Heaven, Hell and the Multiverse

The mythology of heaven and hell has often been used in literature as a way to comment on ethics in general. Dante's Divine Comedy takes us on a journey through hell, purgatory and paradise, the most famous of these being his Inferno. Milton gave us Paradise Lost. The satirist Jonathan Swift described The Place of the Damned by its inhabitants including "Damned poets, damned critics, damned blockheads, damned knaves, damned senators bribed, damned prostitute slaves". The poet William Blake wrote The Marriage of Heaven and Hell in which he contrasts the free Dionysian spirit of hell with the authoritarian and carefully regulated, dare we say repressed, heaven.

In more modern times, C.S. Lewis wrote The Screwtape Letters, a series of letters from a senior devil to a junior devil telling him how to go about corrupting men's souls. He comes to some startling conclusions, including that the devil loves both unselfishness and democracy, as the preaching of both leads to evil. And in Jean Paul Sartre's play No Exit, three of the recently dead are led to a windowless room which is hell. Their punishment? To suffer each other's company!

My wife and I recently finished watching a TV series called The Good Place on Netflix. The series originally ran on NBC from 2016 to 2020. Its 53 "chapters" explore the philosophical question of good versus evil as well as the idea of redemption. A heady topic for a television comedy. The series won many accolades including 14 Emmy nominations. It won four Hugo Awards as well as a Peabody.

The "Good Place," as you may have guessed, is a euphemism for heaven and is contrasted with the "Bad Place." The story starts out with four of the recently deceased being welcomed to a small community by its "architect," an apparent angel. The "architect," named Michael, is played by veteran comedy actor Ted Danson. But as the first season progresses we learn that these four have been admitted to the Good Place by mistake, for each is a morally flawed individual.

The four are Eleanor Shellstrop played by Kristen Bell, who is an inordinately selfish young woman with few moral scruples. She is a sales rep for a shady pharmaceutical company selling shoddy and dubious products. Her personal ethics include lying, cheating and taking advantage of her friends.

William Jackson Harper plays Chidi Anagonye, a professor of ethics who taught at St. John's University in Sydney, Australia. His moral flaw is his indecisiveness, which causes trouble and disruption for his friends, including unfulfilled promises.

Jameela Jamil plays Tahani Al-Jamil, a wealthy British philanthropist and model, whose sins include a lack of sincerity in her philanthropy as well as an insane jealousy of her rock star sister. Ironically, she was killed tearing down a statue of her sister, which toppled on her.

And Manny Jacinto stars as Jason Mendoza, a small-time petty criminal and concert DJ from Jacksonville, Florida who has aspirations to be a hip-hop dancer.

They are welcomed as apparent namesakes of real good people not yet deceased. They are all of different ethnicity, Eleanor is caucasian, Chidi is black, Tahani is Indian, and Jason is Filipino.

One other main character is Janet, a robotic assistant, sort of an Alexa or Siri but with a body. She materializes whenever anyone calls her and she provides whatever anyone desires, whether answers to questions or actual material objects. "Janet, could I have a cup of coffee, please?" Janet materializes a cup of coffee. It should be noted that Janet is not human even though she looks human. She is also attractive and repeatedly tells people she is "not a girl," nor is she a robot. She is a digital assistant.

The new arrivals are paired off, Eleanor being told she and Chidi are soulmates. The same goes for Tahani and Jason. Though none are convinced of this.

All believe they deserve to be in The Good Place despite their flaws. But only Eleanor, who is by far the smartest and most savvy of the bunch, tries to redeem her past life by taking ethics lessons from Chidi. Throughout the series she is coached by Chidi who takes her through Kant and Plato and Aristotle and on up to the more modern ethical theories such as T.M. Scanlon's contractarianism. Tahani and Jason, soon join in the philosophy classes.

The show got largely positive reviews. Wikipedia notes that "Andrew P. Street of The Guardian wrote that 'moral philosophy is the beating heart of the program' and that the show 'made philosophy seem cool.'"

The architect, Michael, learns that the four humans are there by mistake (there is a twist here at the end of the first season that I can't reveal) and agrees that they should have an opportunity for redemption. The rules of the afterlife are too restrictive. Only the morally near-perfect are even admitted to the Good Place. And once you have been judged, there is no chance of making amends or improving one's ethical standing. The second and third seasons are all devoted to Michael, Janet and the four humans trying to change the politics of heaven and hell. A kinder, gentler approach to ethics, one that doesn't end in literal hellfire for the less than perfect.

The philosophical issues that Chidi brings up are sometimes depicted in a stark and often hilarious manner. The most intriguing is philosopher Phillipa Foot's Trolley Problem. You've probably heard of this thought experiment. A runaway trolley is barreling down the tracks and will hit and kill five people. But there is a switch you can pull that will divert it to another track where it will kill only one person. Do you pull the switch?

Janet brings this problem to life and Chidi and Eleanor find themselves literally on a runaway trolley, Chidi in charge. Chidi, as noted above, is notoriously indecisive. He hems and haws and cannot decide what to do. After getting splattered with blood and guts, he is reassured that the victims were fake people, not real people. Then Janet has them go through the same thing again. And again. It does make you think, "What would I do?" especially when actually put in this situation and it is not just a thought experiment but a real problem.

Of course there has to be a foil, and he is Shawn, a rather vindictive demon who wants the four humans consigned to eternal damnation. No redemption as far as he's concerned.

The four humans become close friends as the series progresses, and they all improve morally. And in the final season, they arrive at the Good Place, only to find it a place filled with apathetic and bored people. Heaven is not all it's cracked up to be. When you have all your wishes and desires handed to you on a silver platter, just snap your fingers and Janet will provide, it gets very tedious and dull after a while. Not just for a while, but for all eternity. How do you change heaven to make it a paradise instead of a boring "hellhole," so to speak? The protagonists are given the opportunity to be the architects of a better heaven.

Eleanor is the driving force behind the show. She has a certain savvy sense that figures out things. She thinks on her feet and comes up with solutions. The last chapter is an emotionally wrenching affair because you have come to feel a strong affection for these characters as the show progresses. From Michael who no longer wishes to be an immortal spirit being but a human being to Eleanor who relentlessly immerses herself in Chidi's ethics classes and falls in love with him, to Chidi who learns how to make decisions and also falls in love with Eleanor, to Tahani who comes to terms with her resentment of her sister and her feeling of abandonment by her parents, to Jason who is a rather simple-minded but essentially good soul.

This is a television show that gives you something to think about as well as be amused by.

Which brings me to the Best Picture Oscar winner this year, Everything Everywhere All at Once. This is a sci-fi flick that explores the idea of the multiverse, that is, a series of parallel universes co-existing through time and space. It also raises a lot of philosophical questions. A true ethics is said to be an explication, not of what is, but of what can and ought to be. This film brings forth some ethical dilemmas for its main protagonist, a Chinese American woman named Evelyn Quan Wang. She and her husband own and operate a laundromat. They are also called to task by an officious and unpleasant IRS tax auditor to explain their tax filings. The movie could easily have been named Hard-working Immigrant versus Psycho-Bitch Tax Collector. But while this theme runs through the movie, there are many more nuances and issues it explores.

First is the multiverse itself. Evelyn is called upon by a man who looks like her husband but is really her husband from a parallel universe, to come and save the universe (or all the universes) from an evil and very powerful tyrant. The multiverses are created by life choices. Every significant life choice Evelyn has made in the past, also split off a universe where she made a different choice. Evelyn married a meek, mild-mannered, kindly man named Waymond and they started a laundromat together. Her husband is now seeking a divorce.

Parallel universe Waymond is a master at martial arts and has come from a universe where Evelyn chose to pursue a career as a scientist instead of running a laundromat. The Evelyn in this parallel universe, known as the Alphaverse, discovers that there are multiple universes and has figured out how to travel from one to the other.

Traveling from one universe to the other enables the traveler to pick up all the skills and knowledge of their parallel selves. The villain, Jobu Tupaki, is someone who has decided to use this knowledge to create a doomsday device, a black hole shaped like a bagel, a Bagel of Doom.

Throughout the movie, Evelyn and her Alphaverse husband battle against Jobu's minions. Evelyn also discovers that in one universe she is a kung fu master and in another she is a famous film star. At one point she questions why she ever married her meek husband and settled for the life of a laundromat owner when she could have been so much more.

She also discovers that the villain Jobu Tupaki is none other than the Alphaverse version of her own daughter Joy.

The movie is action-packed and incudes a marvelous scene early on where Alphaverse Waymond takes on a slew of IRS security officers who try to arrest Evelyn. There is a lot of humor as well, as some of the situations are absurd. But it also raises a lot of questions about the choices we make in life. Our lives are filled with a lot of what ifs. What if we had chosen the path less traveled? What if we had chosen a different career? What if we had married a different person? What if we had finished that novel we started?

Evelyn, in the end, has to come to grips with the choices she made in life. Does she make peace with herself, with her daughter, with her husband, and with the IRS?

Gottfried Leibniz famously said that we live in the best of all possible worlds. In Everything Everywhere All at Once, these possible worlds are not just hypothetical for Evelyn. They are real.

The Good Place and Everything Everywhere All at Once both raise questions about the choices we make. They raise questions about what an ideal world would look like. Not in general but for each of us as an individual. In the movie, the villain Jobu creates the Bagel of Doom in order to commit suicide. She has acquired knowledge from every universe she can and nothing matters any more. In the TV series, the people populating heaven are totally bored because they've experienced everything and there is nothing left to live for.

Is it struggle and conflict that bring meaning to our lives? And if we've experienced it all, is there a sense of peace in seeking oblivion, in merging one's atoms with the universe? The movie and the TV show find different answers to these questions. Both are a fascinating philosophical journey.

Postscript: The questions raised affect me personally in many different ways. I wonder what would have happened if I had finished university in my early twenties instead of dropping out. I wonder how life would have been different if I hadn't been inordinately shy in my teens and throughout my twenties. I wonder how my life would have been different if I had not picked up that copy of Ayn Rand's Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal many long years ago. I wonder how my life would be different if I had chosen a different career. But one also wonders about what you would have missed out on that you now enjoy because of the choices you did make. Should one count one's blessings or live with regrets about what could have been?

One of the things that The Good Place did was inspire me to buy a copy of T.M. Scanlon's What We Owe to Each Other. It looks like an interesting read. And my son suggested reading Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle's modern version of Inferno. The former ended up being a bit dry and I gave up on it. But Inferno was interesting and the sequel, Escape from Hell, is on my "to read" list.