The Good Place is a comedy series about people who die and go to Hell disguised as Heaven. In the episodes, “Michael,” the architect of the Faux Heaven, and “Janet,” his all-knowing and robot-like assistant, eventually conspire to assist the four humans in an escape and a journey to the actual “good place.” It’s a clever show, and it poses some serious questions about good, evil, identity, and scoring a life quantitatively. Presumably, a high score gets one into Heaven, though in one episode we discover that no one has entered the real Heaven in the past 521 years.
I recently had the opportunity to see a writing rubric from an Ivy League school that served as a basis for grading, or scoring, a paper by quantifying five components: Ideas, Organization, Word Choice, Sentence Structure, and Mechanics. I guess the professor determined that those five were sufficient for determining a grade objectively.
One could argue that certain of those components don’t lend themselves to an objective assessment. Take ideas, for example. Part of that rubric uses as a criterion the student’s inclusion of detailed “thoughtful ideas.” Thoughtful, of course, requires a judgment on the reader’s part. So, say a graduate assistant is in charge of reading and grading in one instance and a tenured professor is in charge of reading and grading in another. Experience and knowledge determine whether or not any idea is “thoughtful.” One expert’s thoughtfulness is another’s cliché.
Say you were the writer of The Good Place and you had to produce a script on quantifying life-points. What are the components of your rubric? Could you use any of those that the Ivy League professor lists?
You might say you could definitely use “Organization.” Indeed, there’s something to be said for the organized life, especially in the context of so much randomness. Chaos appears to underlie all order and organization. As I have said elsewhere, give me chaos, and you make me a god. I get to impose or discover order when I am enveloped by chaos. I make from chaos my own cosmos, or I fail to do so and live a chaotic life. If I do impose an order, I still have the problem of maintaining that order. As we all know from the constant interruptions to our plans, such maintenance is a very difficult task. So, we all fail at times in organizing, even if we are obsessive-compulsive. Truth be told, we’re all a little disorganized, sometimes through our own fault and sometimes through no fault. Entropy is the way of the universe, and it’s bigger than any of us. No one has yet figured a way to reassemble Humpty Dumpty. How many points, then, do we attribute to our living an imperfectly organized life?
There's yet another aspect of organization to consider, one seen not from the organizer's perspective, but rather from those whose lives an organizer organizes. Parents, teachers, and religious leaders, for example. All do quite a bit of organizing the lives of others. Legislators and dictators, also. Do we include in our analysis of life-points not only how we organize our own lives, but also how we organize--or disorganize--the lives of others?
What of word choice? I don’t think we need to worry about our use of colloquialisms. It isn’t our failure to speak the King’s English that loses points in the assessment of a life. Rather, it’s the use of words that uplift or those that degrade that gain or lose us points. What do we say to others in all the contexts of our interrelationships? What do we say to make a peaceful world?
And words fit into sentences, those whole thoughts laid out in an understandable syntax that we deliver with a implied mood. Do we speak, if not plainly, clearly? Are we purveyors of the double entendre? Are we pent up with the pride of an obfuscator? Isn’t the way we communicate a valid point category? Remember, we’re trying to assess a life in a manner similar to that used by a university professor in judging a student’s report.
Think of any report. Unless it is followed by a meeting between or among interested parties, a report--or book, or editorial, or tweet--stands on its own. It is also, even as a draft, somewhat "final." Once out, it is beyond revision, though it might undergo some emendations for clarification, defense, or even apology. It's through those sentences that we can communicate anonymously with people both around the world and into the distant future. Be careful what you inscribe on a clay tablet; some have been around for thousands of years.
And then there are the mechanics. In the professor’s criteria of assessment lie the nagging errors that distract a reader from knowing what the writer intends to communicate. Little things like spelling and bigger things like punctuation make a paper readable. In our lives we, too, exhibit care and carelessness in our dealings with others. We never know how astute our readers are, so we have to be careful about all the details of our language. And in life, we never know everything about those around us, so we have to be careful in our approach to them. Even little errors seem to be magnified these days. Not that we should lose points for the unintentional mistakes. It’s just that we live in a world of “professors” who make it their task to give points or deduct them from our life report.
Back to The Good Place. Ted Danson’s character Michael keeps bringing up the subject of points that the four dead people accumulated during life. There’s no acquisition of points after death, he explains. While we are alive, we accumulate, so it’s a good idea to take a moment to examine our scores according to a life’s rubric. Adding up life’s good points is usually something we do for ourselves, believing that we are objective accountants. Truth is, we all fudge a little on our own behalf as personal bookkeepers and bean counters. But with regard to others, we act like IRS agents on the hunt for people to audit.
I recently had the opportunity to see a writing rubric from an Ivy League school that served as a basis for grading, or scoring, a paper by quantifying five components: Ideas, Organization, Word Choice, Sentence Structure, and Mechanics. I guess the professor determined that those five were sufficient for determining a grade objectively.
One could argue that certain of those components don’t lend themselves to an objective assessment. Take ideas, for example. Part of that rubric uses as a criterion the student’s inclusion of detailed “thoughtful ideas.” Thoughtful, of course, requires a judgment on the reader’s part. So, say a graduate assistant is in charge of reading and grading in one instance and a tenured professor is in charge of reading and grading in another. Experience and knowledge determine whether or not any idea is “thoughtful.” One expert’s thoughtfulness is another’s cliché.
Say you were the writer of The Good Place and you had to produce a script on quantifying life-points. What are the components of your rubric? Could you use any of those that the Ivy League professor lists?
You might say you could definitely use “Organization.” Indeed, there’s something to be said for the organized life, especially in the context of so much randomness. Chaos appears to underlie all order and organization. As I have said elsewhere, give me chaos, and you make me a god. I get to impose or discover order when I am enveloped by chaos. I make from chaos my own cosmos, or I fail to do so and live a chaotic life. If I do impose an order, I still have the problem of maintaining that order. As we all know from the constant interruptions to our plans, such maintenance is a very difficult task. So, we all fail at times in organizing, even if we are obsessive-compulsive. Truth be told, we’re all a little disorganized, sometimes through our own fault and sometimes through no fault. Entropy is the way of the universe, and it’s bigger than any of us. No one has yet figured a way to reassemble Humpty Dumpty. How many points, then, do we attribute to our living an imperfectly organized life?
There's yet another aspect of organization to consider, one seen not from the organizer's perspective, but rather from those whose lives an organizer organizes. Parents, teachers, and religious leaders, for example. All do quite a bit of organizing the lives of others. Legislators and dictators, also. Do we include in our analysis of life-points not only how we organize our own lives, but also how we organize--or disorganize--the lives of others?
What of word choice? I don’t think we need to worry about our use of colloquialisms. It isn’t our failure to speak the King’s English that loses points in the assessment of a life. Rather, it’s the use of words that uplift or those that degrade that gain or lose us points. What do we say to others in all the contexts of our interrelationships? What do we say to make a peaceful world?
And words fit into sentences, those whole thoughts laid out in an understandable syntax that we deliver with a implied mood. Do we speak, if not plainly, clearly? Are we purveyors of the double entendre? Are we pent up with the pride of an obfuscator? Isn’t the way we communicate a valid point category? Remember, we’re trying to assess a life in a manner similar to that used by a university professor in judging a student’s report.
Think of any report. Unless it is followed by a meeting between or among interested parties, a report--or book, or editorial, or tweet--stands on its own. It is also, even as a draft, somewhat "final." Once out, it is beyond revision, though it might undergo some emendations for clarification, defense, or even apology. It's through those sentences that we can communicate anonymously with people both around the world and into the distant future. Be careful what you inscribe on a clay tablet; some have been around for thousands of years.
And then there are the mechanics. In the professor’s criteria of assessment lie the nagging errors that distract a reader from knowing what the writer intends to communicate. Little things like spelling and bigger things like punctuation make a paper readable. In our lives we, too, exhibit care and carelessness in our dealings with others. We never know how astute our readers are, so we have to be careful about all the details of our language. And in life, we never know everything about those around us, so we have to be careful in our approach to them. Even little errors seem to be magnified these days. Not that we should lose points for the unintentional mistakes. It’s just that we live in a world of “professors” who make it their task to give points or deduct them from our life report.
Back to The Good Place. Ted Danson’s character Michael keeps bringing up the subject of points that the four dead people accumulated during life. There’s no acquisition of points after death, he explains. While we are alive, we accumulate, so it’s a good idea to take a moment to examine our scores according to a life’s rubric. Adding up life’s good points is usually something we do for ourselves, believing that we are objective accountants. Truth is, we all fudge a little on our own behalf as personal bookkeepers and bean counters. But with regard to others, we act like IRS agents on the hunt for people to audit.
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