Doing good is hard, and we will fail, he reassures us. Rather, he simply wants us to care about living a good life and be conscious of our beliefs and actions. Schur knows we all contain, in the words of the Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh, “flowers and garbage.” His approach to living an ethical life is not memorizing Immanuel Kant’s Metaphysics of Morals. As we continue to navigate the new world we live in, Schur gives us not one road map but many.ĭespite its somewhat daunting title, How to Be Perfect doesn’t expect perfection from the reader. Instead Schur’s approach is flexible–he offers lots of ways to examine a situation and make moral decisions. How to Be Perfect is joyously absent of the bossing around you get from certain self-help scolds. I’m relieved that Schur doesn’t give us 12 rules to live by, or a fixed list of ways to be good.
It’s a lively romp through moral philosophy that’s not dumbed down to be the philosophical equivalent of the chicken dance. It’s as if the author has his arm around your shoulder and is whispering in your ear, Come on, give it a go this is going to be fun. Schur’s gift to the reader is his ability to distill the writing of ancient philosophers such as Aristotle and Socrates, more recent ones such as John Stuart Mill and Jeremy Bentham, and modern thinkers such as Pamela Hieronymi and Peter Singer into breezy, engrossing chapters. If you choose to read Plato’s “Apology,” you’ll be reminded of Socrates’s maxim: “The unexamined life is not worth living.”įortunately, into this time of uncertainty has been born a clever and engaging book that is just the bibliotherapy the doctor ordered: How to Be Perfect, by Michael Schur. Reading is an opportunity for escape from the everyday, but it’s also an opportunity for reflection and mindfulness-a way to run a flashlight around in our thoughts. We have been enduring a long, dark night of the soul, and we need the uplift of a good book now more than ever.
Over 3,000 years ago, the library at Thebes was inscribed with the motto “A house of healing for the soul.” The notion that reading is a mental salve is an old one. In World War I, soldiers suffering “shell shock” (what we now call PTSD) were given books to help ease their psychic wounds. Sigmund Freud used bibliotherapy on his anxious patients no doubt he recommended books on cigars. The book can be anything-novels, poetry, the Cambridge World History of Food, 50 Shades of Grey, or philosophy. Bibliotherapy is the practice of reading to heal the mind and soul.
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