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.
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.