I hope Alexander Boris De Pfeffel Johnson – a good name for a poet – will in time be sent somewhere in exile so he can work on a great poem sequence, to be entitled Covid’s Metamorphoses.
Here is the greatest metamorphosis of recent times: the one which turned a libertarian into a totalitarian.
Boris’s public hearings have not been very interesting. I have struggled to remain attentive. It’s an odd sort of ritual humiliation. The witness statement was almost as dull. It is just another two hundred page manuscript from the Doubledownton Abbey archive. Boris is perhaps attempting yet another metamorphosis: he is trying to be serious. But he cannot wear the mask of seriousness – excuse the metaphor – as well as Gove. Boris suffers from a case of Long Facetiousness, and it doesn’t sit well with his hand-wringing about tragedy. However, in all of these long transcripts there is always at least one revealing utterance, and here is Boris’s. It is from p.7 of his witness statement, and is the entirety of his third point.
The context is that on March 23rd, 2020, he told the British to stay at home. He then comments:
In imposing that lockdown, I went against all my own personal and political instincts. I believe that a society will be happiest and strongest if people are free; free to make their own choices: free to live their lives as they please, provided – in the great caveat of J.S. Mill, father of libertarianism – they do no harm to others. And that was the problem.
Read that out aloud in a BBC voice of the old generation and see how well-crafted it is (unlike quite a lot of the rest of Boris’s Witness Statement, which, I assume, was cobbled together by civil servants).
Now, Boris Johnson went to Oxford. In recent memory Oxford was the university of figures like Isaiah Berlin, A.J. Ayer, Bernard Williams. It was worldly, dry, archly but not bleakly cynical, clever, hypocritical, politely earnest, and very liberal. Hence, I think, the reference to John Stuart Mill. The words ‘J.S. Mill’ were probably used in Oxford quads in Boris’s time to calm down anyone exhibiting an unreasonable position on anything. Plus, what was the Bullingdonian smashing of glass if not a Millian ‘experiment in living’?
Mill was the author of the famous On Liberty, published in 1859. In one regard Mill was ‘libertarian’. He deserves to be one of the heroes of ‘classical liberals’ like Jordan Peterson and supporters of the Free Speech Union. Here is one of his famous lines as evidence:
If all mankind, minus one person, were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind.
So far, so good. But in another regard Mill is highly suspect. What Boris calls a ‘caveat’ can at first be read as a fairly mild qualification to a powerful assertion of freedom:
That the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilised community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others.
Read it again. The more one thinks about this utterance the more disturbing it seems. The problem is that the phrase ‘prevent harm to others’, as we are now exquisitely aware, is highly ambiguous. Mill probably thought that power should be used for the purpose of defending law and order. By ‘harm’ he probably meant physical harm. Sticks and stones, and all that. Vaccines. But in our hyperventilating age we have redefined ‘harm’ so it includes microaggressions, triggering events, perforations of safe spaces, and whatnot – including ludicrously modelled exponential anticipations of possible harm. If ‘harm’ can be redefined to include anything that one thinks is even slightly irritating or vexatious or possible then Mill’s encomium in favour of liberty is not worth the ash into which his servant turned Carlyle’s original manuscript of The French Revolution.
Boris went to Oxford. If only he had gone to Cambridge. Cambridge, as compared to Oxford, has always had the reputation of being a backwater, a second thought, a fen: not the stamping ground of wrong but romantic Charles I, but the stamping ground of right but repulsive Oliver Cromwell. Oxford boasts a thousand Prime Ministers, Cambridge only a few. However, Oxford has been a bit unsound politically for some time. The most renowned Conservative academic (in what would have been Boris’s time in Cambridge had he gone there) was the history don at Peterhouse, Maurice Cowling. I was taught by Cowling (in late evening do-you-take-soda-in-your-whisky supervisions) and before too long bought a copy of his book Mill and Liberalism, which was originally published in 1963. I still have it here. In the preface to his book Cowling says this:
Mill, the godfather of English liberalism, emerges from these pages considerably less libertarian than is sometimes suggested. He emerges considerably more radical, and, without straining words unduly, may be accused of more than a touch of something resembling moral totalitarianism.
Cowling’s argument in the book was that Mill had not, as everyone seems to think, advocated liberty for liberty’s sake, but advocated liberty as a destructive force that would lay waste to established tradition, authority and religion so that the ‘Religion of Humanity’ could be imposed on us instead. What Mill meant by the ‘Religion of Humanity’ is of course unclear: it meant partly Auguste Comte’s eclipsing of religion and metaphysics by science (the 19th Century version), it meant partly what generations of open-minded rationalists such as Russell, Beveridge and Popper could build for us (the 20th Century version), and it meant partly ‘experiments in living’ by sensitive souls and assorted snowflakes (the 21st Century version).
Cowling said Mill was not meek or mild or humble or hesitant or a believer in toleration, as everyone in Oxford, including Isaiah Berlin, seemed to think. Mill, he told us, had “a socially cohesive, morally insinuating, proselytising doctrine”. In fact, “Mill was a proselytiser of genius: the ruthless denigrator of existing positions, the systematic propagator of a new moral posture, a man of sneers and smears and pervading certainty”. Needless to say, the bien-pensants of the 1960s all hated Cowling’s book. I don’t think it got a single good review. Most of the Mill scholars chose to ignore it, and read the Oxford books instead: you know, Alan Ryan, John Gray, David Miller, that sort of thing.
Anyhow, if Johnson had gone to Cambridge, instead of Oxford, he might have strayed into Peterhouse, picked up a copy of Mill and Liberalism, and found out long before 2023 that Mill’s ‘harm principle’ is worth – exactly nothing.
The ‘caveat’ is like the trapdoor below the feet of a condemned man with a rope around his neck. It always opens. The harm principle is a hopeless way of defending liberty. It is an argument designed to fail to defend the liberty it very ostentatiously appears to defend.
In relation to Boris, then, it was this ‘caveat’ that helped metamorphise a libertarian into a totalitarian. A virus came along, and the entire free world fell through the trapdoor. The Covid Inquiry is just the twitching of the dying man’s legs as he thanks the hangman for saving him.
Boris let us down, to put it simply, because he could not see that the ‘harm principle’ was worthless.
Dr. James Alexander is a Professor in the Department of Political Science at Bilkent University in Turkey.
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Very good. Gets to the heart of the matter, not least in questioning the wisdom of the attempt by assorted intellectuals over the last few centuries to substitute an ersatz ‘Religion of Humanity’ for the real thing.
I thought Boris’s middle name was piffle.
The harm principle is worthless without a definition of harm. If people are free to define cause harm as exhale (as they did), all of human live becomes subject to legitimate execution of power and that’s certainly not what Mill meant.
But that is exactly where we are now. There seems to be no burden of proof when it comes to claims of harm. At least not in the political or social sphere. Harm is whatever one claims it to be.
Why we just take every claim of harm being inflicted at face value is something that I don’t completely understand.
E.g. You are breathing the virus out and infecting me. Evidence? Proof? Even if you stand back a bit? Nothing, the claim is accepted without question.
E.g. Your reluctance to switch from an petrol car to an electric battery powered one is causing a catastrophic change in the climate. Really?
E.g. You are white and male and inherently racist and sexists and the cause of injustice in the world. What?
Perhaps it isn’t and never has been about the reality of things but rather the narrative of the moment. If claims are consistent with a prevailing narrative they are taken at face value.
And the prevailing narrative of our times seems to be an anti-human one. Humans are a pest in the world and the fewer of them the better. What is terrifying is everyone now believes this with almost no exception, even people who are for the most part on “our” side of the major political issues.
The idea that there are just too many humans around is a dominant thought in our times. So no one needs too much persuading when a claim is made that a person, or a group of people or all of us as species is causing some form of harm or other.
You are breathing the virus out and infecting me.
This one is easily addressed: The answers is I don’t. Viruses may have invaded my body. If so, this happened without me noticing or being able to control it and certainly without my consent. Assuming this has happened, viruses may also be shed from my body in a variety of ways, again without your or me knowing this, without me being able to control it and without my consent. That’s a phenomenon which is as naturally occuring on this world as rain or sunshine and in all three cases, if the possibility bothers you, it’s up to you to take whatever precautions you deem suitable.
Your reluctance to switch from an petrol car to an electric battery powered one is causing a catastrophic change in the climate.
There are 1142 coal fired power plants in China and even one of them dwarves the CO₂ emissions from my car to such a degree that they can rightly be regarded as non-existant.
You are white and male and inherently racist and sexists and the cause of injustice in the world.
I’m certainly not responsible your desire to employ injust broad-brush generalizations of this kind. Hence, other sources of injustice must obviously exist. People like you, for instance.
—
Addressing this passive-aggressive whining is obviously of limited usefulness when it’s just being employed as cover for peope with power acting in self-serving ways but it’s still better than just accepting this as fate.
My point is that it’s worse than people of power using these anti human accusations as devices of manipulation.
These accusations of “abuse” are landing on fertile ground of a population that believes humans are a pest.
You did read the article yesterday that us humans breathing had a significant detrimental effect on CO2 levels and climate….
I didn’t. I’ve now tried to find one but couldn’t. But I was writing about something different, anyway, namely, nonsense-definitions of causing harm which rose to popularity during/ because of COVID.
Opinions are like arseholes — everybody has one would generally come to mind here. And nowadays, everybody with an opinion also has a statistic which ‘proves’ that his opinion is correct.
Boris is a stage name designed to make him seem like everyone’s mate. He’s not my mate.
Egregious as he was and is, he is but a tiny part of a global problem.
Actually I am sick and fed up of all the Bozo analysis. He was proven via the Scamdemic to be utterly useless, lazy and dishonest – I know, I’m being generous – and in reality a traitor so why do we keep bringing him back to the front page on the basis of ill-placed what iffery?
Boris Johnstone is a sick joke and one I am tired of hearing about.
100%
I couldn’t agree more.
Shysters and conmen have long been an object of fascination.
Not for me though. All conmen do is remind me how gullible people are. And I have zero admiration for people who exploit the weakness of others.
The quote in the article also exposes him as the evil schemer he actually is, because he not only accepted exhale as definition of [intentionally] trying to cause harm but is still defending it here: I had to introduce totalitarian rule (sort-of, things were much worse in Germany) because I had to remain be true to my liberal principles!
The DS seems to be able to see the inherent mendacity in many things but somehow not in Boris Johnson and the Conservative Party more generally.
One senses a certain desperation to find something to redeem them.
Yes I think it’s wishful thinking. If you stop believing in the Conservative Party as a party of the right then there’s not much left – it’s pretty bleak.
Totally agree
Excellent and illuminating.
But even then I don’t think ‘Boris’ would have done things differently.
He is in truth first and foremost a man without principles, incl. libertarian ones, and a narcissist.
He primarily wants to be loved by as many people as possible and his fellow chattering class members, which means he will always cave in to polls and spending OPM.
A fair-weather libertarian at best.
You’re still treating him too generously. De Pfeffel likely doesn’t give a hoot if people like him unless that turns out to his private benefit, ie, being liked by people is – to him – just one way to make them do what he wants them to do.
Good article. Very happy to read the truth about Mill and his ilk. Mill neither understood nor cared much about real freedom. He was a proponent of scientism, or rule through ‘the science’ by those deemed superior and ‘rational’.
Fun, but wrong. Boris fucked up because he’s a coward. I prefer Mike Tyson’s trainer to Oxbridge: ‘The coward and the hero feel the same. It’s what they do that makes them different.’ Boris knew what was right and did what was wrong.
What has King Lear got to do with events of recent times. The fools, the evil, the conniving all die. Whilst those with a true heart and an honourable nature Edgar, Kent and Albany live, and it’s no Hollywood production.
This “harm” argument might make sense …. if it wasn’t for the very clear and very obvious FACT that the lockdowns were inevitably going to harm a very large number of people.
And even IF the Tyrants could make an argument that they didn’t know how appalling the harms to the whole population would be when they imposed the first lockdown, by the time we got to Summer 2020 they most certainly did.
Yet they carried on for another 18 months.
So I’m not buying it. There was a clear Agenda in operation and “don’t kill granny” had nothing to do with it.