The Good Place is wrong on the internet
Jan. 31st, 2018 08:30 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
enemyofperfectSo yesterday I learned that the official The Good Place twitter account has invited us to place ourselves on a chart whose X axis ranges from Jason to Tahani and whose Y axis ranges from Chidi to Eleanor. And I mean, I can see that, I guess -- you've got social class going in one direction and apparent goodness in the other. That kind of works.
But also, that way of arranging them is absolutely wrong and I'm incensed. So have some tl;dr!
For one thing, half of the entire point of The Good Place is presenting us with various ideals of goodness and then complicating all of them, and Chidi is by no means immune! I don't happen to agree with the interpretation I've seen floating around that he cares more about the appearance of moral purity than he does about the actual morality of his actions -- I think his concern for what's right is sincere, just poorly implemented -- but his overwhelming terror of making the wrong choice is clearly a huge impediment to ever actually making the right one. He can't be an exemplar of goodness because he's too busy overthinking what that means.
And that makes his opposite Jason, not Eleanor. Because Eleanor doesn't overthink things, but she rarely underthinks them, either -- it's just that her interests, prior to her death, were entirely orthogonal to what's ethical. Eleanor is great at analyzing a situation exactly enough to take effective action; for her own purposes, she tends to think more or less exactly the right amount.
But Jason, oh my gosh. Sweet, innocent Jason, who would probably eat forbidden fruit not out of defiance or even curiosity, but just because it looked so good and he kind of forgot it was off limits. Jason is the perfect opposite to Chidi's anxious inhibition, because Jason is a creature of almost pure impulse.
And sometimes those impulses are very good! He has a natural kindness that Chidi can only rarely escape his demons long enough to match. But sometimes Jason also throws molotov cocktails at the boat of someone who annoyed him. Following whatever you feel in the moment isn't a guaranteed path to goodness, either.
Eleanor's problem, meanwhile, isn't that she deliberates too much or too little -- it's that she refuses to take other people's feelings into account at all. What, you want her to stake her own happiness on what a bunch of buzzkills think of her? Nice try, losers! She has way too much self-preservation to fall for that. So she's doggedly independent, relying on no one to give her what she'd rather scrounge up for herself. Caring about anything outside herself is just a surefire way of getting hurt.
And of course that makes her opposite Tahani, who couldn't stop caring what other people think about her if her life depended on it. The admiration of others is her only source of self-worth -- and that diverts her just as thoroughly from authentic moral consideration as Eleanor's self-absorption does.
How can Tahani think about what's right when she's locked in a never-ending battle for emotional survival? A single lapse, a single misstep, and she could find herself reviled -- or even worse, forgotten. She can't afford to care about anything except what other people think of her.
So that's the true The Good Place personality continuum, in my arrogant opinion -- from worrying far too much about ethics to worrying virtually not at all, and from refusing to think about others to being unable to think about anything else.
And to veer a little farther afield, with spoilers--
It's also fun to consider Michael and Janet, whose relationships with goodness are complicated by the fact that neither of them are human. To Michael, a literal demon, the idea of goodness is deeply foreign, if not irrelevant: he has never before encountered anyone who expected it of him, and being approximately immortal and without obvious physical needs, he initially sees little need for bonds of solidarity with other sentient beings. Meanwhile Janet's situation is even more interesting: while Michael lacks humanity, Janet starts out arguably lacking even a self, so while it's integral to her nature to provide any form of assistance requested of her, it's unclear whether she herself has any opinion about her actions. Can goodness as we understand it exist in the absence of self-awareness or choice?
I'm crossing my fingers for some big developments on that last point in the season finale, incidentally -- it went by pretty quickly in the all the latest episode's excitement, but Janet just casually realized that if she wanted her friends to have any chance of survival, she had to learn how to do a lot of bad things really quickly, which is an enormous shift in her worldview. But I guess we'll see about that soon enough.
And in the meantime, I just so much love that all of the cast have their ethical strengths and weaknesses, and that the show has yet to hold up any single way of approaching moral questions as Objectively True and Right. If it locates the idea of goodness in any one thing -- rather than viewing it as a complex tangle of competing concerns that we all have to navigate subjectively -- it's in finding value in each other... and yet I find a lot of hope, too, in the fact that Eleanor, whose besetting sin is basically valuing herself to the exclusion of others, is in some ways the best of the lot.
Because who says that goodness is only being good to others? When I look at the satisfaction Eleanor finds in successfully doing the right thing, or for that matter at Tahani's impassioned speech to her parents in this last episode, I feel like the show is telling us that finding a way to love yourself -- insisting on it, even or especially if nobody else does -- is a virtue too.
But also, that way of arranging them is absolutely wrong and I'm incensed. So have some tl;dr!
For one thing, half of the entire point of The Good Place is presenting us with various ideals of goodness and then complicating all of them, and Chidi is by no means immune! I don't happen to agree with the interpretation I've seen floating around that he cares more about the appearance of moral purity than he does about the actual morality of his actions -- I think his concern for what's right is sincere, just poorly implemented -- but his overwhelming terror of making the wrong choice is clearly a huge impediment to ever actually making the right one. He can't be an exemplar of goodness because he's too busy overthinking what that means.
And that makes his opposite Jason, not Eleanor. Because Eleanor doesn't overthink things, but she rarely underthinks them, either -- it's just that her interests, prior to her death, were entirely orthogonal to what's ethical. Eleanor is great at analyzing a situation exactly enough to take effective action; for her own purposes, she tends to think more or less exactly the right amount.
But Jason, oh my gosh. Sweet, innocent Jason, who would probably eat forbidden fruit not out of defiance or even curiosity, but just because it looked so good and he kind of forgot it was off limits. Jason is the perfect opposite to Chidi's anxious inhibition, because Jason is a creature of almost pure impulse.
And sometimes those impulses are very good! He has a natural kindness that Chidi can only rarely escape his demons long enough to match. But sometimes Jason also throws molotov cocktails at the boat of someone who annoyed him. Following whatever you feel in the moment isn't a guaranteed path to goodness, either.
Eleanor's problem, meanwhile, isn't that she deliberates too much or too little -- it's that she refuses to take other people's feelings into account at all. What, you want her to stake her own happiness on what a bunch of buzzkills think of her? Nice try, losers! She has way too much self-preservation to fall for that. So she's doggedly independent, relying on no one to give her what she'd rather scrounge up for herself. Caring about anything outside herself is just a surefire way of getting hurt.
And of course that makes her opposite Tahani, who couldn't stop caring what other people think about her if her life depended on it. The admiration of others is her only source of self-worth -- and that diverts her just as thoroughly from authentic moral consideration as Eleanor's self-absorption does.
How can Tahani think about what's right when she's locked in a never-ending battle for emotional survival? A single lapse, a single misstep, and she could find herself reviled -- or even worse, forgotten. She can't afford to care about anything except what other people think of her.
So that's the true The Good Place personality continuum, in my arrogant opinion -- from worrying far too much about ethics to worrying virtually not at all, and from refusing to think about others to being unable to think about anything else.
And to veer a little farther afield, with spoilers--
It's also fun to consider Michael and Janet, whose relationships with goodness are complicated by the fact that neither of them are human. To Michael, a literal demon, the idea of goodness is deeply foreign, if not irrelevant: he has never before encountered anyone who expected it of him, and being approximately immortal and without obvious physical needs, he initially sees little need for bonds of solidarity with other sentient beings. Meanwhile Janet's situation is even more interesting: while Michael lacks humanity, Janet starts out arguably lacking even a self, so while it's integral to her nature to provide any form of assistance requested of her, it's unclear whether she herself has any opinion about her actions. Can goodness as we understand it exist in the absence of self-awareness or choice?
I'm crossing my fingers for some big developments on that last point in the season finale, incidentally -- it went by pretty quickly in the all the latest episode's excitement, but Janet just casually realized that if she wanted her friends to have any chance of survival, she had to learn how to do a lot of bad things really quickly, which is an enormous shift in her worldview. But I guess we'll see about that soon enough.
And in the meantime, I just so much love that all of the cast have their ethical strengths and weaknesses, and that the show has yet to hold up any single way of approaching moral questions as Objectively True and Right. If it locates the idea of goodness in any one thing -- rather than viewing it as a complex tangle of competing concerns that we all have to navigate subjectively -- it's in finding value in each other... and yet I find a lot of hope, too, in the fact that Eleanor, whose besetting sin is basically valuing herself to the exclusion of others, is in some ways the best of the lot.
Because who says that goodness is only being good to others? When I look at the satisfaction Eleanor finds in successfully doing the right thing, or for that matter at Tahani's impassioned speech to her parents in this last episode, I feel like the show is telling us that finding a way to love yourself -- insisting on it, even or especially if nobody else does -- is a virtue too.
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