Michael Schur

In many ways, How to Be Perfect is a distillation of what Michael Schur read and talked about while working on the TV show The Good Place—if you've already watched the show, many of the thinkers discussed here will be at least familiar as names mentioned on the show.

This makes the book a quick primer to philosophy (with a focus mostly on various strands of Western philosophy) and what it can tell us about what it means to be a good person. The tongue-in-cheek title is a clue to the wry show more approach—with a heavy sprinkle of Dad jokes—that Schur takes here, approached from what seems to be broadly a secular humanist approach. Schur's not trying to be comprehensive or definitive here, just to get the reader to think more and to be aware of the complexity of ethical dilemmas, and in that respect I think the book works very well. (Also because let's be honest: I am never going to read Kant.) show less

The television show The Good Place led its cast and crew to new places intellectually. A situation comedy about eternal damnation based on moral philosophy and ethics requires new and different smarts. Thinking is required, not just gags. Chief among the team was Michael Schur, its creator and comedy writer par excellence (Saturday Night Live, The Office (US), Parks & Recreation, ...). He has assembled what he has researched and learned in How to be Perfect. Which is not. Thus making it show more perfect.

Schur has set himself a difficult task, recapping the top lines of various philosophers and philosophies from Aristotle, who everyone knows from 2500 years ago, to today's philosophers, who nobody knows at all. To make the trip bearable, he acts as his own worst enemy, adding comments normally reserved for a sidekick who just doesn't get it. Or he'll make up a totally absurd quote, and just to be sure you don't believe it, adds an endnote admitting the fraud (Thus assuming people read endnotes, to which all I can say is Ha! But these are often funny and worthwhile. Even the Acknowledgements attempt to be humorous).

He likes his fictional examples to be absolutely clear: “Damon never used deodorant, and clipped his toenails on the dining room table, and cleaned the Cheeto dust off his fingers by wiping them on my cat.” He really tries to ease the pain of having readers wade through what amounts to a Philosophy 101 textbook if not for the humor and the casual style he employs so well here.

It does get tiresome though, as every philosophy can be destroyed by simply taking it to its logical conclusion. Making everyone and everything equal is not possible, nor even desirable. Things change too quickly, as do external circumstances and societal standards. Laws that once worked are useless now. (Or as George Carlin pointed out when Catholics were finally allowed meat on Fridays: "But I bet there's a bunch of guys doing eternity on a meat rap.") Following every rule there is must eventually lead to mass murder and/or suicide. Everyone cannot be happy all the time. Looking out only for yourself leads to dystopia. Thinking of others first and foremost leads to bankruptcy and poverty if you think there's still another dollar you could donate to a good cause. Every single philosophy ends up being impossible to implement. Which makes most of the chapters rather predictable.

But the ideas are interesting.

Take luck for example. Schur is clear he has it in spades. He lists nearly two dozen times his life and career jumped the queue, vaulting him into the top echelons of Hollywood. He knows he is lucky, and that his luck has the staying power of a Jenga tower, ready to collapse at any time. This has the perverse effect of making him worry when he wins money in casinos. He'd rather lose some just to show he's ready to, as long as it's not everything.

But he doesn't cite Daniel Dennett, the reigning world champion philosopher of our time, who had the temerity to claim that luck simply evens out over a lifetime, so it's not worth bothering over. (Tell that to a child with terminal cancer, DD. Or to Warren Buffett, who never fails to credit luck as his primary source of success. Just sayin' since Schur doesn't.)

It's also made easier by Schur's allusions, just when thing are getting too academic: "Humans are better than other creatures because we can think and reason and philosophize. Those arguments make sense until you see a bunch of kids on a speedboat during spring break chugging vodka from an ice luge shaped like a shotgun, and then you start to think maybe like otters and butterflies have it more figured out than we do."

Then it turns out he was inspired as a child by Woody Allen's Sleeper, followed immediately by Allen's first three books. The rest might be history for Schur, but his hero turned out to be, shall we say, a dirty old man. What does Schur do about following such a reprehensible character, all the way to total success? He's embarrassed. This is how philosophies crater. What was sacred turned out to be profane. Fooled ya.

He invents the concept of moral exhaustion, the impossible situation of weighing doing the best good. Is this charity bona fide? Do they deploy more of their donations than this other one? Do they publish a success ratio? Should we not buy frivolous things that make us happy for a moment, when we could be donating cash to save actual lives? How much joy are we allowed when people are suffering elsewhere? Again, bankruptcy and poverty are there to guide your decisions on doing the most possible good.

There are references that will be familiar to fans of The Good Place. And if if they aren't familiar, they will still cause a smile to crack: "Several times over the course of The Good Place we had someone say, to Chidi, 'This is why everyone hates moral philosophers.' I never truly understood why that's funny until I began writing this book."

Schur says the whole concept for the show began from his guilt-ridden obsession of tipping at his local Starbucks, by dumping the change from his $1.73 coffee into the tip jar, first making sure the barista noticed. Did he want credit for tipping? Is 27 cents from a rich Hollywood writer/producer the road to salvation for his soul? And on and on, just like early Woody Allen, in fact.

One terrific waste of time are philosophic thought experiments. There are a zillion of them, dreamed up by academics to torture students. A trolley's brakes fail, and it will kill five men working on the track ahead, unless you throw a switch which will divert it to another track where it will kill one person innocently standing there. Which do you choose? The what-ifs are endless, making the whole exercise pointless, proving once again no one's philosophy works in every situation (Interestingly, though unmentioned in the book, this has become a real life problem as self-driving vehicles need to be programmed with a decision, one way or the other).

Whole chapters are devoted to burning issues like Should I punch my best friend in the face? and Should I praise my co-worker's ugly shirt? Should I always return the shopping cart to the collection area? The what-ifs take over, expanding to encompass the universe. I remember from school a what-if that went: What if the child you sponsored and saved from starvation and imminent death grew up to join the army, became a general, overthrew the government, had hundreds of thousands killed, tens of thousands more tortured and jailed for life, raided the country's reserves so he could be a billionaire, and thereby forced the whole nation into abject poverty (and all for just pennies per day! Give now!). This is how philosophy self destructs before your eyes.

But, Schur can also clarify things well: "Consider for a second his (Descarte's) famous Enlightenment formulation Cogito, ergo sum—the aforementioned 'I think, therefore I am'—which, again, is one of the very foundations of Western thought. When we place it next to this ubuntu formulation—'I am, because we are'—well, man oh man, that’s a pretty big difference. Descartes saw his own singular consciousness as proof of existence. Practitioners of ubuntu see our existence as conditional on others’ existence. Someone could write a very interesting book on the sorts of civilizations and laws and citizens that emerge from each of these two utterances. Not me, though—it sounds really hard. But someone."

One of the highlights for me came in an unpromising chapter on apologizing. It seemed mainly aimed at his children's difficulty overcoming their pride and making apologies to each other. But there is a lovely segment dedicated to America's First Child, Senator Ted Cruz, who called Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez a "f***ing bitch" right on the Capitol steps. In his very public non-apology, he cited the media's misreporting of the incident, the fact he has a wife and two daughters, and that he not only never said those words but if he did he was sorry if anyone took offense. In a line by line deconstruction, Schur points out all the ways this was not an apology, and how to look out for any such tactics from anyone claiming to apologize. Delightful.

In the end, it turns out he wrote the book for his two children, now preteens, to assure himself they would be on the right track. But the only way that would work is if they don't follow his train of thought into the moral morass of every philosophy and religion in the world.

It all boils down to Everything In Moderation, because that's all we know that works. Mostly.

David Wineberg show less

Wow, truth in titling! I read this book, effortlessly absorbed the lessons Michael Schur so skillfully boiled down from thousands of years of philosophical writings, and now I'm morally perfect!

Ha ha ha ha, but seriously. Schur pulls off something quite difficult here. He's written a primer on moral philosophy that is deeply meaningful and compassionate, engagingly and intelligently written, and laugh out loud funny on many occasions. There is more insight here than you can shake a stick at show more -- and more jokes! Five stars from me! show less

Michael Shur is the creator of The Good Place, a fantastic TV show, and almost certainly the world's only sitcom about moral philosophy. Unsurprisingly, this is a topic Shur himself is fascinated with, and in this volume he takes us through various approaches philosophers over the millennia have had to the questions of how humans should behave towards each other, what it means to be a good person, and whether you really need to put your shopping cart back where it belongs. Although it should show more probably be noted that a) it's hardly a comprehensive overview of the entire field of philosophy, b) he concentrates entirely on secular, rather than religious philosophy, and c) the emphasis is on Western philosophy, despite brief discussions of particular Buddhist philosopher and of the African concept of Ubuntu.

The approach here is simple and casual, taking ideas from people who wrote huge, dense, largely unreadable tomes, paring them down to some of their basics, and seeing what seems useful for us ordinary schmoes as we try to navigate this stupid and complicated thing called life without being complete jerks. Shur sees some merit in almost all of the philosophies he considers (Ayn Rand aside) and seems to regard them all as possible tools to pick and choose from in whatever situations they seem most appropriate in. His writing is clear, breezy, humorous, and pleasant, and much more interested in mulling over the questions than trying to dictate any hard and fast answers. I don't think I agreed one hundred percent with all his personal takes, but I find his approach in general very simpatico.

It's worth pointing out, by the way, just in case it's not clear, that the title is very tongue in cheek. This book will not only not teach you how to be perfect and get the answer to every moral question right, it's not even remotely going to try, because Shur recognizes that that's completely impossible, and not really the point, anyway.

Also worth noting is that although he does reference characters and ideas from The Good Place, because that show embodied a lot of the ideas he's discussing here, you don't need to have seen it to read the book. He also manages not to spoil anything from it, either, in case you want to go and watch it afterward. Fans of the show, though, will probably find it especially interesting and a nice little add-on to their viewing experience. If nothing else, having read the sections on Kant, I now completely understand why Chidi has a stomachache all the time. show less