How to be Perfect - by Michael Schur
Published:
How to be Perfect - by Michael Schur
Read: 2024-12-08
Recommend: 8/10
I appreciated his sense of humor, as it made difficult concepts much easier to understand.
Notes
Here are some text that I highlighted in the book:
To make it a little less overwhelming, this book hopes to boil down the whole confusing morass into four simple questions that we can ask ourselves whenever we encounter any ethical dilemma, great or small:
- What are we doing?
- Why are we doing it?
- Is there something we could do that’s better?
- Why is it better?
Nobody’s perfect. (As we’ll see in chapter 5, “moral perfection” is both impossible to attain and a bad idea to even attempt.) Again, the goal is to embrace our inevitable failures and find a way to get some use out of them—to learn ways to benefit when we make mistakes instead of just stewing in our own guilt, doomed to make those same mistakes all over again.
We can think of virtues as the aspects of a person’s makeup that we admire or associate with goodness; basically, the qualities in people that make us want to be their friends—like bravery, temperance, generosity, honesty, magnanimity, and so on. Aristotle defines virtues as the things that “cause [their] possessors to be in a good state and to perform their functions well.”
Think of any of these qualities we’re seeking—generosity, temperance, whatever—as a perfectly balanced seesaw, parallel to the ground. If we sit right in the middle, everything will remain upright, even, and harmonious. That’s the golden mean of this quality: that perfect middle spot, representing the exact amount of the quality in question that keeps the seesaw level. Shifting toward either end, however, will throw it out of whack; one side of the seesaw will plummet to the ground, and we’ll hurt our butts. (In this metaphor, our butts = our personalities.) The two extreme ends represent (1) a deficiency of the quality, and, on the other side, (2) an excess of the quality—way too little, or way too much. Extreme deficiency or excess of any one quality then becomes a vice, which is obviously what we’re trying to avoid. Philosophers sometimes think of this as the “Goldilocks rule.” For every aspect of our character, Aristotle’s basically telling us to be: not too hot, not too cold… just right.
how do we know what’s excessive or deficient? How do we know when we’re angry in the right amount, for the right reasons, at the right people? This is the most common criticism of virtue ethics: So, we just need to work and study and strive and practice, and somehow magically obtain this theoretical “perfect” amount of every quality, which is impossible to define or measure? Cool plan. Even Aristotle has a hard time precisely describing a mean sometimes. Regarding mildness, he writes, “It is hard to define how, against whom, about what, and how long we should be angry, and up to what point someone is acting correctly or in error.” And then he shrugs: “This much is at least clear: the intermediate state is to be praised, and… the excesses and deficiencies are to be blamed.” The entire system can seem a little like Justice Potter Stewart’s famous comment on “hard-core” pornography—that although he couldn’t actually define it, “I know it when I see it.”
Quoting the great Enlightenment philosopher Montesquieu, she tells us that “ ‘knowledge makes men gentle,’ just as ignorance hardens us.” This is an idea Aristotle would like, I think. The more we try to learn and understand the lives being led by other people—the more we search for a golden mean of empathy—the less we will find it permissible to treat them with cruelty.
Most of the thought experiments invented to attack consequentialism involve having to do something awful to prevent something more awful from happening; the best way to exploit the flaws in a “numbers game” theory is to design scenarios where people suffer no matter what you decide to do. But to let the utilitarians off the hook a little, we should note that their theory often holds up far better when we’re simply trying to maximize good.
three main globs of secular ethical thought in the Western world over the last 2,400 years: Aristotelian virtue ethics, consequentialism, and deontology. But sometimes, in our everyday lives, we encounter a mundane little question about what we ought to do in some basic earthbound scenario, and we don’t want to have to employ a huge all-encompassing moral theory to make sense of what’s right. We just want someone to tell us—quickly—what we should do. We want rules, like the ones Kant offers us, but, you know, simpler rules.
Ubuntu is Scanlon’s contractualism, but supercharged. It’s not just that we owe things to other people—ubuntu says we exist through them. Their health is our health, their happiness is our happiness, their interests are our interests, when they are hurt or diminished we are hurt or diminished.
someone who tilts too far toward helping others to flourish—a happiness pump, essentially—may be unable to flourish herself. There is some amount of “selfishness” that’s appropriate and even good for us to have, because without it we aren’t properly valuing our own lives.
The larger point James makes here is: What difference does it make? We can accurately describe the event, the results of either explanation are the same in terms of what occurred, so the rest is just semantics. That’s what pragmatism asks: What difference would it practically make to any one [sic] if this notion rather than that notion were true? If no practical difference whatever can be traced, then the alternatives mean practically the same thing, and all dispute is idle. Whenever a dispute is serious, we ought to be able to show some practical difference that must follow from one side or the other’s being right.
guilt is the internal feeling that we have done something wrong—it’s our own icky, private sense of personal failure. Shame is humiliation for who we are, reflected back at us through other people judging us from the outside.
we commit to those regular “check-ins”—to simply note, when we morally jaywalk, that we’re doing it. Make the “good deed” bank account withdrawal, but pin the receipt up on our cubicle wall as a reminder.
It’s not always easy to know the difference between harmlessly breaking rules and sending ourselves down a slippery Overton window–shifting path. Plenty of great TV shows and movies involve people making tiny bad decisions and then spending the rest of their lives making more and more of them to try to make up for the first one, eventually becoming irredeemable monsters.
For Sartre, life with no God to create systemic order for humanity may indeed be disturbing, but it’s also freeing. Without commandments we have to follow, or “meaning” to be found in religion, or national identity, or your parents being dentists and demanding you become a dentist too, or anything else, we’re truly free—in like a big-picture, eagle-eye-view-of-everything way—to choose what we are. “Signs” or “omens” exist only because we choose to see them, and we should never make a decision based on one; or if we do, we should recognize that the sign isn’t making the decision—we are simply choosing to interpret the sign in a way that points to our decision. Religious instruction, education, family traditions, a Magic 8 Ball—they’re all equally bad crutches to rely on when we face a choice. Every person, whether Peruvian or Mongolian, a pauper or third in line for the Danish throne, is perfectly and completely free to make whatever choices she wants.
Another of Aristotle’s most famous lines, “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit,” was also never written by him. Will Durant wrote that about Aristotle in his seminal 1926 work The Story of Philosophy. But try telling that to the thousands of Instagram accounts posting that “Aristotle” quote over pictures of people doing yoga on a beach at sunset.
The most basic facts of existence can create wildly different living experiences for two people who otherwise may appear roughly similar. The writer John Scalzi crystallized the problem of ignoring context and privilege in a 2012 blog post titled “Straight White Male: The Lowest Difficulty Setting There Is.”
There is a certain strain of modern Western sociopolitical thinker that aggressively admires “meritocracy.” Every society should be a meritocracy, argue these adherents, and we should not pass laws that favor one group of people over another, for any reason. There should be no affirmative action laws for university admissions, no initiatives to gender-balance workforces. The cream shall simply rise to the top! These people (usually heterosexual, rich, white men, with a bookshelf full of Ayn Rand novels) conveniently forget that for a meritocracy to work—for a society to properly value and celebrate hard work and individual success—the people within the society need to start from the same point of origin. Otherwise, the cream isn’t rising to the top—the people who were closest to the top already are rising to the top, and the whole concept of meritocracy crumbles to dust. What they are actually calling for, these people, is a pseudo-meritocracy that does not distinguish between the accomplishments of a man with a Mayflower last name who inherited a billion dollars from his dad and those of a Black woman who was born into poverty in a redlined neighborhood in a state that enforces draconian, racist laws. (Some people, as the old saying goes, were born on third base and think they hit a triple.) It’s not a meritocracy if some runners start the race ten feet from the finish line and some are denied entry to the race because of systemic biases within the Racing Commission.
I escaped all of those booby traps, which can throttle people as they attempt to make their way in the world, through no effort of my own, just because of the random, specific embryo that I grew out of. I started my life with a massive societal advantage, and when we do a general checkup of my ethical report card it makes perfect sense to factor that in. Demanding applause for being a generally ethical person would be like me starting a marathon twenty-five miles in, beating someone who started at the actual starting line, and then bragging about winning.
everyone who achieves anything, no matter how talented or driven, benefits in some way from chance. Some people—far too few, but some—understand that. Warren Buffett, who as noted earlier has pledged to give 99 percent of his wealth to charity, writes this on his givingpledge.org page: My wealth has come from a combination of living in America, some lucky genes, and compound interest. Both my children and I won what I call the ovarian lottery. (For starters, the odds against my 1930 birth taking place in the U.S. were at least 30 to 1. My being male and white also removed huge obstacles that a majority of Americans then faced.)
They stand there “as long as Kid 2 wants.” Minutes go by. Then hours. Day turns to night. No one eats. Phones ring and go unanswered. Somewhere in the distance, a lone wolf howls. The sands of time slowly fall through the hourglass. Civilizations are made and unmade, forests rise and then burn to ash, a reminder of the only true constant in the universe: change itself. Then…) KID 2: (mumbled) Sorry.
In 1985, Tom Petty did a concert tour for his album Southern Accents whose stage design featured a huge Confederate battle flag. Years later, after many people had pointed out to him what that flag represents, he said this in Rolling Stone: “The Confederate flag was the wallpaper of the South when I was a kid growing up in Gainesville, Florida. I always knew it had to do with the Civil War, but the South had adopted it as its logo. I was pretty ignorant of what it actually meant. It was on a flagpole in front of the courthouse and I often saw it in Western movies. I just honestly didn’t give it much thought, though I should have.… It left me feeling stupid. That’s the word I can use. I felt stupid. If I had just been a little more observant about things going on around me, it wouldn’t have happened.… I still feel bad about it. I’ve just always regretted it.… When [Southerners] wave that flag, they aren’t stopping to think how it looks to a Black person. I blame myself for not doing that.… It was dumb and it shouldn’t have happened.” I love this statement. It’s clear and straightforward. He doesn’t dig in his heels or make excuses; instead he just explains how it happened, acknowledges that he blew it, names the people he hurt, and expresses regret. This is the correct way to apologize.
“Telling a lie,” he writes, “is an act with a sharp focus. It is designed to insert a particular falsehood at a specific point in a set or system of beliefs, in order to avoid the consequences of having that point occupied by the truth.” In other words, a liar knows the truth and deliberately speaks in opposition to it. A bullshitter, however, is “unconstrained by a concern with truth.” The bullshitter couldn’t care less what the truth is—he wants only to make himself appear a certain way or achieve some effect on the listener.
Another classic disingenuous apology move—which Yoho employed a version of—is to say “I’m sorry if you were offended,” which of course is less an apology than an accusation. That’s saying both “I did nothing wrong” and “You’re so dumb you thought I did something wrong and got upset, so I’m sorry you’re so dumb.” Apologies don’t undo whatever bad thing we did, but when they’re sincere and honestly delivered, they can help heal a wound. They won’t do anything, however, if we’re defensive, hedging, or disingenuous—if what we offer is not actually a sincere plea for forgiveness.
The point is this: to demand perfection, or to hold people to impossible standards, is to deny the simple and beautiful reality that nobody is perfect.
Know thyself and Nothing in excess. Honestly, as far as “guides to life” go, I don’t think anyone’s beaten that in the 2,400 years since. Know thyself—think about who you are, check in with yourself when you do things to see if you’ve made good decisions, remember what you value and care about, understand your integrity, and live a life consistent with that integrity. Nothing in excess—because too much (or too little) of anything will screw you up. Practice virtues like kindness and generosity and courage, but not too much of them.