On Yapping Dogs and Talking Apes

"A Man Said to the Universe"

Stephen Crane

A man said to the universe:

“Sir, I exist!”

“However,” replied the universe,

“The fact has not created in me

A sense of obligation.”

William B. Irvine in his excellent Guide to the Good Life makes the point that we ought not concern ourselves with other people all that much, or at all, pretty much. Exceptions exist, such as people who depend on us and people who relate to us in some sense. I am bound to do my duties to those who depend on me, and those people ought to matter to me to the degree that I keep up my end of the relationship, that I do my duty.

People I do not know or who do not depend on me I ought not care about at all, moreso and especially if those people have values that are alien to me, which, as it turns out, is pretty much everyone in America. Irvine has a turn of phrase for it that I really like, that he ceased caring what kind of car he drives once he realized how silly it was to try to impress people who are impressed by the car one drives.

Contemporary American values are anti-values, if we take values to be an orientation toward the good. American anti-values are oriented toward generating suffering. I used to do this exercise with my students. I’d challenge them to come up with a list of American cultural values, and we’d soon discover that America is a bizarro world that makes virtues of all of its vices. Put another way, name a dominant cultural value, and it is in actuality an anti-value; its opposite is the actual good.

To take just two examples, the American default life philosophy Irvine terms Enlightened Hedonism, which is the philosophy that happiness is the chief aim of life, and to achieve happiness one ought to pursue what feels good. The enlightened part is the general consensus that this pursuit of pleasure ought not cause harm to others. This pursuit takes on various forms, from sexual debauchery to consumerism. Americans believe that new cars and motorboats bring happiness. Americans believe that sport-fucking as many people as possible yields happiness.

Both of those are anti-values because their opposites are far more likely to induce some state of lasting happiness, and I think in some sense people know this. Buying things I don’t need is never going to bring me lasting happiness. Lack of sexual self-control has harmed people by the millions, that ten minutes of carnal enjoyment has doomed millions of people to lives of disease and unwanted responsibility. Everybody knows that in some sense; nevertheless, people who don’t relentlessly chase tail and work to make payments on cars are seen as outliers. Black Friday has become a de facto national holiday dedicated to raw consumerism, and the entire month of June has been set aside to celebrate non-reproductive sport-fucking.

I can state the above and be absolutely and completely in support of everyone’s rights to live his or her own life in whatever way he wants. One can buy all the motorboats he or she wants, and one can sport-fuck all the people he or she can convice to join in, for all I care. I’m not making a moral argument here about how people ought to live. Quite the opposite. I’m saying that I don’t care about these people, thier lives, their values. I don’t care if they live or die. They don’t matter. They are merely talking apes.

This runs counter to the prevailing American orthodoxy that other people are important in some way, that somehow the lives of strangers matter just because. Yet, when I survey even my own existence, it becomes crystal clear to me that my life only matters to a whitheringly small group of people, but even to them, not that much. Not so much that they wouldn’t be completely over my demise in less than six months.

Back to Irivine: One of the most useful tricks I find in his book is in equating people to yapping dogs. I’ve extended this frame for my own uses to acknowledge, on a daily basis, that people are talking apes. I mean that in the most literal sense. Forget this Christian or religious framing about souls, and forget even the ancient stoic formulations that people have capacity to reason. Neither is true. People are just talking apes, so just like if one was walking down the street and a dog ran up to him and started yapping, no one would let that upset his day in any sense whatsoever. No one gets upset about yapping dogs, as in, oh my, that dog doesn’t like me. That dog yapped at me, and it hurt my feelings. No one cares about the opinion of a yapping dog, and in just exactly that way, no one ought to care about the opinion of a talking ape. Some talking ape took an attitude in line at grocery store. Some talking ape cuts one off in traffic. Some talking ape did this. Some talking ape did that. Why would anyone care what some talking ape does or says?

Look at us for what we actually are, not some romanticized or even propagandized version. When one strips us down to our barebones essence, we are just talking apes. Accepting that, the talk itself no longer has any value, and certainly it has no more power to have any effect on us. Like a dog barking, it just doens’t matter. This, I have found, adds to my daily satisfaction as the unthinking whims and bullshit monkey words of other people have a lesser and lesser effect on me.

In our true American anti-values fashion, though, the opposite value, of fixating on the words of other people, rules the day. Every utterance by this celebrity, by this politician, is amplified, quoted, dissected, and people are outraged, upset, angered. It’s a weird Kabuki, especially when people could just as easily refuse to care what sounds any one talking ape lets escape from his or her mouth. It’s weird to me, that this is the world we live in, that people get fired and cancelled or divorced or even jailed based on nothing more than the shape of the sounds they emit from their maws when we could just collectively decide that as talking apes we are going to talk.