On Obedience
Or, how dog lessons can shed light on being a good human
I take Mollie everywhere—and, truth be told, I don’t like to be without her.
Perhaps it’s lingering grief from losing Sam last Thanksgiving.
Perhaps it’s simply that Mollie is a joy: energetic, playful, and able to sustain a nine-minute pace for a 5K—good for both of us.
Lately I’ve been thinking about what makes a good dog—and how, right now, we often hold dogs to higher standards than we do people.
First Principles
Because I plan to license Mollie as a therapy dog, she must be a good citizen and interact well with others.
She learns this through weekly classes and daily practice.
She’s learning how to behave, how to conduct herself around people and other dogs, and—most important—whose voice matters most.
The more time I spend encouraging and correcting her, the better she becomes at engaging with the world and staying by my side.
She is, after all, a dog.
She wants her own way.
Manners Maketh the Person
Without clear instruction, Mollie would run amok, unable to socialize with either dogs or humans.
That thought reminded me of a line a friend recently shared:
“Men should be acceptable at a dance and invaluable in a shipwreck.”
J. F. Roxburgh, the first headmaster of Stowe School in England, captured two enduring civic virtues in that sentence: social grace and courage—qualities we prize in good dogs as well.
Regrettably, today’s public discourse often rewards the opposite, eroding our capacity to connect meaningfully or to be courageous when needed.
Discipling vs. Following
Nearly 1,800 years earlier Marcus Aurelius wrote,
“If, at some point in your life, you come across anything better than justice, truth, self-control, courage—it must be an extraordinary thing indeed.”
When I think of Marcus and the struggles he endured, I wonder what he would say about our present habits.
Would he find us pursuing health and discipline—or distraction and decay?
Despite their differences, the great traditions—Judeo-Christian, Islamic, Greco-Roman, and Eastern—share a handful of distilled truths:
Life is hard and you will not get your own way. (Ecclesiastes 7:14; the Buddhist truth of dukkha; Qur’an 90:4)
Being kind to others is never bad. (Leviticus 19:18; Stoic humanitas; Buddhist metta)
Learning to get along with others is good for the soul. (Romans 12:18; Qur’an 49:10 on ummah; Aristotle’s zoon politikon; Right Speech and Action of the Buddhist Eightfold Path)
How you treat others—especially the vulnerable—defines your character. (Matthew 25:40; Islamic almsgiving; Buddhist Right Livelihood)
Being a good citizen matters in untold ways. (Jeremiah 29:7; Seneca on civic virtue)
Each calls for obedience and belonging to something larger than the self.
Yet today’s influencers tell us we can cherry-pick a path to “freedom” or “success” without the hard work of discipline—offering hacks and tricks to get what we want without belonging to anything at all.
Cutting Through the Noise
One of the best ways to escape the online follower mentality is simple: think for yourself and read.
Read widely.
Read from diverse sources and let those words shape how you live.
Then act.
Help others.
Volunteer.
Offer your time and talents where they’re needed.
Epictetus warned against empty reading when he quipped about his fellow Stoic:
“What good will it do you to read all of Chrysippus? You might praise him as a clever writer, but unless his arguments change how you live, you’ve gained nothing. Chrysippus himself wrote so much that only a few could read it all, but his goal was to help people live well, not to be endlessly admired.”
Our aim should be the same: to live well—to harmonize with others in line with the very traditions we claim as our own.