(Eventually, this will turn out to be about progressive spirituality — bear with me….)
Scott Adams, the creator of the “Dilbert” cartoon (and the Dilbert merchandise empire) has died of prostate cancer, at age 68. Cancer deaths are often unpleasant, and Adams’s last months sound like they were especially painful and debilitating, not something you would wish on anyone.
Adams left behind a very mixed legacy. His “Dilbert” comic strip was syndicated from 1989 until 2023. For the first few years, the strip often offered a fresh and funny take on what it’s like to be a lower-level white collar worker in corporate America. But Adams’s career went downhill from there.
Although, who am I to judge? I guess I can call myself a cartoonist, insofar as I drew a regular strip for the weekly newspaper of the undergraduate college I attended. My drawings were good enough, but my weakness was writing the strips. I depended on my friend Mike (who’s now a rabbi) to write the strips, and after he graduated I never drew another weekly strip. I manage to write acceptable nonfiction prose, but when it came to writing comic strips, I was a failure.
By contrast, Scott Adams was a wildly successful cartoonist, even though he drew badly. His characters show no particular expression, and he had little understanding of how to represent three dimensional space. But his writing was good, or it was in the first few years of the strip, because in writing for the strip he managed to capture some of the more frustrating aspects of corporate bureaucracy. He came out with a strip that appealed to the white collar cubical worker at a time when there were lots of white collar cubical workers. His success as a cartoonist was probably due more to lucky timing than anything else.
Yet after half a dozen years, in the late 1990s, “Dilbert” was getting repetitive. By the 2000s, none of the characters was likable; or maybe Adams no longer liked any of his characters. And by the 2010s, the strip was just plain boring, as well as mean-spirited. I think what happened was simple. In 1995, Adams quit his white collar cubical job in order to work full-time as a cartoonist; once he stopped working in a cubical, he stopped being funny.
Furthermore, by the 2000s, Adams was becoming an unlikeable person. My take on it is that he let his success go to his head, deluding himself into thinking he was pretty hot stuff even though he couldn’t draw and he wasn’t much of a writer. He became pompous and self-righteous. You can read a brief summary of his online sockpuppetry, trolling, and bad behavior here. His bad behavior kept getting worse, culminating in 2023 when he said in his podcast:
“If nearly half of all Blacks are not okay with white people—according to this poll, not according to me, according to this poll—that’s a hate group. And I don’t want to have anything to do with them. And I would say, based on the current way things are going, the best advice I would give to white people is to get the hell away from Black people. Just get the –– away. Wherever you have to go, just get away. Because there’s no fixing this. This can’t be fixed.” [Expletive deleted by me.]
(Full disclosure: I admit I didn’t listen to the podcast myself; I depended on this transcription.)
In fact, as early as 2000, Adams had turned into one of the least likable characters in his strip. He founded Scott Adams Foods to manufacture a frozen burrito that he called “the blue jeans of food.” What a stupid phrase. It’s a phrase that is classic corporate gobbledy-gook; it is exactly the sort of meaningless utterance made by the Pointy-Haired Boss of the early “Dilbert” cartoons. Adams had become the Pointy-Haired Boss.
I told you that eventually we’d get around to religion. In the last few weeks of his life, when he was in hospice, Adams apparently became a Christian. According to TMZ, in a final episode of his podcast his ex-wife read a letter from him which stated “he’s converting to Christianity because of the ‘risk-reward’ calculation.” (For an in-depth discussion of this philosophical stance, see Pascal’s Wager on the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy; there is little evidence that Adams understood any of the philosophical complexities.) Calling his conversion to Christianity a “‘risk-reward’ calculation” sounds like more corporate gobbledy-gook. Again, it’s the sort of thing the Pointy-Haired Boss would say, which is kind of sad.
Crucially, he did not say what form of Christianity he converted to. Did he become a Roman Catholic? a Latter Day Saint? Russian Orthodox? an evangelical Protestant? “Dilbert” had grown so mean-spirited in its last couple of decades that it’s hard for me to imagine what form of Christianity finally attracted him. Or maybe he just didn’t know all that much about Christianity, and just called himself a Christian without knowing quite what he meant. However, from my religious point of view, he didn’t have to worry about the afterlife. If he had become almost any form of progressive Christian, he would have understood God as love and forgiveness, and he wouldn’t have had to worry so much about formal conversion. Instead, he seems to have understood God as a sort of deified Pointy-Haired Boss, and Christianity as a corporate bureaucracy. Which is too bad.
But despite all your flaws, thank you Scott Adams, for a half dozen years of a good comic strip. Not a great comic strip — you weren’t a Herriman, or a Mauldin, or a Johnston. And maybe you should have done what Bill Watterson did, refusing to sell related merchandise, then quitting while you were still fresh. Nevertheless, your half dozen good years remain a legacy that surpasses what most people manage to do. So thank you for the good stuff, and we’ll try to forget about the rest of it.
1/14: overall revision for clarity.
