Michael Scott wants to be a bad man but his
body won’t let him. In season 6 of the Office (US) Michael found out his
girlfriend was married and then kept on seeing her. When his friends and
coworkers called him out on it he became self-righteous and hardened his heart,
dismissing his friends’ objections because “I deserve to be happy,” and “if
Stanley can do it why can’t I?”. And he bragged at the office about what he was
doing! saying “I take what I want.” Michael
even met her husband face-to-face, shook his hand, and did not repent.
But when he went to meet her for sex at a
motel, the guilt overwhelmed him and prevented him from following through, and
he broke up with her through a text message.
This episode revealed that Michael is a very
bad man. But, one might reply, he repented at the end! Yes, but his will was to go on sleeping with this
man’s wife. He resisted being convicted about it and planned in cold blood to
do it again. It was only his body
that prevented him. Michael is emotionally sensitive, in fact childishly so,
and in this situation his emotions got the better of him and defeated his will.
Emotions are an affair of the body. That should
be uncontroversial today: it is taken for granted in psychology and medicine.
It was known in the middle ages as well—represented by the scheme of four
personality types, based on a predominance of one of four types of fluids in
the body. E.g. a ‘bloody’ personality (sanguine) was lively, energetic,
quick-tempered, and generally happy. We also know from our own experience how
much our emotions are determined by physical factors like how much sleep we’ve
had or what we’ve eaten.
It is a cliché to talk about the spirit being
corrupted or led into sin by the flesh. But it is also an old Christian idea
that the flesh can be corrupted by the spirit. This is obvious when you think
of the fallen angels—they had no flesh to corrupt them, they fell through pride,
an entirely spiritual sin.
There is a sermon in Old English from the tenth
century, preserved in the Vercelli Book, that has a scene of the body and soul being
brought before Christ at the Last Judgment. The body stand and accuses the
soul, saying “you led me into sin!” It says roughly, “I prevented you from sin,
and limited the damage you could do, by making you sleepy, hungry, and so on — but
you made me sin anyway, and now I will be damned and suffer forever because of
you!”
Michael illustrates just this situation. His
will is bad, but his body prevented him from carrying out his will.
This also shows the importance of formation of
character, in the sense of habits and the training of the right emotional
responses. Lewis once said that he would
rather play cards with a man who was a skeptic about ethics but was taught that
“a gentleman doesn’t cheat” than with a man who believes cheating is wrong but
had no such upbringing. We want the emotions to guide and help the will make
the right choices—which is precisely what happened to Michael.
In this vein it also shows the poverty of
modern utilitarian or contractual schemes of ethics. A modern might say that
adultery is wrong because it is a breach of trust, and so he would condemn Michael’s
action in the abstract. But this is in a context where people are raised in
general to have no shame and to adopt a pose of self-righteous entitlement
about their own choices. In particular people are not taught to be ashamed of
lying, divorcing a spouse, fornicating, and are bombarded with art forms that
show sympathetic people engaging in adultery and all kinds of banditry. And you
expect this quasi-contractual moral obligation not to commit adultery to have
any force?
But Michael shows that this is a very
inadequate account of ethics! Because even with all his self-righteousness and
attempts to steel himself up to do what’s wrong, his human nature rebelled against it. Ethics are not just
an arbitrary set of intellectually-defined duties! They are not like the rules
of the road, which you have to learn but could in principle be totally
different. Ethics flow from our human nature. And because they are part of our
nature they even make themselves felt in
our body when we do something wrong — if we have not been artificially
divorced from our nature.
Adultery is not just a violation of a contract.
Adultery goes against our human nature. As when we eat something we can’t
digest and our gut vomits it up, so with adultery. Our conscience cannot digest
adultery, and so our nature rebels against it!
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