Putting on the Dog

The Crown Prince of Thailand reportedly made his poodle, Foo-Foo, Air Chief Marshal of the Thai Air Force. He thus outdid Caligula, who was assassinated before he could make Incitatus, his favourite horse, consul. Much as I love dogs, I cannot but admit that the Prince’s appointment of Foo-Foo to high military honours bespeaks a certain levity that bodes the crown ill. Only my own late dog, Ramses, was truly worthy of such an elevation.

I know, and like very much, all the local dogs: Oscar, Midge, Alfie. No really bad person could be the master of any of them. Alfie is the light of his owner’s life, a man not in the best of health, to say the least, and I suspect that Alfie gives him a reason—and a good one—for living. The fact is that it is impossible to be unhappy, or bored, in the company of a dog who loves you.

Some time ago, for reasons which I now cannot remember, I looked up the orthodox Sunni and Jewish attitudes to dogs. They seemed to me to be equally miserable and grudging. What struck me most, however, was the similarity of their mode of reasoning. It was all what x said about what y said about what z said about the permissibility or otherwise of owning dogs, as if the truth of the matter were to be found by the endless sifting of texts. Of course, the x, y and z were different in the two cases, but the argumentation was of the same sort.

Much has been written recently on the dark side of the Enlightenment, no doubt justifiably, but it is when you look into pre-Enlightenment thought that you realise not only how necessary was the Enlightenment, but how much it has entered your soul, so to speak, even if it cannot satisfy your soul completely. We are, most of us, children of the Royal Society, at least to an extent, whose motto is Nullius in verba, on nobody’s word.

Of course, Nullius in verba cannot be a complete philosophy of life. In practice we have to take people’s word for most things. We do not investigate too deeply the empirical or philosophical basis of the control tower’s clearance for take-off, for example, when we are in an airliner: we submit to the control tower’s authority. We take it for granted that our water supply is more or less bacteria-free. But we do not expect the public health authorities to check on it by consulting texts and nothing else.

My brief encounter with certain religious orthodoxies convinced me more than ever that the proper study of mankind is dog.

But as I write this, a story has just broken in Britain of a baby killed, and a child seriously injured, by a dog. Even before it was revealed to the public, I knew what kind of dog it was, or at least would have been prepared to put quite a lot of money on it: a pit-bullish creature. I was right.

These dogs, ugly, squarish brutes that look menacing and unappealing even to dog-lovers such as I, have become almost as fashionable as tattoos in certain areas of our towns and cities. They are to most dogs what cudgels are to walking sticks: they intimidate and are meant to intimidate. I have not yet fully made up my mind whether the dogs come to resemble their masters or the masters their dogs, but there is no doubt that there is an elective affinity between them, for many of the masters are square-jawed, shaven-headed and piggy-eyed. At any rate, they exude a kind of para­noid malignity and hatred of the world as if at every moment they expect to be attacked and to have to defend themselves with maximum ferocity. The dogs have the kind of jaws that, once locked, can be released only by decapitation; as for their masters, they assume that all eye-contact is a challenge that must be met, or they will appear weak and vulnerable, easy prey for predators.

The popularity of these dogs, then, tells us something about the social (or anti-social) world in which they are numerous. It is probable that some of the masters of these dogs are not actually aggressive but only wish to appear so, as a protective measure. I had a patient who had himself tattooed not because he liked tattoos or thought them aesthetically pleasing but so that he looked tough and likely to retaliate if attacked. He assured me that this was necessary for a quiet life where he lived and I believed him.

But there is more to the taste for those dogs than their supposed protective qualities. They are not jolie laide as, say, Jack Russells are. Their character is not (or at any rate, not intended to be) at variance with their physiognomy, but rather of a piece with it. Their physical ugliness is intended as a sign of deeper ugliness.

And this leads me to a curious phenomenon in our modern world. Although we are richer, healthier, safer and, I suspect, happier than ever before in human history, we are the first people in that history not to value elegance, except perhaps in personal gadgetry (the cheap computer on which I write this is beautifully designed). We live in an age when many of the super-rich do their best to look a mess: and as they are generally talented people, they generally succeed.

Perhaps they want to look a mess for reasons of political expediency (I exclude principle or genuine guilt, of course). They find it more comfortable not to display their wealth by outward show at a time when everyone else looks a mess as well. They feel that to dress formally, and therefore expensively, when everyone else is more or less in rags, could be counted as vulgar display or at any rate as a dangerous demonstration of financial prepotency.

Not long ago, I happened to watch a video on the internet made by a journalist from the Guardian newspaper about a social gathering of young members of the Sweden Democrat Party. I am not sufficiently informed about Swedish politics to know how genuinely extremist this party is: I have rather come to distrust the designation of “extremist” since polyglot supporters of Brexit who have lived much of their lives abroad have been called xenophobes. But I suppose it is possible that the Sweden Democrats are the real thing.

But what seemed most to upset the journalist about the young members of the party, who I must say all looked intimidatingly handsome and healthy, was that they were very well, indeed impeccably, dressed, and all in very good taste. Moreover, both the men and women appeared at ease with their own elegance.

“Why are you dressed like this?” asked the journalist, in a tone that was obviously accusatory. It was as if they were betraying some noble ideal by dressing thus. Did they not know that in Eritrea, in Bangladesh, and in many other countries, children were going to bed hungry? And here they were, dressed to the nines, when it was their plain duty to express their solidarity with les damnés de la terre, and with the refugees who were pouring into their country, by donning T-shirts and jeans.

My experience of les damnés de la terre, however, leaves me to suppose that they dress in rags despite themselves, and whenever they are able try to look elegant. There is nothing more moving, in fact, than to see the very poor people of, say, Haiti or India, strive to dress their children beautifully for school.

Having said all this, I must confess that I am not always well-dressed and indeed by nature I am a scruff. As with good manners, I have to remember to dress well, but often try to do so for the sake of others. Scruffiness is really a form of egotism, of deep but unacknowledged indifference to others. Arnold Bennett has a beautiful little essay in praise of dandyism. It may be carried to an absurd extent, he says, but it is relatively harmless even so, and at least represents a striving towards an ideal, and a social one at that. As it is, we slither towards the lowest common denominator, combined with more than a hint of the miserable orthodox attitude to dogs. Social justice, so-called, is our sharia.