The Good Place, Ethics 101, and Spoilers, Spoilers, Spoilers

Warning: We’re going to have spoilers for The Good Place in here. I’m going to assume that I’m the last person on the planet to watch it and talk about it accordingly. If, however, you haven’t seen it and want to watch it spoiler-free, it’s streaming on Netflix. It’s got enjoyable characters, some belly laughs, some sensible chuckles, some first-year philosophy stuff, some third-year philosophy stuff, and it’s not bad. Seriously, if you haven’t watched it yet, go and check out the first episode. You’ll then know whether you want to experience the show unspoiled or not.

I think it was either 2nd or 3rd grade when about a quarter of the precocious kids in the class drew maps of Heaven. The usual setpieces showed up… the pearly gates, God’s Throne, the live music venues. The interesting parts of the map were to be found beyond the boilerplate. There were playgrounds, and amusement parks, and ice cream parlors, and candy shoppes, and various kids put various relatives’ new homes in various places. I don’t even remember what I drew… I’m sure it must have been half Big Rock Candy Mountain (For Kids) and half Cedar Point (minus the Demon Drop). I remember one kid’s though… she had a playground on there and down, in the bottom right corner, a swing. Just a single swing all by itself. I asked about it and she said that the playground would be for people who wanted to all play together but the swing would be hers for when she would want to swing by herself.

That single swing was probably what made me run over and draw my own map. Even now, that one single swing is the only thing that I remember from all of the maps done by that one little corner of the class.

Anyway. The Good Place.

The Good Place is a television show about The Afterlife and Morals/Ethics and all that crap. Six core characters: The Boss, The Assistant, The Protagonist, The Philosopher, The Cosmopolitan Socialite, and The Fool. It’s like Friends, only without the coffee. The Boss and The Assistant are in charge. The Protagonist, The Philosopher, The Cosmopolitan Socialite, and The Fool are wandering around in The Good Place and trying to figure out why they are so very stressed out.

There isn’t a God or anything. It’s a Good Place without being able to talk to God about life and what happened or why. Remember Dogma? Remember Buddy Christ? This is the Christianity of Buddy Christ without the Christ… just the Buddy.

Now, I knew going into it that Eleanor and The Gang wasn’t really in The Good Place but they were in The Bad Place (and I understand that it was a fun ride for the people at home watching the show as it aired because, at first, there was no reason to believe that the various narrators were unreliable). It was a lot of fun to watch these (surprisingly likable) characters figure out that they were in The Bad Place.

Along the way, we got a lot of fun little philosophical thought experiments, the most famous being the whole “Trolley Problem”.

Yeah, that was fun. But the big one that I saw going on the entire time that they never explicitly named (as far as I can tell) is the Allegory of The Long Spoons. It was a popular sermon opening way back in the 80’s and 90’s. One of the ministers I grew up with once gave a sermon about it and the basic story goes something like this:

Hell is a long banquet table that is loaded with all kinds of food. There are low chandeliers hanging over the food and everyone’s elbows are locked, keeping their arms straight. They are holding long spoons that make it impossible to feed themselves and they look out over this sumptuous feast and they are very hungry.

Heaven is a long banquet table that is loaded with all kinds of food. There are low chandeliers hanging over the food and everyone’s elbows are locked, keeping their arms straight. They are holding long spoons that make it impossible to feed themselves and they look out over this sumptuous feast and they are feeding each other.

Or, as Sartre would put it, The Bad Place is Other People.

But the interesting thing about the show is that they explore how people who are, basically, not-that-bad who, when given the opportunity, can help each other be better people. As they help each other become better, they become better at helping each other become better. Get this: They eventually become good enough to want to go back and be better humans (like, the first time… undoing their deaths) and they want to go back and help the loved ones they left behind to be better humans.

And because we keep raising the stakes, when they figure out how the afterlife works, they want to make a better afterlife!

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Now, I’m going to make a short aside and mention a point made by one of my professors back in one of my comparative religion courses. One of the big differences between Judaism/Christianity and Hinduism/Buddhism is whether or not existence is Good or not.

In the beginning of Genesis, they really get into how God created the heavens and the earth and the word that keeps showing up over and over again is “good”. Some excerpts:

And God saw the light and that it was good. And God called the dry land Earth; and the gathering together of the waters called he Seas: and God saw that it was good. And God called the dry land Earth; and the gathering together of the waters called he Seas: and God saw that it was good. And God created great whales, and every living creature that moveth, which the waters brought forth abundantly, after their kind, and every winged fowl after his kind: and God saw that it was good. And God created great whales, and every living creature that moveth, which the waters brought forth abundantly, after their kind, and every winged fowl after his kind: and God saw that it was good. And God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good.

These things are good! Light is good! Water is good! Animals are good! People are good! Existence is *GOOD*!

Buddhism? Man, this sucks. Stop the ride, I want to get off. Gimme some Nirvana and let me escape the cycle. Okay. Maybe I’ll stick around as a Bodhisattva and say something like “having crossed the stream of samsara, maybe I can help living beings to cross. Being liberated, maybe I can liberate others. Being comforted, maybe I can comfort others. Being finally released, maybe I can release others.” And, you know, help them get off the dang wheel.

And so the two differences were whether existence was a good thing or whether it was something to leave behind.

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So now I need to talk about part of the problem that I have with the show. They showed us how the accounting of whether a person deserved to go to The Good Place vs. The Bad Place was done. I mean, above and beyond how they hinted in the first episode that there was a points system.

In season 3 it is revealed that, over time, life got so very complicated that even when you did a good or neutral thing, it came bundled with so very many bad things that it was impossible to get enough points to make it into The Good Place. Like, if you bought sweets for your mom, that used to be a good thing. But it turns out that in the modern era the chocolate is made with slave labor and there are scandals involved with the school maintained by the chocolate company’s endowment and now you aren’t merely buying chocolate, you’re putting money into the pocket of a horrible person. This means that a gift that, at one time, would get you a cool handful of positive points now gets you negative points. Buy a burger? Welp, the tomatoes were picked with slave labor. Watch a show on Nick at Nite? I hope it isn’t Mike & Molly! So on and so forth to the point where the guy who took mushrooms and saw how morality worked and changed his life to grow his own lentils and recycle his own wastewater ended up with a negative total.

And I suppose that a pure utilitarian calculus feels vaguely accurate to any given person making their way in the modern world. Every few days a new article comes out explaining that this or that thing that was okay last week is really problematic this week. Eggs are bad for you! Coffee is bad for you! You should be putting peas in your guacamole!

Utilitarian points swing from green to red at the drop of a hat. Worse than that, there’s a strange dynamic that attends the idea of “intention”. If you do a good thing with the intention of getting good points? Whoopsie. You no longer get the points. You have to help people because you’re pure of heart, not because you want some benefit for helping them.

It very much feels like a way for people with a lot of red points to muddle the calculus of someone else doing a good job of accumulating green points. “Ah, they had bad intentions.” Whammo. They no longer have the points. Whew. Now I don’t feel so bad about my Spicy Deluxe Chicken Sandwich.

But that only seemed to work one way, didn’t it? Your intentions can keep you from getting Good Points. When it comes to whether your intentions keep you from getting Bad Points when you do something like buy your mom some chocolate? Well, ignorance of the school maintained by the chocolate company’s endowment is no excuse. Those points get on your ledger no matter what.

Well, The Gang goes on to have an adventure where all this information comes to light. They say “We’ve got to do something about this!” and they find and eventually make their case to a judge. The judge then looks at this and agrees and concludes that, hey, this system sucks and we should get rid of it. Just wipe the slate clean and blow everybody away. Annihilation. No more problems.

Well, The Gang freaks out at this threat of annihilation. They come up with a way out from everybody being annihilated. They hammer out that that the negative point totals shouldn’t be an *ETERNAL* thing but should give everybody an opportunity for a more Purgatorial Place.

A place where you go, after you die, where you are forced to deal with your shortcomings, work on your bad parts, sand off the rough edges, and turn things around. Finally figure it out. Do it right and, finally, go to The Good Place.

CS Lewis has a great line about this in his book Letters to Malcolm:

The right view returns magnificently in Newman’s Dream. There, if I remember it rightly, the saved soul, at the very foot of the throne, begs to be taken away and cleansed. It cannot bear for a moment longer “With its darkness to affront that light.” Religion has reclaimed Purgatory.

Our souls demand Purgatory, don’t they? Would it not break the heart if God said to us, “It is true, my son, that your breath smells and your rags drip with mud and slime, but we are charitable here and no one will upbraid you with these things, nor draw away from you. Enter into the joy.”? Should we not reply, “With submission, sir, and if there is no objection, I’d rather be cleaned first.” “It may hurt, you know”–“Even so, sir.”

(I admit. This is a nice thought.)

They establish the new purgatorial system, they get it going, they walk around the new neighborhoods and hear that the first folks to make it to the other side happen to be THE GANG THEMSELVES!!! By saving the souls of everyone, selflessly, they managed to nudge their numbers into the green. Congrats, Charlie. You got your golden ticket.

They find themselves in The Good Place. FOR REAL THIS TIME! And it turns out that The Good Place is a lot like those maps that kids drew back in 2nd Grade. Stardust Milkshakes! Go-Kart Monkeys! Greece! But it turns out that Heaven is not people feeding each other. Heaven is, instead, Wireheading. And, worse than that, it’s wireheading that you get tired of.

And so what is the solution to a Wirehead heaven? The Gang figures it out: The answer is Annihilation. Wirehead until you get tired of it. Then walk through the gateway and get off the wheel entirely.

They did have *ONE* major exception, though… and this exception was the one that saved the finale (if only by a little): One of our main characters decided that she wanted to stop being a wirehead and, instead, get a job as an architect of Purgatory. The Bodhisattva who puts off walking through the door in order to help others get off of the wheel of pain and enter the pearly gates to become a wirehead.

As for the other three, we see them walk through the gate one by one by one. The truly disappointing ending was that of our Protagonist and the Philosopher. Our Protagonist would have been delighted to spend all of eternity walking around with her soulmate. Go get the milkshake. Go ride the go-karts. Go to Greece. And the Philosopher eventually finds himself at ease and wants to walk through that door. Our protagonist who would have been cool with an eternity of wireheading with her soulmate quickly finds herself walking through the door… not to be with him but just to no longer be without him.

It all culminates in the judge’s original plan.

The show started off as a toothless Buddy Christianity without the Christianity, it ends up being Nirvana without the Buddha.

I suppose that I can see the argument that struggle gives meaning and that these guys were at their most fulfilled when they were fighting to make it to The Good Place rather than actually being there, but it also seems strange to say that Sisyphus is really the guy who has meaning and the guy who made it to the other side of Moral Philosophy is the guy who will eventually just want to walk away… and, after him, because he is gone, his soulmate wanders off as well.

The show was a fun journey and provided a lot of fun things to think about and talk about and maybe even mentally draw a map of what heaven would be like… but, at the end, their moral takeaways have nothing at all at the end of them. Just extra steps before they get to nothing at all.