The Good Place was one of those shows I knew I would love before I had even watched it. From bits and pieces I saw beforehand, I thought it was some kind of sleuth-y, mystery-solving comedy set in a realm of the afterlife. And while that’s not exactly the storyline, it honestly isn’t too far off. It is in fact a show about the afterlife, with hefty doses of comedy at times packaged in a whodunnit fashion. But more centrally, it is a show about the value of community relationships. While its setting is in a mostly supernatural realm, its themes and characters are incredibly humanistic, illuminating the human capacity to mess each other up, but ultimately to achieve and create goodness. It offers its viewers plenty to chew on, and has a few ideas germane to our Unitarian Universalist tradition – one of them being the morality of what we owe each other. In our creedless tradition, when few other things unite us, our shared principles convey what we aspire to give and expect to receive from one another. As we close our month of reflecting on integrity, I want to offer a reflection on the role our shared values play in creating the communities we want to be in.
For those of you who haven’t seen The Good Place, here’s a quick run-down. Eleanor awakes to find that she has died, leaving behind a life marred with selfish decisions which often harmed herself and those around her. But she’s told she has gone to the Good Place, an after-life realm for everyone who racked up enough Good Points during their time on earth. Taking a panic-stricken look back over the life she led, she realizes that someone has made a mistake in letting her here. As she and her new friends in the afterlife quickly discover, not everything is as good as it seems in the Good Place. As the seasons progress, they realize that they are in fact 1) in the Bad Place; 2) that the cosmic Points System is so outdated and lacking in nuance that no-one has gotten to the Good Place in 500 years; and that 3) there’s got to be a better system than just cancelling earth and starting from scratch.
It is a show of cosmic proportions, simultaneously light-hearted and profound at the same time. Its story centers on human capacity to do good and become better, despite our capacity to harm and hinder one another. Which is why I find it so fruitful as a Unitarian Universalist. Here, human goodness is depicted neither as something essential to the human condition, nor as something externally bestowed. Goodness isn’t some kernel in every human heart which we must excavate alone; nor is it something we ascend to through divine grace. Instead, throughout this story we see that the people around us and our relationships with them are both the source and destination of our goodness. We offer our own goodness to care for the people in our lives, and the people in our lives inspire us to rise to this same morality.
This is a cooperative approach to goodness and morality. And it reminds me of our own Principles and the role they can play in our tradition. Here, it isn’t a god, or savior, or laws or scripture which unite us in community. Instead, we come together through shared values which can lead to principled living. We are together because of how we want to be together. Which in turn, is a matter of what we owe each other. All other sources of meaning and purpose aside, our Principles are things we can all agree on. That as humans we have integrity, conscience, and the responsibility and freedom to find and make meaning of this world. All agreeable things. They are important as a common denominator that unites our vision for how we want to be in this life. The reality and certainty of this life is another common denominator. While each of us has our own understanding of what does or doesn’t happen after death, we are agreed on the real certainty of this life we have to live together, and that there is a need, even an urgency, to impart the good that we can into this world.
Our principles speak to common human qualities. In coming together as a community under these values, I think we express two things simultaneously. One is what we want for ourselves from each other, and the other what we deem important to commit to other people. What I think is less explicit is what lies in the space between our own needs and of others. That we are not independent agents imparting goodness upon the world, but that we create goodness through our work and love and living together. That while each of us has the capacity to be a blessing in this world, our individual capacity is so much smaller than what we can give rise to together. This is another idea in The Good Place that I find of merit in our community, and one of special worth in our world today.
In the first season, and throughout the show, morality is doesn’t come from within people or outside of them, but from between them. The idea of contractualism Chidi introduces to Eleanor was articulated by the Harvard philosopher T.M. Scanlon. The moral concept here, as he describes it, is that an action is wrong if a principle permitting it can’t be justified to the people it will impact. This aspect of morality then, arises from the implicit and explicit agreements we have with each other, about what we need and owe each other. This idea, this book, and this advice from the show’s characters point to a morality that grows out of our relationships with each other, rather than the authority of gods or laws we have inherited. That seems like a needed reframing for American approaches to morality. In an article for the New York Times, Sam Anderson writes:
“[This idea] is, in a way, deeply un-American — an affront to our central mythology of individual rights, self-interest and the sanctity of the free market. As an over-the-top avatar of all our worst impulses, Eleanor is severely allergic to any notion of community. And yet her salvation will turn out to depend on the people around her, all of whom will in turn depend on her. What makes us good, Chidi tells her, [are] our bonds to other people and our innate desire to treat them with dignity1.”
That last line sounds pretty familiar to me, and I think could summarize our principles, or some of them at least. However, this notion of morality that’s interpersonal is a reframe that we also need. We want community, and I think on some level that’s why most of us are here this morning. But the reality is that being in community is often messy, uncomfortable, and even painful. We come face to face with disagreements, unintended hurts, and the vulnerability of seeing each other and being seen even when we’re not at our best. But we also rise to care for each other. We step up when something is lacking. We step in when someone is hurting. And when we respond to the need that grows between each of us, we get a real glimpse of the power we each possess to cause pain or soothe it.
With some mindfulness and attention, I think this shows us a vision of heaven or hell we can agree upon as Unitarian Universalists. Despite strong ties these words have with reward and punishment, maybe we can find a gentler understanding for them here. If Scanlon’s words2 that opened our service describe the Bad Place, perhaps The Good Place is the one where we have nurtured our relationships with one another through mutual care and consideration. Perhaps getting to the Good Place is about getting to the best possible community we can build together, and for each other. “It will be hard, we know, and the road will be muddy and rough. But we’ll get there, heaven knows how we will get there, but we know we will3.”
1. Sam Anderson, “The Ultimate Sitcom,” The New York Times, October 4, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/10/04/magazine/good-place-michael-schur-philosophy.html
2. Maliya V. Ellis & Woojin Lim, “Asking Philosopher T.M. Scanlon ‘What We Owe Each Other’”, The Crimson, October 10, 2019, https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2019/10/10/scanlon-and-the-good-place/
3. Loughty Amoa et al., “Woyaya,” in Singing the Journey: A Supplement to Singing the Living Tradition (Boston, MA: Unitarian Universalist Association, 2005), #1020.