I am my own guest blogger: My last post was full of crap

In my last post, I argued that racism as a character defect does not, by itself, preclude someone from being a good person. I used Michael Scott, the insufferable boss from The Office, as an illustration to make my point. Here today to offer a counter-point is...me. Let's all welcome me here.

Guest Post

Art is not life

In Jake Weber's June 24th post, "Is Michael Scott both a racist and a good person," we get a good glimpse into how addled a brain can become after a lifetime of interpreting the world through fiction, rather than reality. Weber tries to debunk the notion that racism alone is enough to make someone a bad person. He derides the idea that racism is somehow a more elevated form of evil, worse than greed or parsimony or concupiscence.

It might be a convincing argument, if there were any examples in the real world of people with enough racism to be plainly evident but enough other charms to balance it out. But there are no such people, unless you find Paula Deen charming.

This is what comes of using fiction to draw ideas about real life. Fiction isn't real life. It follows a specific path meant to bring about a satisfying response in the reader or viewer by the end, leaving the consumer of the story to feel that all of what happened along the way was there for a reason. The real world isn't like that, and people in the real world tend to be quite different from people in art. In art, we need to show people as balanced, and give them some redeeming trait so they don't seem too simple. But the real world is full of people with no redeeming qualities at all, and racists are often at the top of that list. People who say the kinds of things Michael says don't usually also have hidden hearts of gold. They just don't. It's nice to think that people have some kindness just beneath the surface waiting to come out, but usually, when people seem like assholes, it's because they're assholes.

The Office is fantasy

The Office is escapist fantasy pretending to be a realistic comedy about working class people in middle America. When Michael says things no longer tolerated in any office in America, the audience cringes, but it also feels a slight tinge of vicarious thrill: someone is getting to say something that none of us is allowed to say anymore, and because it's presented as bad, we can enjoy it without feeling guilty about enjoying it. In this manner, the show gets to have it both ways: it can give us a stock heel character, but it also gets to show that same character humanized enough that we feel warm and fuzzy when he once in a while gets something right. Because Michael so frequently offends, the emotional payoff is that much higher when he acts appropriately.

Can't you tell when you're being played, Jake? 

There is no greater example of this than the very scene Weber cites: the one in which his employees sing a tribute to him before he leaves. The writers need the audience to have warm feelings for sweeps week, so everyone remembers the Michael of the previous three episodes instead of the one who picked Stanley for his basketball team because he was black.

Some flaws really are more important than others

Racism might not be a greater sin than avarice in a personal or spiritual sense, but that's between you and your confessor, if you're into that kind of thing. Because in its effect on society, racism is far more dangerous, as the entirety of human history teaches us. Society's judgment lies on the behaviors that most threaten its harmony. So yes, it is appropriate to hold the racist's racism against him more than than egoist's egotism.

Michael may grow throughout the series, but we don't see him ever explicitly repent of any of the terrible things he said or did over the years. By the end of the show, we did, it's true, witness fewer lines like "Mo' money, mo' problems, Stanley; you of all people should know that." But it seems more likely (other than the business reasons that the show couldn't keep going to this well) this was because Michael learned from his many scoldings from corporate, not because he had a change of heart. In other words, the punishment worked. Society is right today to treat racism as a special brand of evil, because treating it like this works.