Trying to understand Donald Trump has become a high-stakes intellectual sport. Is he an evil genius? Or a grossly insecure man-child? Is he a neo-fascist? Or a useful idiot for Big Tech? Maybe he’s a bit of all of the above.
I have my own theory: Donald Trump is 95 per cent cat.
I reached this conclusion after reading John Gray’s Feline Philosophy: Cats and The Meaning of Life – a welcome Christmas stocking filler over the festive period. Ostensibly exploring the differences between cats and humans, the book centres on the work of Baruch Spinoza, the 17th century Enlightenment thinker.
Spinoza is regarded as a founder of modern atheism. He rejected the Judaism of his birth and the Christian theology of his day to construct a naturalistic understanding of human beings and our place in the universe. Humans are animals, God is nature: These two propositions sum up his philosophy, which was admired by great minds from Albert Einstein to Jeeves from the PG Wodehouse novels.
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What has this got to do with Trump? Well, Spinoza tells us that humans have animal instincts because we can’t be divorced from nature. Chief among these instincts is what he called conatus – a “striving” or “effort” within all living things to enhance or preserve their activity in the world. Humans are inherently trying “to maintain and extend their power”, Gray notes. This goes for someone devoted to charitable works or social justice campaigning as much as for someone dedicated to accumulating wealth or building empires.
Spinoza argues that Christian morality denies our true nature. Instead of embracing the conatus within, we are taught to feel guilty about our desires and to feel shame for wanting power.
“Spinoza’s ethics diverges from traditional morality in not being composed of rules or laws handed down by some human or divine authority,” Gray explains. “It also views virtues and vices differently. Pity is a vice because it is a cause of sorrow and depletes vitality.”
Trump may know nothing of Spinoza – the 47th US president says he doesn’t read books – but he acts like an animal whose conatus is off the leash. He is following his natural instincts and proud of it.
He appears incapable of feeling shame and, crucially, is disdainful of established legal and moral codes. No man-made law should halt his onward prowl. Trump said as much in a recent interview with the New York Times. Downplaying the need to obey international law, he said there was only “one thing” that put a limit on his powers: “My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”
Gray, a prolific writer and one of the most subtle philosophical thinkers of our time, associates this quality of “following your nature” with cats. Cats “obey no commandments and have no ideals. They show no signs of experiencing guilt or remorse”. Gray should know, having lived with four different cats over the past 30 years.
As someone who shares a house with a cat, I’ve also experience of feline stubbornness. It’s not that cats are inherently immoral – far from it, they can show moments of tenderness. Cats also have different personalities. In every neighbourhood there is one bully (as my poor puss has discovered). But what they all share is disdain for human constraints on their nature. “This is who I am,” cats say. “Deal with it!”
It is this sense in which Trump is catlike. Mind you, there is also the furry mop of hair. And the floppy jowls. And the way he slopes across the White House lawn like Scar from the Lion King.
Why then do I say Trump is just 95 per cent cat?
Gray notes that cats, and other non-human animals, are distinct from us humans in having no awareness of death. This enables them to do impulsive things like jump off tall buildings and invade foreign territories. However, no human – not even Trump – can fully silence anxiety about their eventual demise. “The human being who thinks nothing of death does not exist,” Gray writes, adding that this awareness of mortality prompts humans to “look for meaning beyond their lives”.
Such meaning can be found in religious worship but also, for example, in invading Greenland as a legacy conquest.
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Spinoza suggests humans should be true to their nature. As a result, he is sometimes accused of supporting a doctrine of “might makes right”. Certainly, his writings heavily influenced Friedrich Nietzsche who reimagined conatus as “will to power”, a drive for mastery or dominance, and who became Nazi Germany’s favourite philosopher. However, a more generous reading of Spinoza’s work suggests he is simply pushing for a more realistic form of ethics than that offered by religion, a form of ethics that takes proper account of human nature.
In this way, Spinoza helps us to understand those like Trump who refuse to play by the rules without necessarily forgiving them. And he has at least one hopeful message for today.
At a time when individuals feel powerless against the might of global corporations and despots, Spinoza reminds us that we each have a “supreme right” to strive to make our presence felt.
It may seem like Earth is governed by predators. But you are not without power yourself.
