Adrian Wooldridge: Want a friend in the AI age? Get a dog

The most moving scene in Homer is not the death of the great heroes, Patroclus or Hector, but the tail-wagging of a pet dog, Argos. After 20 years away, 10 fighting the Trojans and 10 wandering the seas, Odysseus returns to his hometown of Ithaca disguised as a beggar.

As he approaches his family palace, where his wife is being besieged by leeching suitors, he encounters his childhood pet Argos, which he raised from a puppy into a magnificent hunting dog, swift as a stag and bold as a lion, but that has now fallen on hard times, old and weak, lying dejected in a pile of manure. Argos wags his tail when he recognizes his master, but Odysseus has no choice but to ignore him, shedding a tear as he walks by.

Why do human beings forge such deep bonds with dogs? Chimpanzees are more intelligent, as are dolphins and octopuses. Cats are less demanding. Horses were an essential means of transport until the beginning of the last century. Yet no bond is like the bond between Herr und Hund. The greatest chimp specialist of our time, Jane Goodall, invited 90 dogs to her 90th birthday party in Carmel Beach, California, but not a single chimpanzee. The chimps would have caused havoc, she said, but the dogs would take their proper place in the celebrations.

Dogs are solvents of social distinctions as well as perfect guests at parties. They are the eternal friends of the unfortunate - guide dogs to the blind, companions to the homeless, caregivers to people in distress. Many people only got through the COVID epidemic because of their canine companions. But they can also reduce the most elevated examples of our species into sentimental sops: Rousseau loved his dog "above all expression and conception"; Bismarck doted on his mastiff (which attacked a Russian diplomat during the negotiations of the 1878 Treaty of Berlin); Thomas Mann allowed his dog to jump up on him as he worked at his desk, smearing the wet ink on his manuscript with his "broad and hairy paws."

Thomas Laqueur, a veteran professor of history at the University of California, Berkeley, provides as good an answer to the eternal question of the bond between man and dog in his new book, "The Dog's Gaze: A Visual History."

The book is magnificently illustrated with examples of great artists contemplating dogs, often their own dogs, in various poses - dogs joining us on the hunt, dogs guiding the blind or comforting the afflicted and, above all, dogs just being there, sitting in family portraits, lying in scholars' studies, accompanying skaters on the ice, the eternal helpmates of the human species. But this is more than an upmarket book of dog pictures (not that there is anything wrong with that): It is a meditation, through art, on our closest relationship with another species.

The essence of the relationship is that dogs are the most human-centric of creatures - they mold themselves not just to our needs but to our peccadillos. Historically, they may have crept their way into our lives by providing useful services - guarding our settlements against invaders or helping us to hunt other animals - but they soon recognized that the best way into our inner circle was to provide companionship. Dogs are part of the social contract in the way that no other animal can ever be because they instinctively understand our plight as the most anti-social of social creatures. The human dilemma, so brilliantly diagnosed by Hobbes, is that we simultaneously need other people but also fear them as rivals and potential enemies. Dogs fill an existential gap by providing us with unadulterated affection.

French critical theory is usually a barrier to understanding the world, but Laqueur, a fluent writer, uses the concept of "the gaze" to good effect. Dogs are always staring at us, particularly our faces and eyes, in order to gauge our shifting feelings. But they are also gazing with us - looking at what we are looking at in order to anticipate our feelings and actions. They are thus part of our subjective world in the way that no other creature can ever be, certainly not those other domestic companions of our species, cats.

Dogs live simultaneously in two worlds - the world of nature and the world of culture. The novelist Edith Wharton writes about the "usness in their eyes," and at the same time their underlying "not usness." Dogs are singularly unabashed about their natural functions - excreting whenever the need arises (often while crossing busy roads) and philandering with other dogs whenever the mood takes them. Some eccentric humans have concluded that the best way to slough off the excesses of civilization is to behave as much like dogs as possible: Diogenes was known as a "dog philosopher" because he lived in the street, excreting at will, and Paul Gaugin liked to sniff the ground in Tahiti like a "rough, shaggy dog."

But they are equally comfortable in a human-centric world, adapting themselves to the rhythms of human life, shadowing us in our daily activities and often getting under our feet, until the desire for a nap takes over. Dog owners divide into those who let their dogs sleep with them and those who draw the line. I am afraid I am in the weaker group: My Jack Russell mix, Mabel, lies on the bed while my King Charles Spaniel, Alfie, burrows under the covers and sleeps at my feet, indifferent to the lack of oxygen.

My only criticism of this book is that Laqueur does not put enough emphasis on homemaking. Dogs have a genius for turning houses into homes - indeed, as far as many of us are concerned, a house is not a home until it is graced by a dog. Dogs domesticate even the most austere figures with their doggy presence and reconnect even the most distracted tech addicts with the natural world thanks to their demands for regular meals and walks.

In David Goodhart's classic distinction between "people of somewhere" and "people of nowhere," dogs are the quintessential people of somewhere. Had they been allowed to vote in Britain's 2016 referendum on membership of the European Union, I have no doubt that they would have voted overwhelmingly for Brexit, the inconveniences leaving the EU's pet passport scheme be damned.

Rudolphina Menzel, a leading Austrian cynologist, made this point about the somewhereness of dogs in a particularly vivid way. A Yiddish saying declares that "if you see a Jew with a dog, either the Jew is not a Jew, or the dog is not a dog." Menzel countered that "our people found their way back to the earth and it is time we found our way back to the dog…He who has not overcome the fear of the dog from the ghetto is not a renewed Jew."

The number of dogs being kept as pets is rising steadily, reaching between 470 million and 522 million, driven not only by rising disposable income in the emerging world but by deepening civilizational longing. Central Park is crowded with dogs, many of them wearing little doggy boots.

The need for dogs is becoming more pressing as the pace of technological change and social disintegration increases. As more people live alone, the need for doggy companionship increases; as AI bots slather us with faux friendliness, the need for real affection, even if it is served along with doggy breath, becomes more intense; and as civilization becomes more artificial, all manipulated news, machine-generated entertainment and contrived nothingness, the need to be reconnected with natural time grows. Technological fashions will come and go. The love of dogs is eternal.

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This column reflects the personal views of the author and does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Adrian Wooldridge is the global business columnist for Bloomberg Opinion. A former writer at the Economist, he is author of "The Aristocracy of Talent: How Meritocracy Made the Modern World."

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