I recently rewatched “The Good Place” (spoiler warning), one of my favorite shows from the last ten years, and I noticed so much more about the show the second time around. I decided to write a miniseries analyzing different facets of the show – some complimentary, some critical – as a tribute to one of the most thoughtful and interesting sitcoms on mainstream US television. Here are the previous reflection and next reflection in the series. I hope you enjoy.
In the Good Place, making moral and ethical decisions has become noticeably harder than in the modern world. Over the past 500 years, no human has lived a life worthy in their points system to make it into the Good Place, instead all of them have been damned to the show’s version of hell. Wow, that is quite a statement about the modern world.
The show’s reason as to why this is happening is that the modern world has grown increasingly complicated, meaning that we must shift how we assess the morality of the decisions humans have to make to navigate this world. For example, Michael describes a boy in the Paleolithic Era picking fresh flowers from the forest and giving them to his mom, an altruistic act that earns him many positive moral points. When an equivalent contemporary boy buys flowers to present to his mom, his generosity gives him some positive credit, but it is offset by the unethical treatment of the worker who farmed the flower, the oil needed to transport it to that shop, and all sorts of other factors. In defense of the flowers now being negative, the Judge responds that the information is available about, say the plight of the workers on the flower plantations, and the boy chose to buy those flowers that had been farmed in that way and thus to implicate himself into that context. The response from the other characters is that researching everything or completely removing yourself from all instances of injustice while still doing what is needed to survive is unrealistically difficult in the contemporary world.
This illustrates the fundamental problem the show sees within modern life: the vast interconnectedness makes people reliant on systems that conduct unethical acts in difficult to understand ways around the world. And the individual is held responsible for how their, even seemingly innocent, acts are complicit in these injustices.
I see an implied primitivism in this view. Past eras of history were simple, much more local. Then when you make a decision, all the necessary thinking is right there in front of you. Modernity has produced interlocking webs that remove an individual from the full context in which the products around them come from, becoming overly complex ethically and morally in the process. This vaguely reminds me of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s idea of the innocent noble savage or that mass society corrupts individuals, and also Mahatma Gandhi’s view that humans are best off living local lives in their small communities but that mass travel and communication has corrupted humanity as it forced it to scale up. In contrast to many primitivist thinkers, though, the show does not consider a return to “simple society” to be realistic, instead ultimately arguing that the retribution nature of moral criticism is what has got to give.
As an anthropologist, I view such primitivism as an oversimplification of past periods of human history. Humanity has almost always been interconnected in multilayered connections. The show imagines the past as a kind of simplified ideal that solves some of the complexities they see in today’s world. I would say that individual decisions have always been complex, with full knowledge of the implications of one’s actions across other communities beyond one’s familiarity practically unknowable.
Second, by arguing that absolutely no one has gotten into The Good Place, the show implies that modern injustices implicate everyone to an overwhelming degree, which flies in the face of how injustice seems unevenly distributed in the world. The show consistently states that no one has gotten into the Good Place for 500 years. So the societal shifts that prevented people from being able to get into the Good Place started 500 years ago. That corresponds rather well to the rise of European colonialism and the start of what many historians call the “modern era” in the 1500s and 1600s (and the very end of the 1400s). European colonialism changed many of the global relationships and power dynamics around the world, resulting in the societal systems that still last in various forms today (such as capitalism, which the current distribution of places in the world are “wealthy” and not, etc.). These systems seem to be exactly what creates the complex social systems that make moral decision-making now overly complicated.
The show portrays everyone as damned with no distinction of their position within these global forces, despite the fact that people have had very different positions within these systems. For starters, 500 years ago was the start of European’s subjugating large parts of the world and forcing pretty much all other peoples to produce resources for their benefit. Sure, overtime this may have embroiled people born in Europe and maybe even their colonies in implied forms of complicity against injustice outside of their control, but it took hundreds of years for European colonialism to cast its shadow across the entire world. It did not just start 500 years ago. What about people in Oceania who due to geographic isolation had no real contact with Europeans or those implicated in European colonization until the 1700s or 1800s? For example, was everyone from Australia in the 1600s, who had no knowledge of these forces because they did not know about these other parts of the world, subjected to eternal damnation for all time? The show says, “Yes,” when it says that absolutely no human has been able to make it to the Good Place in the last 500 years, even though some of their societies may have looked more like the hunter-gathering society the boy discussed above lived in. This arbitrary caught off of 500 years makes some sense within European history, and in presenting it as such a unilateral caught off, they are eurocentrically presenting European history as the history of all peoples.
Furthermore, it almost exclusively portrays everyone as beneficiaries of this inevitable system, despite the fact that inequalities distribute decision-making unequally. The victims of modern injustices are just as damned for all time as those who benefit from or at least live in a society that benefits from such injustices. For example, the oppressed farmer who picked the flower in the above example would also be damned for all time. Was this farmer’s decision just as complicit in systems of injustice?
Consider an example of US slavery to illustrate how absurd that would. During the slave era around the 1830s to 1850s, large swathes of US Americans were complicit in the slave trade. Not just the slave owners who directly owned the slaves, but the (usually) white managers who oversaw the slaves work each day, those who transported the cotton in the South and beyond, made it into shirts (at that time, increasingly this happened in mills in the US North and England), the banks (usually in the North) who organized and traded off of Southern Cotton from the South, and other parts of the world that bought the cheap textiles. Sure, the system was an awful injustice with multiple layers of complicity, but how complicit was your average Black slave? He or she has no (or little) choice in producing the cotton and very limited choices in terms of what they consume as “owned property.” But in the show, that slave received eternal damnation, since their choices evidently also made the world a worse place.
This view of the modern world in terms of becoming trapped by complex choices where it’s unrealistic to understand and respond properly to how everyday decisions and objects prioritizes the perspective of the privileged beneficiaries of these global forces. It reflects a bias for the experience of US Americans, especially US Americans who are middle class or above, the show’s primary audience. The United States has been a major beneficiary of the global world order, with many parts of the world directly or indirectly committed to producing items to feed our economy, often with unjustly poor wages and conditions.
Thus, I think the show compellingly demonstrates one way to experience the funneling of vast resources to the United States and other places that primarily benefit from the contemporary global system. In the US, this can feel like an uncertainty over the morality of how the various goods we might buy have arrived on our shelves and the difficulties understanding the ins-and-outs of the vast supply chains necessary to provide us with these cheap goods in the first place. To be clear, they have great insights into what this experience is like, something uncommon for sitcoms to try to tackle.
At the same time, by universalizing it as the experience of every single human over the last 500 years, it reflects a bias towards a rather limited and privileged perspective on these global forces. The idea that this is just as much a problem for slaves as discussed above, for example, or that their decisions also have made them complicit in unjust systems resulting in their damnation is insulting. The same would also apply to the other forms of injustice and oppression committed around the world. It tangles the beneficiaries and victims of injustices as just as complicit in the system itself. I appreciate that the show tries to tackle the moral complexity of basic life decisions and injustices committed around the world, but I wish it had done so in a way that did not imply that everyone had the same basic experience of these injustices.
