So You Think Your Cat Is a Communist

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She skulks around and doesn't do any work, votes for both sides, and makes people satisfied enough that she never actually has to do anything. Gray believes that our innate need to explain mortality and suffering with imagination and myth is far too fundamental. “I don’t have an idea of God or anything but I find the idea that you could wipe the slate clean of that impulse to be ridiculous. I once met in America a Christian fundamentalist, who told me in all seriousness that if young people were brought up in a completely chaste environment, they wouldn’t experience sexual urges until they got married.” He laughs loudly. “That’s exactly what Dawkins thinks about religion. Myth-making has been a part of every single human culture in history, why would we imagine that it is disappearing from our own?” If you see it in the light, it is usually sleeping, it always looks lazy and harmless, a good person to confide in. It is insidious, friendly and purrs nicely. But it also has quite sharp claws and it's job is to find and remove vermin. It is a subtle form of control in the system. Cat is spying and doing subversive actions. It is a cloak and dagger compared to sword and shield of dogs.

Gray believes that humans turned to philosophy principally out of anxiety, looking for some tranquillity in a chaotic and frightening world, telling themselves stories that might provide the illusion of calm. Cats, he suggests, wouldn’t recognise that need because they naturally revert to equilibrium whenever they’re not hungry or threatened. If cats were to give advice, it would be for their own amusement.In the last sentence of Straw Dogs, Gray asked a question, almost plaintively: “Can we not think of the aim of life as being simply to see?” Has writing the current book helped him to understand what such a life of experience might look like?

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It seems like she represents the unhelpful people of society, the thieves and criminals and people who profit over other people's work. Yes, yes,” Gray says, in his engaged and friendly voice, that still carries a north-east inflection (he chose the theme of When the Boat Comes In as one of his desert island discs). “Many people didn’t like Straw Dogs. The criticism was that I swept the board of philosophy and left nothing standing. I should say that I got some wonderful responses from people who weren’t philosophers. For example, three over the years, from war correspondents who said that adapting to what they’d witnessed, the trauma, had been one of the great struggles of their lives. And somehow my book helped them.”