How to Be Perfect: The Correct Answer to Every Moral Question

by Michael Schur

Some of the thinkers we’ll meet later have theories that can be decently presented in a few sentences; Aristotle’s ethics is more of a local train, making many stops. But it’s an enjoyable ride! When Do We Arrive at “Good Person” Station? It might seem odd to begin with the final question noted in the last paragraph, but that’s actually how Aristotle does it. He first defines our ultimate goal—the very purpose of being alive, the thing we’re shooting for—the same way a young swimmer might identify “Olympic gold medal” as a target that would mean “maximum success.” Aristotle says that thing is: happiness. That’s the telos,4 or goal, of being human. His argument for this is pretty solid, I think. There are things we do for some other reason—like, we work in order to earn money, or we exercise in order to get stronger. There are also good things we want, like health, honor, or friendships, because they make us happy. But happiness is the top dog on the list of “things we desire”—it has no aim other than itself. It’s the thing we want to be, just… to be it. Technically, in the original Greek, Aristotle actually uses the nebulous word “eudaimonia,” which sometimes gets translated as “happiness” and sometimes as “flourishing.”5 I prefer “flourishing,” because that feels like a bigger deal than “happiness.” We’re talking about the ultimate objective for humans here, and a flourishing person sounds like she’s more fulfilled, complete, and impressive than a “happy” person.

Aristotle’s flourishing, to me, is a sort of “runner’s high” for the totality of our existence—it’s a sense of completeness that flows through us when we are nailing every aspect of being human.

And the same way we develop any skill, Aristotle tells us, we become virtuous by doing virtuous things. This is the “lifelong process” part of the equation: “Virtue comes about,” he writes, “not by a process of nature, but by habituation.… We become just by doing just actions, temperate by doing temperate actions, brave by doing brave actions.” In other words: we have to practice generosity, temperance, courageousness, and all the other virtues, just like annoying Rob practiced his annoying bagpipes. Aristotle’s plan requires constant study, maintenance, and vigilance. We may have been born with those starter kits, but if we don’t develop them through habituation—if we just kick back and rely on them as adults—we’re doomed.

You might recall having an aptitude for generosity but not temperance, or industriousness but not mildness. In order to flourish we need to develop all of these virtues, and Aristotle promises us that we12 can, regardless of whether we are seemingly inclined toward some of them more than others. With enough work, no one is doomed to be forever deprived of magnanimity or courage or any other desirable quality, the way I’m doomed to get lost every time I walk around a parking garage looking for my car. Habituation may be the most important part of Aristotle’s ethical system, but it’s not the only one. Just like we need a coach to get better at tennis or a maestro to help us learn the flute, we also need a good teacher to give us some flourishing lessons.

“Nature, habit, and teaching,” says Aristotle, “are all needed.” Because flourishing, you see, doesn’t just require us to identify and then acquire all of these virtues—it requires that we have every one in the exact right amount. We have to be generous but not too generous, courageous but not too courageous, and so on. The toughest part of virtue ethics is identifying these amounts, and then precisely nailing each one. Aristotle called each of those maddeningly specific targets: “the mean.”

The mean, or “golden mean,” as it’s commonly referred to (though never by Aristotle himself16), is the most important cog in Aristotle’s ethical machine. It’s also, in my opinion, the most beautiful. And the most annoying. And the slipperiest, and the most elegant, and the most infuriating. Think of any of these qualities we’re seeking—generosity, temperance, whatever—as a perfectly balanced seesaw, parallel to the ground. If we sit right in the middle, everything will remain upright, even, and harmonious. That’s the golden mean of this quality: that perfect middle spot, representing the exact amount of the quality in question that keeps the seesaw level. Shifting toward either end, however, will throw it out of whack; one side of the seesaw will plummet to the ground, and we’ll hurt our butts. (In this metaphor, our butts = our personalities.) The two extreme ends represent (1) a deficiency of the quality, and, on the other side, (2) an excess of the quality—way too little, or way too much. Extreme deficiency or excess of any one quality then becomes a vice, which is obviously what we’re trying to avoid. Philosophers sometimes think of this as the “Goldilocks rule.” For every aspect of our character, Aristotle’s basically telling us to be: not too hot, not too cold… just right. As an example, let’s take mildness, which Aristotle describes as “the mean concerned with anger.” People with a deficiency of anger are those who are not angered by the right things, or in the righ...

For starters, how do we know what’s excessive or deficient? How do we know when we’re angry in the right amount, for the right reasons, at the right people? This is the most common criticism of virtue ethics: So, we just need to work and study and strive and practice, and somehow magically obtain this theoretical “perfect” amount of every quality, which is impossible to define or measure? Cool plan. Even Aristotle has a hard time precisely describing a mean sometimes. Regarding mildness, he writes, “It is hard to define how, against whom, about what, and how long we should be angry, and up to what point someone is acting correctly or in error.” And then he shrugs: “This much is at least clear: the intermediate state is to be praised, and… the excesses and deficiencies are to be blamed.” The entire system can seem a little like Justice Potter Stewart’s famous comment on “hard-core” pornography—that although he couldn’t actually define it, “I know it when I see it.” That may seem like a tenuous basis for an entire ethical system. And yet: We kind of get it, right? We can probably all remember a time we got furious at someone or something, and later thought: “Ehhhh, I probably got too angry there.” Or maybe a time when we let something go, and then felt like we should’ve raised our voice a bit louder. If we take the time to mull over what we’ve done, if we really commit to examining both our own actions and the actions of those around us, we can eventually come to understand ...

The best thing about Aristotle’s “constant learning, constant trying, constant searching” is what results from it: a mature yet still pliable person, brimming with experiences both old and new, who doesn’t rely solely on familiar routines or dated information about how the world works.

This is the full sales pitch for virtue ethics: If we really work at finding the means of our virtues—learning their ins and outs, their vicissitudes and pitfalls, their pros and cons—we become flexible, inquisitive, adaptable, and better people. In fact, the search for golden means is cumulative—the closer we get to one, the more it can help us in our search for others. Approaching the mean for kindness helps us get closer to the mean for generosity, which helps us get closer to the mean for loyalty, which helps us approach the mean for temperance, and so on. Eventually we’ll truly flourish, achieving a mastery over the exact balances of hundreds of different virtues. We’ll understand and adapt to any new situation, able to see and decipher the very foundational code of human existence—like Neo at the end of The Matrix. See? Being good isn’t so hard. You just have to understand the world as completely as Neo does at the end of The Matrix.

Quoting the great Enlightenment philosopher Montesquieu, she tells us that “ ‘knowledge makes men gentle,’ just as ignorance hardens us.” This is an idea Aristotle would like, I think. The more we try to learn and understand the lives being led by other people—the more we search for a golden mean of empathy—the less we will find it permissible to treat them with cruelty.

In fact, one of the best explanations of why “other people” matter isn’t really an “explanation” at all, but rather a worldview: it’s the southern African concept of ubuntu. “I Am, Because We Are” Explaining ubuntu will take a second, because there’s not really (as far as I’ve found) a perfect encapsulation, and since I don’t speak Zulu or Xhosa or any other African language, all I have to go on are somewhat murky English translations. A lot of the explanation of ubuntu is done through aphorisms, anecdotes, and proverbs, though the South African political philosopher Johann Broodryk defines it this way: A comprehensive ancient African world view based on the values of intense humanness, caring, sharing, respect, compassion, and associated values, ensuring a happy and qualitative human community life in the spirit of family. Broodryk anticipates our next question: “It may be asked whether this notion is unique,” he writes, “since all cultures ascribe basically to these positive values.” He’s right, of course—if we think of ubuntu as, say, “human interconnectedness,” there are parallels in Buddhism, or the Hindu concept of dharma.

The difference, he says, is that in Africa “these values are practiced on a much deeper level. It is about a real passionate living of humanity, as if humanity is the primary reason for living above all other concerns.” Another writer, Mluleki Mnyaka, further interprets ubuntu as an actual ethical system, which plays “a determining factor in… [the] formulation of perceptions… of African society about what is good or bad behavior.” Okay, we might be thinking, it’s the root of an African philosophy, a worldview related to the ways humans are connected to each other, a humanistic ethos that describes values and good behaviors… but what does the word “ubuntu” actually mean? The answer seems like a bit of a cop-out: “ubuntu” means a lot of different things, no one of them directly or easily explicable in translation. In fact, because it encapsulates a community-specific set of ethical guidelines, it may even have different meanings depending on who you are and which African language you’re speaking; Broodryk notes that the word itself varies—in Zulu it’s ubuntu, in Swahili it’s utu, in Shona it’s unhu, and so on. But the central idea remains the same—it’s always related to humanness, or “the ideal of being human.”

Here’s a proverb that I think comes close to encapsulating the whole idea: A person is a person through other people. Ubuntu is Scanlon’s contractualism, but supercharged. It’s not just that we owe things to other people—ubuntu says we exist through them. Their health is our health, their happiness is our happiness, their interests are our interests, when they are hurt or diminished we are hurt or diminished. The virtues that political scientist Michael Onyebuchi Eze cites as being characteristic of ubuntu ring an Aristotelian bell—“magnanimity, sharing, kindness”—but the emphasis is now on the communal instead of the individual.

So. Why should we return the shopping cart to the shopping cart rack? Because it helps other people, and we are only people through other people. Living in our world, going about our days with our own problems and annoyances and issues to deal with, it’s easy (and tempting) to remain trapped in our little brains and to only do stuff that improves our lives or eases our own pains. But… come on, that stinks. We’re not alone here on earth. We’re one tiny part of a much larger whole, as the Kenyan philosopher and theologian John S. Mbiti wrote: The individual does not and cannot exist alone.… He owes his existence to other people including those of past generations and his contemporaries. He is simply part of the whole.… Whatever happens to the individual happens to the whole group, and whatever happens to the whole group happens to the individual. The individual can only say, “I am, because we are; and since we are therefore I am.” We don’t just owe things to people—we owe our whole freaking existence to them. And when we think of “other people” that way, well, we’re not going to stop at the minimal amount that we “owe to each other”—we’re gonna damn well return the shopping cart to the rack if we think it eases the burden of those around us.

We’re not really going to discuss René Descartes, but consider for a second his famous Enlightenment formulation Cogito, ergo sum—the aforementioned “I think, therefore I am”—which, again, is one of the very foundations of Western thought. When we place it next to this ubuntu formulation—“I am, because we are”—well, man oh man, that’s a pretty big difference. Descartes saw his own singular consciousness as proof of existence. Practitioners of ubuntu see our existence as conditional on others’ existence. Someone could write a very interesting book on the sorts of civilizations and laws and citizens that emerge from each of these two utterances.

For the first year-plus of the Covid-19 outbreak, there was one persistent and harmful issue: No one wanted to wear masks. Or, more accurately: no one wanted to, but millions of dopes actually wouldn’t. Scanlon published his book in 1998, but if he were writing it now, I bet he’d have a lot to say about those dopes. Wearing a mask is roughly as annoying as returning a shopping cart to the rack after we’ve unloaded our car—it takes more effort than just doing nothing, but barely more effort, really, and when we run through the pros and cons of mask-wearing it becomes ludicrous not to do it. Here’s what was asked of us: buy a two-dollar face covering and use it when you go outside. Here’s who would benefit: everyone, everywhere on earth. Here’s how they’d benefit: society returns to normal much faster, and everybody doesn’t get sick and die. A global pandemic is, oddly, an ideal scenario to illustrate contractualism—what we owe to each other in this case is both easy to identify and infinitesimally small, and the benefits are astronomically huge. I said before that contractualism can quickly and effectively identify behavior that feels unreasonable or selfish—well, every time I see a video where someone screams that wearing a mask in this Taco Bell is a form of oppression, my first thought is: “You’re being unreasonable, and I reject your rule.” (For someone practicing ubuntu, of course, suggesting that we don’t all have to wear a mask would be ludicrous; the main function o...

Nearly all whataboutisms are indefensible, because by definition they fail to address the moral shortcoming the bad actor has exhibited.

When we screw up, deflecting attention onto a completely unrelated action utterly misses the point, which is: that we screwed up. Despite their fundamental differences, the philosophical theories we’ve discussed all agree—on like a “this is so obvious we shouldn’t have to say it” level—that each of us is responsible for our own actions. They might differ on the moral accounting we do once we’ve decided to act, but none of them suggests that our actions should be judged based on other people’s actions that have nothing to do with ours.

Do not confuse altruism with kindness, good will or respect for the rights of others.… The irreducible primary of altruism, the basic absolute, is self-sacrifice—which means self-immolation, self-abnegation, self-denial, self-destruction—which means the self as a standard of evil, the selfless as a standard of the good. Do not hide behind such superficialities as whether you should or should not give a dime to a beggar. That is not the issue. The issue is whether you do or do not have the right to exist without giving him that dime. The issue is whether you must keep buying your life, dime by dime, from any beggar who might choose to approach you.… Any man of self-esteem will answer: No. Altruism says: Yes. Or, to put it another way: “Fuck all y’all.” It’s frankly dispiriting that a woman who advocated radical selfishness and utter disdain for everyone but oneself wasn’t booed off the world stage, but even today Rand has plenty of adherents, especially among those who call themselves libertarians. (There are more than a few Randites in the U.S. Congress—former Speaker of the House Paul Ryan says he asked all of his staffers to read her books, a request which, based on their length and unreadability, may have violated the Geneva Conventions.) I suppose at some level, this shouldn’t be surprising. She is basically telling her readers that the only thing they need to do to be morally pure is greedily protect their own interests.

I can’t imagine Immanuel Kant struggling through 1,172 pages of Atlas Shrugged11 and declaring infinite selfishness a solid universal maxim. T. M. Scanlon seems like a pretty calm and thoughtful person, but it’s not hard to imagine him reading Ayn Rand and putting his fist through a wall. And an Aristotelian in search of a golden mean would bristle at a theory that tells the very concept of a golden mean to go jump in a lake. Nonetheless, we live in a world where “Be as selfish as you can!” is somehow a mainstream moral theory.

Again, I can’t help but think about the Covid-19 “mask problem.” The people who’ve refused to join the team here—the ones who decided that they simply didn’t have to (or want to) follow this new rule—often get extremely indignant when store owners or workers ask them not to be “free riders” and go maskless while everyone else covers up. “How dare you,” they say. “This is America! I can do what I want, because of liberty! The Constitution guarantees us Freedom of Face, and also Don’t Tread on Me and George Washington and Bald Eagles!”15 Thanks in part to this attitude (and in larger part to the craven media types and politicians who fostered it), we all watched helplessly as the virus ripped through the country in wave after wave. Even worse were the states where authorities decided not to require mask-wearing—either for similar ideological reasons, or because they feared the wrath of those who held that ideology, or both, or both plus ignorance and stupidity. The widespread lack of guilt among mask resisters feels like a gut punch, to me.

And yet here I sit, writing this book, watching the case count for the nation skyrocket because too many people think their own Ayn Randian right to unfettered selfishness outweighs the sum total of literally everyone else’s happiness and safety. It’s one of the reasons Scanlon’s What We Owe to Each Other struck such a chord with me—the title itself orients us, points us in a certain direction. He notably did not call his book Do We Owe Things to Each Other? He begins his journey with the point of view that we do, certainly, owe things to each other, and the goal is to find out what those things are. In a fractured national moment of stress and pain, of inequality and injustice, of ethical strain and Moral Exhaustion, we should go easy on ourselves at moments when we fail in our quest to become better people. But we cannot forget this simple truth: we owe things to each other. They may be small things, or simple things, but they’re there, they’re important, and we can’t ignore them.

Existentialism, in a hilariously reductive nutshell, believes the following: Human existence is absurd. There is no “higher power” or deity or meaning to be found beyond the fact of that existence, and this condition fills us with dread and anxiety. The movement’s overall goal (though the details vary from writer to writer) was to make sense of what we can do in the face of that absurdity, dread, and anxiety. Even at its height, existentialism was largely misunderstood and criticized. On October 29, 1945, French existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre attempted to set the record straight, giving a speech entitled “Existentialism Is a Humanism” in Paris. The title itself was meant to surprise people—a humanism?! This dude is claiming that his philosophy is “optimistic” and pro-people?!

The religious objection to existentialism doesn’t take much explanation: Sartre completely denies the presence of any omnipotent God that watches over us or judges our actions. To Sartre, we’re born out of nothingness—poof!—and then it’s entirely up to us what we are and do, and then we die—poof!—and that’s it. Nothing “guides” us, we’re not following any playbook from religion or spirituality or anything. All we have, and all we ultimately are, is the choices we make while we’re alive. The belief that we exist before there’s any meaning attached to our lives is a condition Sartre calls “subjectivity,” and explains by saying: “Existence precedes essence.” The most important conclusion it leads him to is this: if there’s no giant structure that fills the world with any kind of meaning before or after we exist, then: “Man is responsible for what he is.” Man first exists: he materializes in the world, encounters himself, and only afterwards defines himself. If man as existentialists conceive of him cannot be defined, it is because to begin with he is nothing. He will not be anything until later, and then he will be what he makes of himself. For anyone brought up in one of the Abrahamic traditions—Judaism, Christianity, or Islam—life without God is like a baseball game with no umps. No one is keeping score or enforcing rules, so anything goes. As Dostoyevsky famously wrote: “If God does not exist, everything is permissible.”2 If you remove God from the equation—and thus any ki...

For Sartre, life with no God to create systemic order for humanity may indeed be disturbing, but it’s also freeing. Without commandments we have to follow, or “meaning” to be found in religion, or national identity, or your parents being dentists and demanding you become a dentist too, or anything else, we’re truly free—in like a big-picture, eagle-eye-view-of-everything way—to choose what we are. “Signs” or “omens” exist only because we choose to see them, and we should never make a decision based on one; or if we do, we should recognize that the sign isn’t making the decision—we are simply choosing to interpret the sign in a way that points to our decision. Religious instruction, education, family traditions, a Magic 8 Ball—they’re all equally bad crutches to rely on when we face a choice. Every person, whether Peruvian or Mongolian, a pauper or third in line for the Danish throne, is perfectly and completely free to make whatever choices she wants.

But—and this is kind of tricky—when we make our choices, we’re actually making them for all people.3 Yeah. Wrap your head around that for a second. When we choose to do things, says Sartre, we’re creating an image of a person as they should be, which can then be viewed and followed by everyone else. Here Sartre weirdly converges with Kant, because he wants us to ask ourselves, “What would happen if everyone did what I am doing?” He wants us to determine our own morality but also model that morality for everyone else. This might seem like a contradiction: There’s no God, no “meaning” to the universe, no guidebook to follow, everyone can make whatever choices he wants… but also those choices should be a model for everyone else? Then, we might ask, wouldn’t thinking of yourself as a model for others be in conflict with the idea that everyone makes choices for herself, not following any external guide or rulebook? But don’t worry, there’s a good reason that this seems like a contradiction: it’s a contradiction. It’s honestly a little unclear how Sartre maintains all of these ideas simultaneously, or even why he would want to. He did sympathize with the Communists in postwar Europe, so maybe his political beliefs seeped in a bit here as he tried to find a way that humans were connected to each other? All I know is, people have been writing about this contradiction for seventy years, so the odds I untangle it in this paragraph are… slim.

Now, if you’re thinking, “You just told me there is no God and no ‘meaning’ to our existence, and that all we have are our choices, and now you’re telling me to make choices that model behavior for all of humanity? I kind of have a stomachache here, man,” well, that’s exactly the point. In fact, Sartre acknowledges that this particular human condition fills us with anguish—“the kind experienced by all who have borne responsibilities.” He knows how hard it is to be a human being on earth under the circumstances he describes, and refuses to let us off the hook. Life is anguish. Welcome to existentialism! And yet, for all the anguish it entails, Sartre believed, about existentialism, that “no doctrine is more optimistic.” The way Sartre puts it, in his trademark “everything I say is kind of terrifying, even when I’m trying to reassure you” style, is this: “Man is condemned to be free.” We have no crutches, or “reasons” to do whatever we choose to do, except that we have chosen to do them. (And I know what you’re thinking—what if I just don’t choose anything? No go. “If I decide not to choose, that still constitutes a choice,” he says.4) The “...

So what’s option number three? 3. We can acknowledge the fundamental absurdity of the human condition, and just kind of exist within it! I added the exclamation point to try to hide how bleak a sentence that is. But for Camus, that’s the only real answer. I don’t know whether this world has a meaning that transcends it. But I know that I do not know that meaning and that it is impossible for me just now to know it.… These two certainties—my appetite for the absolute and for unity and the impossibility of reducing this world to a rational and reasonable principle—I also know that I cannot reconcile them. The only way to cope with our desire for meaning inside an empty, pointless universe is to recognize how absurd it is that we exist in an empty, pointless universe and still desire meaning. He wants us to stand in the middle of the hurricane of absurdity, neither denying it nor allowing it to defeat us.

The existentialists are there to remind us: it’s always our choice. For all its confusing French8 linguistic gymnastics, there’s a simplicity to Sartre’s existentialism: we choose to act, and the choices are ours and ours alone. And there’s a comfort, sometimes, in Camus’s existentialism: just being human often feels ridiculous, and true happiness may come from accepting that ridiculousness as inescapable. Both men also encourage us not to dwell on our mistakes. Okay, we blew it. Next time: don’t. If Aristotle tells us to keep trying different things in order to find the bullseye of virtue, existentialists say: keep making choices, because choices are all we have in our absurd, meaningless universe.

However: despite Sartre thinking his existentialism is “humanistic,” or how liberating Camus’s existentialism might be for the mythical Sisyphus, it can be pretty unforgiving for real people.

We’ve now heard a large number of theories, spanning dozens of centuries, all of which have given us reasons to care about whether what we’re doing is good and playbooks for how we might try to be better. But there’s one essential aspect of the human condition that none of them really deals with: context. Few of these philosophies grapple with the plain fact that moral choices are a lot harder for some of us than they are for others, depending on our circumstances. How can it be that the same exact rules apply to me, Prince William, that poor woman whose doctor got her addicted to OxyContin, a South Korean dental hygienist, Cardi B, a sugarcane farmer in Guyana, and you? As we’ve talked about what “we” should do in any given situation, we’ve ignored that within “we” are a whole bunch of different “me”s, and each “me” describes a unique life with unique challenges and privileges, which might make the work of being good harder or easier for that “me” than the “me” who lives right next door.

But because apologies are so fraught with that ickiness, people, as a whole, are terrible at them. Like anything else, there are good and bad versions of apologies; if we’re going to take a deep breath, confront our fear of shame, and actually make one, we ought to do it right. In 1985, Tom Petty did a concert tour for his album Southern Accents whose stage design featured a huge Confederate battle flag. Years later, after many people had pointed out to him what that flag represents, he said this in Rolling Stone: The Confederate flag was the wallpaper of the South when I was a kid growing up in Gainesville, Florida. I always knew it had to do with the Civil War, but the South had adopted it as its logo. I was pretty ignorant of what it actually meant. It was on a flagpole in front of the courthouse and I often saw it in Western movies. I just honestly didn’t give it much thought, though I should have.… It left me feeling stupid. That’s the word I can use. I felt stupid. If I had just been a little more observant about things going on around me, it wouldn’t have happened.… I still feel bad about it. I’ve just always regretted it.… When [Southerners] wave that flag, they aren’t stopping to think how it looks to a Black person. I blame myself for not doing that.… It was dumb and it shouldn’t have happened. I love this statement. It’s clear and straightforward. He doesn’t dig in his heels or make excuses; instead he just explains how it happened, acknowledges that he blew it,...

Apologies don’t undo whatever bad thing we did, but when they’re sincere and honestly delivered, they can help heal a wound. They won’t do anything, however, if we’re defensive, hedging, or disingenuous—if what we offer is not actually a sincere plea for forgiveness.

But if Montesquieu was right, and knowledge makes people gentle, maybe it makes them safer too. That’s the bet I’m making, really. I’m placing a decent-size bet on the idea that understanding morality, and following its compass during decisions great and small, will make you better, and therefore safer. Not safer from harm, necessarily—though I hope for that too—but from all of the traps that modern life sets, especially for people lucky enough to be born into privilege. I’m talking about selfishness, callousness, cruelty, hypocrisy, snobbery—those qualities people display when they decide we are not actually living all together, here on earth, but instead are living alone, individually, eight billion siloed ego states, competing with each other in a race that (they seem to forget) inevitably ends with everyone in a dead heat.

Know thyself. Nothing in excess. There’s more, of course. You can’t just use that. But maybe start there. Being a good person is a job, and a hard one at that. But if you care about it, it may start to seem less like work and more like a puzzle you can solve. And in those rare times when you have to make a decision and you assemble the pieces in exactly the right way, so the image of what to do comes sharply into focus—you will feel alive and fulfilled and elated. You will feel like you’re flourishing.

Some Alaskan moose in the Western Yukon have been observed having “birthday parties” for each other, complete with “presents” (usually smooth rocks or metal objects that they find in nature) and even “birthday cakes” made out of weeds and mud. They even “sing” a song to each other by grunting in unison!2