The Good Place, Goofus and Gallant

Okay, I'll just get over my Ted Danson phobia and watch. Maybe not binge, though.

Michael Schur swears he didn’t name Michael, the avuncular architect played by Ted Danson on Schur’s metaphysical sitcom, “The Good Place,” after himself. The character was actually based on St. Michael the Archangel, who according to Christian tradition is involved in the final judgment of souls.

But the parallels are undeniable. Over four seasons on the NBC comedy, both Michaels spent their time devising elaborate, twisty fictions and trying to settle on a suitably just plan for the afterlife.

“That character is some sort of a showrunner — he’s writing scenarios and putting people in different positions,” Schur said recently. “I gave up trying to argue and have just accepted the fact that my subconscious will live on the show.”

“The Good Place” is ending this week, wrapping up Thursday night on NBC with the series finale followed by a live panel discussion, hosted by Seth Meyers, with Schur and the cast — Danson, Kristen Bell, William Jackson Harper, Jameela Jamil, Manny Jacinto and D’Arcy Carden.... (continues)

==
Help is other people
Through a series of metaphysical twists (this is a rare sitcom with the momentum and galaxy-brain surprises of a drama like “Lost”), we discover that eternity is broken: No humans have qualified for heaven in centuries, less because we’re so bad than because the point-based system is out of whack.




The series was largely about the obligation to help others be good.

So Eleanor sets out to fix it, with the expertise of Chidi (William Jackson Harper), a student of moral philosophy; Tahani (Jameela Jamil), a self-absorbed socialite; and Jason, (Manny Jacinto) a small-time Florida criminal and Molotov cocktail enthusiast. Each alone is a Goofus. Put together — and abetted by a renegade demon (Ted Danson) and a hypercompetent A.I. assistant (D’Arcy Carden) — they may make enough of a Gallant to fix the universe.

It’s that “together” that connects “The Good Place” to Schur’s other communitarian comedies. A lot of TV series are about what it means to be good — even “Breaking Bad” was, albeit using a negative example. What distinguishes this one is that it’s ultimately about our obligation to help other people to be good, to tutor and challenge one another, to learn and to pass lessons along.
As its trial-and-comedy-of-errors shows, you can push yourself, work the program and accrue the points, but it’s nigh impossible to do it alone. An entirely individual morality, in its vision, is a kind of solipsism doomed to fail. Making a better world — or even one better person — has to be a team effort. (One Season 4 episode had the sunny-Sartre title, “Help Is Other People.”)

“The Good Place,” charitably, blames our circumstances, not ourselves, for this situation. Modern life, it argues, has become so complicated, the effects of our actions so far-reaching and unpredictable, that it’s impossible to live a good life on the first blundering try. (One small but resonant example is Chidi’s love of almond milk, the virtuous-seeming beverage with the giant water-usage footprint.)
nyt
==
A big part of my early moral education. Seriously.


g&g
==
Postscript. I watched the finale and I liked it. Turns out the denizens of paradise find eternity a drag, and only perk up when they're shown where to find the exit. Nice concluding secular message. And Hypatia of Alexandria too! Thanks again, Ed.


https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/tv/a30653064/hypatia-of-alexandria-lisa-kudrow-the-good-place-season-4-explained/


Lisa Kudrow's The Good Place Hypatia of Alexandria Cameo Explained - Why Chidi Met Hypatia in Season 4 - esquire.com
In introducing Chidi to Lisa Kudrow's Hypatia of Alexandria—a cutting-edge feminist scholar from ancient Egypt—The Good Place makes a sly comment about what kind of person gets into heaven.
www.esquire.com

How to post Google Book excerpts etc.

FYI-

1. Go to Google Books. If the selection you want to excerpt has a Preview, click on it.
2. Click on the link icon above the book.
3. Copy ("Ctrl-C") the Embed code that just popped up.
4. Paste ("Ctrl-V") that code into your post.

For instance,

How to post a snippet of text and link to the rest of it:

1. Copy the selection you want to excerpt.
2. Paste that into your post.
3. If it doesn't display correctly, highlight it and click on the "Remove formatting" (Tx) icon 
4. Type ("continues") at the end of the text ...
5. Highlight ("continues") ...
6. Paste the URL address onto ("continues")

For instance,

In a New Dystopian Novel, the Country is AutoAmerica, but Baseball Is Still Its Pastime

by Dwight Garner

The best thing about being God, Iris Murdoch wrote, would be making the heads. The best thing about writing speculative or dystopian fiction, surely, is updating human language, pushing strange new words into a reader’s mind.

Gish Jen’s densely imagined if static new novel, “The Resisters,” is set in a future surveillance state known as AutoAmerica. The ice caps have melted, and much of the land is underwater. A racial and class divide has cleaved the population... (continues)

Descartes's BS on the Necessity of God for Morality

This comment goes back to our discussion of the idea that God is required for morality, or meaning in life, or human goodness.

René Descartes, as explained in his Meditations on the First Philosophy (1641), using his method of doubt, knew that he existed as a thinking thing, because he concluded that he must exist to doubt that he exists. He knew that God exists and is real because, as Anslem argued in 1078, he could conceive of God in his mind. From these two bits of knowledge, he knew that substances were real.

In his dedicatory letter of the Meditations to the faculty of theology at the Sorbonne, he went further. He said that the God’s existence is necessary.

“[I]n the case of unbelivers, it seems there is no religion, and practically no moral virtue, that they can be persuaded to adopt until these two truths (the existence of God and the immortality of the soul) are proved to them by natural reason. And since in this life the rewards offered to vice are often greater than the rewards of virtue, few people would prefer what is right to what is expedient if they did not fear God or have the expectation of an after-life.”

This just bothered me. I was all set up to read the rational argument of why God is necessary for morality, and right up front he asserts a premise which is just, forgive me, bullshit*.

To say that humans prefer vice to virtue not an argument, it’s just an assertion, with no support. In fact, it may be just flat out wrong. The ancient Greet philosophers taught that humanity’s ultimate good was happiness. Aristotle taught that man achieved Eudaimonia (happiness) through the exercise of virtues. He gave us virtue ethics, moral philosophy based on character. Epicurus found happiness in pleasure, but in intellectual pleasure, not vice.

It has been suggested to me that Descartes's assertions may have been colored by to whom he was writing; i.e., the faculty of the theology department. If that is the case, calling bullshit on his premise is just being descriptive of his intent to persuade.

*Bullshit involves language intended to persuade by impressing and overwhelming a reader or listener, with a blatant disregard for truth and logical coherence; statements produced without particular concern of truth, as distinguished from a deliberate, manipulative lie intended to subvert the truth. It is this lack of connection to a concern with truth—this indifference to how things really are—that is the essence of bullshit. Quiz question: give an example of a prominent American president who is a bullshit artist. 

Spring 2020 Honors Lecture Series - Climate Change

MIDTERM REPORT PRESENTATIONS

Declare your topic by Feb. 6, in a comment below this post. Indicate whether you're interested in collaborating with a classmate or prefer to do a solo report.

You can do a solo report or team up with a classmate. I suggest anchoring your report to a specific text, something we're not already reading as a class. 

Talk to us for about 10 minutes and lead discussion. Give us a short (3 or 4 questions) quiz over your report and a couple of discussion questions. Your quiz should cover the presentation and anything you'd care to post and have us look at in advance. Your quiz questions are eligible for inclusion on the first exam.

Feb 11 - Ed, "The Blackstone Sermon"

Feb 13 - Jamil - The End of God-Talk: An African American Humanist Theology

Feb 18 - Heather, Death & secular meaning/Christopher Hitchens, Mortality

Feb 20 - Crystal, Nietzsche

Feb 25 - Cooper, On Humanism. 
           -  Ben, Identifying parallels between social oppression and control by religious institutions with "Woke Culture".

[We're not meeting on Feb 27, I'll be at a conference]

Mar 3 - Jessica, Camus: Myth of Sisyphus/Sartre: Existentialism Is a Humanism.

Mar 5 - Makayla Barrett : Thoughts on Sadhguru 

Spring Break

Mar 17 - How An Atheist Finds Meaning, Sheala Carpenter

Mar 19 - Patricia Hummel: The Reason Revolution by Dan Dana

Mar 24 - Debria Tyler Can Creationism and science coexist? 

Dr. Flicker's antidote to cosmic despair

One of the things some godless folk find unsettling, and subversive of the quest for meaning and purpose in an indifferent universe, is the prospect of ultimate cosmic nullity. I know at least one other of us is old enough to have been a Woody Allen fan before he became a pariah...

Dr. Flicker's antidote to cosmic despair: enjoy your life. Turn your attention to other things including a better future, but not to The End. (Isn't that basically Camus's message too?) And, do your homework.



"Nobody really worries much about what is going to happen millions of years hence. Even if they think they are worrying much about that, they are really deceiving themselves. They are worried about something much more mundane, or it may merely be a bad digestion; but nobody is really seriously rendered unhappy by the thought of something that is going to happen to this world millions of years hence. Therefore, although it is of course a gloomy view to suppose that life will die out—at least I suppose we may say so, although sometimes when I contemplate the things that people do with their lives I think it is almost a consolation—it is not such as to render life miserable. It merely makes you turn your attention to other things." Bertrand Russell, Why I Am Not a Christian

Sisyphus

The video Jamil shared. Let's all become authors so everyone can post cool stuff like this directly.