January 16, 2024

A review of How to be Perfect, by Micheal Schur.

And, in passing, a defence of audiobooks

If you're seeking guidance from books on the vexed question of how we ought to live our lives, you generally have two types of option. One is the academic treatise, and the other is the self-help book. What both genres share is the ambition to provide answers, concrete guidance for attaining the good life. They also share a total absence of a sense of humour, or of the ridiculous.

Subscribe now

Michael Schur, on the other hand, has both in spades. One of the most successful comedy TV writers of the last decade, his CV includes parks and recreation, Brooklyn 99, and, most relevantly here, The Good Place. How to be Perfect emerged from Schur’s research when creating The Good Place, so it's not unreasonable to see it as a companion piece to this phenomenal show1.

I'll return to The Good Place later. This book takes a relatively direct approach to the discussion of ethics. Schur spends the first few chapters explaining some of the ‘poles’ of ethical thinking, deontology, utilitarianism, and virtue ethics, before spinning off into discussion of other approaches such as contractualism, and more meta questions such as the reach of our moral concerns.

This might sound a little dry- if so I invite you to peruse the table of contents for this book.

Schur is funny. Funny to his bones- every sentence fizzes with dry humour laced with delightful flights of fancy about trolleys, both supermarket and problematic. He is self-effacing and reveals enough about himself and his own failings for the book to feel personal, without tipping into confessional memoir.

He doesn't stint on the rigour of his thinking either. He has enlisted a real moral philosophy professor (although I would have liked to hear more from him), and as someone who has previously been quite embedded in this stuff2, I really cannot fault his analysis of the ethics. In fact, it would be kind of annoying that he's so good at this, if only the book wasn't so damn charming.

Which brings me to my defence of audiobooks. I think it's entirely understandable that people don't feel that listening to an audiobook ‘counts’ as reading, which is why, when I review something I have read in this way, I make this clear. But there are three reasons why I actually recommend reading this in audiobook form:

1. It's narrated by Schur himself, so the personality of the writing, and the personal anecdotes, come over all the better

2. He has enlisted the cast of The Good Place to read quotes and chapter headings. This breaks up the experience, and leads me to two conclusions

   1. Ted Danson should read every chapter heading of every audiobook

   2. I would listen to William Jackson Harper read literally anything. Forever.

3. You can read it with someone else, pause between chapters and discuss what you've just heard. I did this with my wife, and the discussions we had when not listening only made the experience more valuable.

So has this book made me more ethical? Well, at the risk of giving spoilers, that's not really the point. Schur avoids the pitfalls of false certainty, or shrugging dismissal of the whole enterprise of ethics, to produce a genuinely moving conclusion. I won't do it justice, but essentially, keep asking questions, examine our own choices and keep each other in mind, and we will be doing our best.

And dammit, he's right.

If you take the title of this book literally, of course it doesn't achieve the impossible. But as to its actual aim, of engaging the general reader with questions of moral philosophy, while richly entertaining them- this is achieved handsomely.

Subscribe now

I know I gave Disco Elysium quite a kicking recently- time has mellowed my view a bit, but I've been diving into the Life is strange back catalogue, and while imperfect, these games have a genuine heart that DE is too snarky to appreciate. And they are very cheap to get into!

I know this isn't a music substack, but I'm a bit obsessed with Romy’s album right now, specifically this amazing track.