical term, not a sociological category. Just a plain description of a common failure. Call it myopoly: the habit of forming totalizing judgments from a narrow sample. The periscope gives you a real view. That is the problem. You see something true, something actual, a genuine slice of a person or a generation or a political tribe, and you mistake that column of light for the whole ocean.

The writer of Proverbs saw it clearly: “The one who states his case first seems right, until the other comes and examines him” (Prov 18.17). Jesus pressed it further: “Do not judge by appearances, but judge with right judgment” (John 7.24). James watches the early church form verdicts about people before they even know them and calls it what it is (James 2.1-4). The pattern runs through Scripture because it runs through us. We trust our impressions more than we trust the slow work of proximity.

That is the real issue. Myopoly is not just an intellectual error. It is a failure of love. You cannot genuinely love someone you have caricatured. The flattening protects you from the cost of actually knowing them. “Lazy.” “Out of touch.” “Those people.” “That side.” The label does its work and the relationship never has to happen. We do this with generations, with political opponents, with people of a different ethnicity or background, with people from different theological traditions, with anyone whose complexity would inconvenience the verdict we have already reached.

Jesus did not operate this way. He sat with people long enough to know them, not just assess them. He asked questions before he gave verdicts. He pressed through the caricature to the person beneath it.

The call is the same for us. Not to suspend all judgment, but to earn it. Go sit with the person you have already decided about. Stay long enough to be wrong about them. That is not weakness. It is the beginning of wisdom, and it is very close to what love actually looks like.

~PW 🌮🛶