 This is a cultural event from the British Library. Thank you, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the British Library tonight for John Gray, Cats, Humans and the Good Life. My name is Susanna Stephenson and I'm one of the cultural events producers here at the library where I've had the very fun job of taking the exhibition that we currently have in the entrance hall and building a programme of events around it. I shared a story with John earlier in the green room about the fact that this all came from the fact that I heard his desert island discs in which he mentioned that he had a cat and was intrigued by their relationship with humans, at which point he received an email. Tonight's event is just one of a series of talks inspired by the exhibition Cats on the Page. So do take a look at the brochures you have and see if there are any others you'd like to come and see. And the exhibition is on until the 17th of March, so don't miss your chance to see it if you haven't already. I'll just briefly summarise the format of this evening. In a moment I'll ask John Gray to come to the stage and he will speak for around 50 minutes or so. I will then reappear and we'll have a Q&A with all of you. So if you find any questions brewing, please do hold on to them because your moment will come. So now it just remains for me to introduce John Gray properly. He is a political philosopher with interest in analytic philosophy and the history of ideas. He retired in 2008 as school professor of European thought at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He contributes regularly to The Guardian, The Times Literary Supplement and The New Statesman where he is the lead book reviewer. I hope you enjoy the talk this evening and please welcome John Gray. Well thank you for all of you for coming to hear my thoughts about cats. I should add that the cat that we have at the moment is one long-versed in the ways of humans. He's 22 years old at his next birthday. Whether he's learned anything of value during those 20 years of close connection with humans, I'm not so sure because one thing my own observations of cats, I've had many other cats too, is that cats are like a certain kind of human, the kind of human who originally gave me the idea of the book I'm now writing on, cats and the meaning of life, who was the kind of person who believed very strongly in human reason and was a philosopher many years ago, the kind of person who first implanted this idea in my mind of writing a book on cats that now several decades later I am doing, believed that human beings were guided by reason in their lives or could be and he was himself as almost inevitably that would follow in some aspects of his life at least completely irrational. The part of his life where his irrationality was to me most revealed was in his relationship with his own cat, which he assured me one evening in what I then thought was a joke. He had, this was about 30 years ago, he had persuaded to become a vegan. Now, vegan cats have always been, shall we say, rare. And the idea of persuading a cat to become a vegan has perhaps even been rarer until recently where it's now seriously proposed and even practiced by a number of people, but then it was unusual. And so originally I thought it was a joke so I smiled and he said, you must have had some very persuasive arguments. And he said, yes I did. I pursued the conversation a little while until I saw him getting angry and I realised that it wasn't a joke. He really had convinced himself that his cat was vegan. I didn't go into many details but towards the end of our increasingly rather tense conversation I asked him, I said, did your cat go out? Capital O. And he said yes, so QED. What I imagined was happening is that the cat went to some other owner who was less, shall we say, besotted with reason and with a certain conception of morality or caught things in the garden and possibly even brought them back but vegan philosophers may not perhaps not be the most observant people in the world. What does this illustrate? Well certainly it illustrates a feature of cats which is that cats are quickly convinced of the incurable irrationality of humans. But they never, even if they could, they would never try and persuade by reason humans to stop being unreasonable. They would take for granted that humans are so unreasonable that no reason could stop them from being unreasonable. So they simply adapt their behaviour if it becomes too trying or boring they leave. I don't know if they can have it. So that planted the idea in my mind 30 years ago of writing this book and our own cat seems to have long accepted that we are unreasonable. But we're reasonable enough, my wife and I when we look after him, for him to forgive us our human status and our unreasonableness and he seems to have had and have a happy life. Now what did that actual event, that actual episode that did in fact happen to me illustrate some of the themes I'm going to try or thoughts that I'm going to try and address at night. I'm not a scientist of cats, I'm not a zoologist. I've had much, lots of books about cats and had many cats but these are simply thoughts that I've had over the years which have been germinated in me by living with cats. And they've really fallen into three categories. The first is cats and morality. The second is cats and happiness. And the third is cats and us. Now I suppose when one talks about cats and morality the first thing people say, well cats have no morality they'll say. Cats are always thought to be amoral. And people who say this have like the philosopher I described a moment ago, they have a very clear idea in their mind or they think it's a very clear idea in the mind of what morality is. They think they know what morality is. It's a set of principles perhaps or rules or values which they never quite clear where they come from. If they're religious perhaps they come from God, if they're not religious it's less clear where they come from. They might say humanity or humankind but of course humankind, human beings have had many different moralities. There's an enormously wide variation. The moralities of Sparta and the moralities of Athens for example in human history. But they're very clear in the minds people who think like this of what morality is. But in fact I think even in the relatively narrow cultural space of western civilization there are at least two different conceptions. Of morality and what's sometimes called ethics. There's the one I've just described which is that morality consists of a series of laws essentially. It's kind of a legal conception or a system of principles which we must obey. And I think this is important. I think it comes from Jewish and Christian sources and although I'm an atheist myself. I think these are very valuable and precious traditions that have contributed a lot to our civilization and we've been greatly impolished without them. But they're not the only way of thinking about the good life. They're not the only way of thinking about how to live. And in other traditions outside of the western civilization, Chinese Taoism for example, or within western civilization, the ancient Greeks didn't think of the good life in quite that way. They didn't think of it in terms of obeying laws. They didn't even think that morality marked out a special part of human life. We tend to think of morality as a kind of special, weighty, terribly important, immensely valuable kind of part of human life. In fact as the supreme kind of locust, the supreme kind of value in human life as if it's separate from everything else. But actually if you read back into Aristotle even, not one of my favourite philosophers for many reasons, but if you read back into Aristotle the way he thought of ethics, to use this other word, was the way most Greeks thought of it at that time, which was the art of life. So ethics was whatever you needed to live well and that would include hygiene, beauty, what we now call aesthetics. It would include lots of areas of life that we don't think of as being moral, of having nothing much to do with morality. Whatever was needed to live a good life was part of ethics. Now one good feature of Aristotle is that even back then, 2500 years ago, he didn't restrict ethics entirely to human beings. In Aristotle long before there were ideas of speciesism or anti-speciesism or animal rights, he talks about the ethics of dolphins. He said dolphins have virtues. What are virtues? Virtues are things you need to live well. To live well he thought meant to realise your nature, to realise your nature. Dolphins, being dolphins, needed certain virtues of courage, bravery, cooperation, trust among themselves to live well as dolphins. So too did human beings. Downside of Aristotle, there are many downsides of Aristotle, is that basically he was writing for middle-aged Greek property-owning males, which is a relatively small part of the human species even at that time. And there's also something when you read him and when you read him on friendship, I mean when he says a friend is someone who mirrors yourself. When reading, I think, well why would it have been simply just a buyer mirror and sit and look at yourself all day? That's not been my experience of friendship. Mine has been that people are very different from the way I am. I've been very often the most valuable friend. So I don't in general find him an inspiring moral philosopher. But in this respect he's very interesting because he sees ethics, the art of life, as something which all species can practice. They can't deliberate about it, maybe the way we do, they can't ponder it about the way that we do. But other species like dolphins and like cats, though he doesn't mention cats, can have virtues and cats I think are like that. Now of course, one feature of cats relevant to any book on cats and philosophy or the meaning of life is that cats don't need philosophy. There's no known feline philosophy and I think they don't need it. Why don't they need it? Because they already know how to live. From a kind of feline point of view, you might say that needing a philosophy or a religion is a human frailty, a human weakness. It's because we don't know how to live that we need to think about it and philosophise about it and take up religions. And also, as far as we know, there are no cat religions. One thing we can be absolutely certain is that they don't regard us as deities. Humans have regarded cats as deities, the ancient Egyptians of course, but there's no known instance of that being ever reversed. Of course, the ethics of cats are shown in their relationship to their kittens. They go to great lengths to protect their kittens, sacrifice their lives for their kittens and in that sense you might say they're altruistic. And we tend to think of ethics nowadays in terms of altruism. Ethics means or morality means caring for others. And that's of course one of the arguments people give for cats being immoral. They say well they don't care for other cats, it doesn't seem unless they're kittens and they don't really care. Many people say for humans, they want certain things from humans and to the extent that they get these things from humans they exhibit affection, but it's kind of switched on and off and it's not really true. I think this is a mistake. I'll talk a bit about that more later, but I think cats can have genuine affection for us and even love us. But unlike humans, they can love us without needing us. That's to say they can walk away. They have their own life, they're independent. Their lives have the meaning they have, and I'll talk about that a bit more, independently of us. So they don't need humans in the way that we humans sometimes need other humans to provide our lives with a meaning. And that's actually part of my main thought tonight, which I'll try and develop, which is that the secret of feline happiness is that cats don't tell their lives as stories. You sometimes read from people who may not have had cats or know them very well, they say cats live in an eternal present. They have no sense of time. Well, if you're woken up as we are twice a night at 3.30 and then 6.30, you begin to doubt that because when they get hungry they seem to remember exactly when they're going to be fed. They have a sense of time, at least as it applies to their practical necessities. The key is not that whether they have a sense of time or not, or whether they live in the present or not, I don't think they do entirely, although they do more than humans. It's that cats more than even other animals don't find the meaning in their lives from constructing a story about their lives. And I think a very deep-seated feature of the human animal and the human culture is that we all tend, all of us have this tendency, I think, and again I'll try and speculate about why this is so. To find meaning in our lives to the extent that they embody a coherent story told to us by ourselves, made up by, fashioned by ourselves, or maybe one that we find ready-made in a religion or a philosophy. And to the extent that that story breaks down or is confounded by events, some dissolution of society, upheaval or a personal catastrophe or tragedy like a bereavement or something else of that kind. To the extent that our story is disrupted, broken, to the extent that our lives which we thought of almost like a novel or a book, we suddenly found the pages ripped out, some of the pages ripped out. We don't know what's coming next. We're unhappy. And we're unhappy in a way which is more pervasive and more diffuse and more disabling to some extent than even the unhappiness which comes from physical pain or danger because it pervades the whole of our lives. And here again we're different from cats because the default condition of a cat is contentment or happiness. The default condition of human beings is diffuse misery. Remember Freud, someone I think is now unpopular but I greatly admire, he wrote to someone that the aim of therapy of psychoanalysis he said was to transform the hysterical misery of neurosis into ordinary everyday unhappiness. Might seem rather limited and modest but stoically even but that's what he said. But it recognizes that for humans happiness is not a natural condition. It's certainly not the default condition but cats it is. They're capable of unhappiness even of great unhappiness or suffering obviously. Terrible things can happen to them as they can to humans. But the impact on them is different because it doesn't, those kind of events don't fragment a story that they've either imbibed, accepted, inherited or made up for themselves which is then broken up by events. So get back to my first cat. Cats have no morality but it doesn't mean they don't know how to live. They do know how to live. It doesn't even mean that they have no ethics. The ethics is what it takes for them to live well. So they need to be brave and cats are brave. They also brave enough to be cautious. That's to say to run away. They don't exhibit bravery in order to be praised or admired by other cats. They run away. They're very cautious when they eat. They make sure it's as far as they can that it's not poisonous. Some of it is anyway but they're cautious in many of the things that they do but they're also extremely good. And they're extremely inventive and resourceful. In fact according to recent studies of cats based on the long history of cats based on DNA evidence it looks as if they initiated their own domestication about 12,000 years ago. When they started haunting grain stores in Turkey and maybe China that humans had set up because in grain stores first of all there were other living things like rats, rodents that they could catch and kill. And they started interacting with humans and unlike dogs there is a view which says that cats as it were took the initiative and being domesticated but they're not of course very domesticated. They're much less domesticated than there are many artificial breeds of cats but cats on the whole have become less, have not become part human the way dogs have done. And that's I think part of their charm for those of us who love cats which is they're not actually mainly human in their mind. Their mind is an inhuman mind, an alien mind and for that reason it gives us like a window to a non human world. But fearless Sylvesteros, a sturdy little tabby who seems to have emerged from Turkey about 12,000 years ago has spread throughout the entire world on ships which went to Australia. It's conquered the world, very, very successful animal, very successful species. And so it has the virtues which enabled it to live well and in this context living well also includes living happily. Unless bad things happen to them cats are happy. Humans are not happy even if good things happen to them. Because very often they have a story in which something even better should still happen or they have a story about their whole lives ending in a successful death of some kind. But the fact of the matter is none of us knows how we're going to die and that by the way I'll come back to that later is I think one of the reasons, I'm only speculating I can't prove this, but one of the reasons we are storytellers in the way that we are as humans is that we know we're going to die in a way that cats don't. We know our lives are finite. We know they come to an end. I mean there are some people in California who won't accept this of course. Including the current director of engineering at Google who's on what he describes as an inexpensive vitamin regime, it's only $1,000 a week. To keep him alive till 2040 or I think it might now be 2032, it's getting nearer as he gets older. When there will be a technological transformation in which he will be rid of his frail human body, however a vitamin boosted. And his mind will be uploaded into cyberspace where he will be immortal. But unless you share that view, or you let your religious, which in some strong way in a type of religion which values immortality, which not all religions do actually, but which thinks that humans can or will be immortal, the common human experience is to know that you are going to die and that your lives and your days and your years are limited. And that I think is one of the factors, one of the forces that turns us into storytellers. If we didn't know that, if we didn't have a vivid sense of that, which even elephants, though they seem to gather around dead elephants, don't seem to have in their own cases, they don't seem to have a sense of their lives as being measured out in three score, ten, or even with four score, five score, six score and ten as technology enables us to live longer. We know that finite and that seems to be one of the factors to me, the awareness of our mortality which makes us into storytellers, which makes us want to tell a coherent story of the whole of our lives which we know will come each of them to an end. The trouble is we don't know any of us how they will end and so there's an element of pretence and also an element of deep anxiety in this because as I said earlier, when something goes wrong, we tend to suffer very badly. So I'll move on, as it were, to cat happiness, the happiness of cats. And I guess one book here, which I mentioned to you, it's a very long book and it's not mostly about the cat, but the title is The Cat from Huey. Any of you ever heard of it? That book, The Cat from Huey. It's written by an American war correspondent who, as a relatively young man, spent a lot of time in Vietnam and while he was in Vietnam, he adopted a Vietnamese cat in the city of Huey, which is some of you who may remember about Vietnam. It was a city, a beautiful Vietnamese city, which was pretty well completely destroyed in the course of the Vietnam War. He adopted the cat, he took it to America, he took it to London and although the cat always had a certain grumpiness and mistrustfulness about human beings, not surprising, being surrounded by in its early months and years by sounds of gunfire and people dropping dead beside it, it grew to trust him and love him, it seemed, and it's a story of partly about his own life as a war correspondent, but partly about that cat. You might want to look at his name as John Lawrence. Now, why is that relevant? Well, one of the things I guess that occurred to me when I was reading the book is that, as any of us would do, we would all do this, we would try to make sense of our time in Vietnam. We'd try to construct some story of what we were doing there and what the war was for and how it worked out, which didn't make it into a completely meaningless farce. I mean, I think the Irish poet Seamusine, he says, people ask what the logic of history is. He says it's got perfectly clear logic, it's the logic of an abattoir. So you're out there, are you among the sheep or the killers of the sheep, the butchers of the sheep? You'd be one or the other at any one time and then switch to another. We'd struggle and of course many of the young Americans who came back, came back psychologically damaged. There were more people, more Americans who served in the Vietnam War, who came back and committed suicide than there were who died in the Vietnam War. Many of them came back with strong addictions and of course countless more Vietnamese in that war, seeing their homes, their cities, their forests destroyed would not quickly or ever recover from it. They'd be traumatised. Now cats can also be traumatised, but what struck me in this story is that the cat was traumatised but it was able to leave it behind to a large degree more than a human could and I don't interpret that as many would say, well it's just less well developed in humans. Cats are, they've got less cognitive abilities, maybe they don't remember things the way we do. I think the reason was more that cats have not developed, don't have, maybe couldn't have but don't have this need to turn their lives and even human history as a whole into a coherent narrative, a coherent story. Bad things happen, you recover from them if you can, you go on and you enjoy the next day. I once was talking to another philosopher who said along these lines a different philosopher who said but you must remember John, that cats have no history the way we do. I said you regard that as an advantage of ours. Is history so wonderful when you look back at history? It's so wonderful that cats are deeply impoverished, they can't say well. We cats first of course discovered the pleasure of fish in the Egyptian period. At that time we knew very little about the truth, the true delicacy of fish. We just walked it down. Later on we became gourmets of fish. We often refused fish, often they do actually, sometimes cats offered by humans as not being to our taste but at that time we were pretty undeveloped as cats. It's only over many centuries and long struggles that we progressed to the point at which we now have the highly developed taste in fish that we have. No, cats don't think like that. But then they're also of course for that reason they're not dependent on historical narratives. That can't not only the narratives of our own lives, each of our lives, we each have narratives of our own lives, but we also have big historical narratives which tell us that the future, how the future is going to be. So they tell us that there'll be more of good things, more justice, more liberty, more freedom, more prosperity. What some politicians call the arc of justice will gradually tilt. Not inevitably, not quickly, there'll be periods in which it slides back in which you have periods of regression, but over a long history the idea is that there is a gradual story slowly working out. Now, if you begin to get the feeling which I suspect quite a lot of people do now that that narrative may not be entirely accurate. That there may be sudden rapid losses of gains that have been accumulated over centuries. Very hard to gain or generations that suddenly vanish in the blink of an eye and that they might not come back during your lifetime or even your children's lifetime. Once that seeps into the soul it's very difficult for humans to adapt to that and characteristically I don't want to sound pessimistic, far from me to be pessimistic. They become rather wild and desperate and irrational and it's in those times that people tend to turn to dictators and demagogues and persecutions because they want to, they're terrified by, and there may be practical reasons too by the way like there were in the 1930s, there may be huge inflations. I remember reading about old people in Berlin during the great inflation of the interwar period and when they were asked their address, the number of the street they said, instead of saying 22, so-and-so strasher they said 22 billion, 3 million and 550 thousand, the street number because suddenly the denominations to the notes that they used have really gone into millions and were. So we go get this rough so it can be practical as well as spiritual or psychological and when that happens, when things we've not only grown used to and habituated to but expect to be in the future suddenly vanish or it looks as if they vanish and we don't know what's going to come next. The story breaks down, not just our own personal story but the historical narrative, history. History has a sort of repository of meaning breaks down and the normal reaction to that is fear and a common reaction to that fear is to look round for a saviour of some kind and that often turns out to be a dictator or a tyrant or someone offering some quick and easy solution. Quick and easy solutions if you want a general rule, generally involved killing large numbers of people. That'll do it, never does actually but not much has learned from that. Well in the world of cats which is a world if not of the internal present but a world different from the human world in that they live according to the pleasures of the day and the satisfactions of the day and the long sleeps they take in between the days. None of this occurs so I don't see the absence of a history, I don't see the lack of a history of a ffeline history of improvement, ffeline history in 12 volumes. I don't see that as a loss necessarily, they certainly don't anyway. So this also has another side which is that although terrible things can happen to cats as may have happened to the cat from your way, the cat's lives can't be tragic in the way that human lives can be tragic. Now you can see this as a loss because you can say that what's in a sense valuable even about a tragic life is that it's some kind of will has been asserted against, some kind of struggle has been mounted by a human being individually or collectively against some great disaster or injustice or evil. And even if it's failed then it has value and I think there's something in that actually is important. I think there are some struggles that humans can and have and will and do and should even engage in, even if they know they're going to lose, even if they know they're going to be defeated. It would have been better to go back to Unfashionable now to talk about it but in 1940 it would have been better to go into that war, in the certain knowledge that you were going to be defeated rather than I think to compromise or make a peace because the peace would have been so shameful and so ultimately barbarous that it would be better to resist. You would show some signs of civilization go on there perhaps but it would be better. So I don't see that tragedy as well at value but of course we can be trapped individually or collectively in our tragic stories. There's an interesting historical debate on historical remembrance. Should we remember, I think we should, the great crimes and atrocities and victories and so on on the past. But there is a debate about it because sometimes they can prevent a society moving on. Cats don't have any of these problems. The basic kind of thought I'm having here is that if you want to be happy in the way that cats are happy, you have to forget the stories which you as a human being think will make you happy. You have to put aside those stories because they're necessarily fragile in relation to the events of life. I think the least fragile stories are stories from traditional religions because they're not falsifiable in the way that stories that we know. If you have a story which tells you that if you take up a certain therapy you'll be alright in certain ways and it doesn't work. That's pretty fragile. Ten thousand dollars on that damn therapist and I feel worse now than I did when I started. That's a fairly, I'm not saying it always works like that but fragile stories are ones that depend on events in the world which can easily go the wrong way. Less fragile ones may depend on religious beliefs and I'm not a religious believer myself or practitioner but beliefs which can't be fragile in that way. It's interesting if you read about how people survive in extreme conditions in concentration camps and other extreme conditions. You often find that those with, they're not the only ones but those with strong commitment to a religious narrative of their lives. Ending of course not with death but going on after death lasts longer. That's open to a criticism in one of Solzhenitsyn's stories about the Soviet gulag. He has one of his characters, Evander Mizovic, ask another one in the bunk. The other one said well God sent me here that's why I'm happy and the character Evander Mizovic he says fine but why am I here? So it doesn't always as it would give the kind of deep peace that it's required. What does this non-story telling approach to life give you? Well first of all cats have no regrets. They don't spend their lives wondering what they've lost. Freud again back to Freud said that the uses of fiction, he thought we all tended to fiction in our lives, the logical thinking in fiction in the way we thought about our lives are they provide us with the possible lives we might have wanted or desired but didn't have. That's why we're like that. Kierkegaard Danish philosopher wrote that however a human being lives he or she will regret part of our life. I don't know whether that's true. I've always thought that he or she might have regretted a bit too much but she's saying so passionately about not regretting. It's not always possible to believe that. She didn't regret and we have reasons for regrets but we don't live in regret if we're wise and if we're wise we can learn something from cats in that respect. Now this kid takes me to another kind of very important point about cats and about humans. Humans I think can't avoid protecting an image of themselves as they pass through their lives. We have a self image. An image not of us that we recognise in the mirror. Cats don't recognise their image in the mirror. Other animals, non-human animals can and do certain types of ape for example can recognise themselves but cats don't. But more generally quite apart from their physical appearance cats don't have what we all have which is an image of ourselves as we wish to be or would like to be or like to be seen to be which we protect through thick and thin. And this is a feature I think just a feature of being human. We know the kind or we think we know the kind of person we want to be and we think we know the kind of person we want to be seen as being. And of course this can lead and very often does lead to a state of self division. The key feature of humans I think as compared with other animals in particular with cats is not that humans are better or worse by some standard. I don't think there is some cosmic standard of better or worse between species. Not one which puts humans at the top which is the traditional Greek and Christian view for example. Or even one which puts cats at the top although I'm more tempted by that. I don't think there is one like that. I think the good life is specific to a particular species. And this is one way by the way where ethics differs from morality. The vegan philosopher wanted to convert his cat to veganism and thought that because veganism might be the best for humans. It was the best for everyone else, all other species. Well it might be the best for humans. I'm not saying it isn't. But doesn't follow that it's the best for other species. If you think of ethics as being those virtues, those ways of living that enable a particular species with a particular nature to live well. The trouble with humans is that their nature is divided. Our natures are divided in a way that other animals' natures are not. As I say, no cat and all that regrets. Dogs do as having been partly humanised, partly anthropocentised. They can show shame and embarrassment and you can tell from their behaviour that they may think they've done anything wrong. Never noticed that in cats. But that capacity for regret or remorse or backward looking or discontent is one of the human capacities that creates the default condition of diffuse unhappiness in which humans live. Because we can always regret what we've done. Even if it's not bad, it might not have been the best we could have done. It might have led to some better result. So we can always, we've got the capacity, the reflexive capacity to look on our impulses and regret the fact that we have certain impulses at all. Regret the fact that we are what we are. And so nothing is more characteristic than humans than the want to be higher than human. Nothing is more characteristic of humans than to want not to be human. Which is exactly the opposite of cats of course because they're delighted to be cats. They want nothing else but to be cats. Humans write throughout history even back to Chinese alchemy. They wanted ways of kind of early Silicon Valley type thinking. They wanted to make themselves immortal. Other Taoists by the way, maybe more philosophical Taoists thought that they welcomed death when it came because they transformed them into something different, something they welcomed death as part of an endless cosmic process of renewal. So they lyrically accepted death or tried to when it came upon them. But generally speaking throughout human history there are countless traditions in which humans have tried to rid themselves of part of their humanity. And not only themselves unfortunately but other people too by converting them to their own way of life or their own beliefs or their own worldview, their own ideology. And in modern times of course we have this through technology. Many people want to not just live longer but to live longer thinner, more beautiful, more attractive to other people, more sexy, more everything, more everything. And they think that technology can give them that along with perhaps some way of escaping death itself. By the way the reason I don't think we can escape death at all is not because the technology will never exist to upload us. Maybe it will, how do I know, might be quite soon. And certainly we will live longer already now than humans typically did. If you go back and read what Liverpool was like in the early 19th century, the average lifespan I think taking to a kind of child mortality was somewhere in the 20s, early 30s. Now later on you got into the 40s and I'm old enough now to remember a time when most males where I grew up in the northeast of England died in the early 60s. Women a couple of years later. So right in that even in my lifetime there's been a huge increase in mortality and no doubt there will be greater increases. In future though they may be very unequally spread, that's another kind of factor, but there won't be a technological cure of death, why not? Well even if you can upload a mind, a conscious mind into cyberspace, cyberspace is a projection from the human world not part of the, not something independent of the human world. Ultimately it will depend on a material infrastructure, computers, various kinds of devices that do the projection. If they are destroyed in a war or a global economic crash or a change of property rights in the course of a revolution, the sort of thing that's happened countless times, even in the 20th century. Then you can kiss goodbye to your immortality because you'll suddenly disappear. Back in the 80s, get back to cat, but it's relevant to cat. When I lived in California I spoke to some of the techno-immortalists who at that time were going to achieve technological immortality by having their bodies or their brains at least frozen. And I said, well, when will the technology be around? That will defreeze you without the harm that the freezing does. And they said then, because they were more modest then, they said it might be about 100 years or so. So I said, well have you thought about what happened in the last 100 years, even just in America? Civil war? Great depression? Two world wars? So this little company in Nevada that you're sending your remains to your frozen head, that'll still be there. It won't have been corruptly closed down or had a power failure or there won't be another world. Well none of these things will happen. In other words, no, no, none of those things will happen. So I admire their faith, not in this case in technology but in human history because what they were saying actually is that the institutions around them were already immortal. But historically it's just not true. Historically, as I say, there was a big crash in the 1930s and countless businesses and banks went under. In Europe there was what we all know what happened in Europe in the 1930s. So although these particular disasters won't happen. Now if you do not live with an awareness of death and therefore of the kind that we humans have, and if you don't live trying to tell a story in which your life will end in the way that you now want it to end, and if it ends in that way you will be happy and if it doesn't you won't. You won't be tempted to seek technological immortality. And you won't be tempted to see human history as an ongoing story which ends with humans controlling nature or controlling themselves or being capable of immortality. And you won't be as horrified or as frightened perhaps. You still will be because we're humans but you won't buy times in history when the improvement or progress that you have inherited from the past seems to be going to be suddenly lost. You'll realise that this is actually historically speaking normal. You'll realise that this happens from time to time and you can resist it. You can join collective movements if you want. You can do various things or you can do as the cat does to try to live well in all circumstances as they unfold even in Huey. The cat doesn't seem to have tried to run away from the war, war observe. In fact when it was taken up in a plane, two or three-seater plane and flown across a battlefield, it sat curiously on the shoulder of the pilot and watched as it flew over the jungle. It seems to have taken its new life in its full stride. So what I say of cats are is they are egoists aside from their care for their kittens, but they're a strange kind of egoists. They're selfless egoists because they don't have any conception of themselves, a self image which they're protecting. Unless their security, their safety or their comfort is threatened, they don't act to achieve some image of themselves in themselves or in the eyes of others. I think we can learn from that. Now what about cats and us? What I've said so far, I'm coming to the end now, has suggested that they're very, very different from us. In fact, that's, I think, one of the reasons why many of us love them, but if they're so different, how can we learn anything from them? If they're so different from us, if they're so radically different from humans in the respect, how can we learn anything from them? Well, we can't become cats. I'm sure that's something that cats would agree with. We can't become cats and we shouldn't try and become cats because we are humans. We should try to be perhaps better humans, but there are certain features of being human, like storytelling, which we might be happier if we were less enslaved to them, less attached to them. In other words, what we can learn from cats, I think, is how to be less attached to the stories we tell of our lives. We may derive great meaning from them in certain ways, the lives we've had with a partner who's gone or in a place that no longer exists. But equally, those stories can sometimes prevent us from moving on. So although we are storytellers and we always will be, which is one of the reasons, by the way, why we will, I think in my view, we will always have religions of one kind or another. Because the stories we tell in the sense that they're all very fragile and we look for anti-fragile stories. That's what we're looking for in religion. We shouldn't be so attached to that part of our natures. Hanging on to our stories is one of the reasons we don't enjoy our lives as much as we can. So what would be the meaning of life for a cat like human being? Well, what's the meaning of life for a cat? It's the sensation of life itself. The meaning is in the sensation of life itself. That is the meaning. Nothing else. Now, if you're religious, that will seem to be a very impoverished view. But if you're not religious, this is one way to think of the meaning of life. The Taoist in China thought like that. Some of the ancient Greek skeptics, for example, thought like that. The meaning of life is in the sensation of life. You then try and find a way to live being human you don't already know. And a way which enables you to interact with other human beings in a beneficial way. In a way which is perhaps even mutually beneficial. So that's in a way where I get. Where I get is we love cats because they're not human. Maybe we envy the fact that they're not human. But we can't become cats because we're so different from them. Because the reasons we love them also tell us that we can't be like them. But we can learn from them even though they're not particularly interested in teaching us. Books on cats, I just mentioned often, this is the first talk I've given on cats. But there are occasions when I've talked about cats with philosophers or others. They say, what about books on cats? I haven't found among philosophers very much. Montaigneur is a great writer on cats. Michelle de Montaigneur, the essayist, wonderful cats. He loved cats. He had, when my cat plays with me, I never know whether I am playing with it or she with me. He thought cats were in fact superior to. And other animals, many of animals in general, were superior to humans. He writes on cats. I'll mention three writers on cats I love. Colette is a film about her at the moment. The cat only appears for two seconds. But her whole life was spent loving cats and living with cats. And she wrote a lovely little novella called Gigi and the Cat. Which is about a love triangle, one of whose points is a cat. In which the cat is determined to drive away a gorgeous young woman who is interested in the cats. Some say owner, others say staff. Patricia Highsmith, the inventor of Ripley, spent an entire life with cats, loving cats. And she has a variety of stories about cats, very worth reading. And also Doris Lessing, many of you have come across. She spent a whole life loving cats, partly in Africa where she lived as a young person. So the kind of lives the cats lived with her in Africa on a farm in the outback in the wild. Quite different from the lives her sub-ascent cats lived when she came to live in London. But there's a little book where some of her stories are collected. And there are one or two poets. There's a kind of rather rough American poet called Charles Bikowski. And if you heard of him, he published a whole book of poems on cats. He wasn't too fond of humans, I don't think, but not even of himself. But he was very fond of cats and that's worth reading. So read more about cats, but maybe read these writers, fictional and other writers on cats. But just open your mind to the possibility that cats knowing so little know more than we do. About how to live a worthwhile life. Thank you. You've been listening to the British Library.