The Covid Inquiry is like a poem by Wordsworth. One wanders lonely as an aerosol for pages and pages, drearily marching through miles of marsh, and then one spies a lovely daffodil: a little phrase which offers some amusement or opportunity for reflection. I have noticed two of these already. Both were references to philosophers. You may recall that Vallance got into a tangle about whether Boris Johnson was reflecting on ‘Humeric’ or ‘Homeric’ logic in October 2020. Second, Johnson himself, in his witness statement, claimed that his thinking was what we might call ‘Millian’. Interestingly, both David Hume and John Stuart Mill were of Scottish ancestry and both had names – originally Home and Milne – that had been anglicised for the sake of English pronunciation.
My third finding is another philosopher, but this time without a name adjusted for the English and without any Scottish origins, except in so far as, on this occasion, it was a Scottish lawyer who mentioned Hegel.
On December 13th Claire Mitchell KC spoke in a public hearing on behalf of the Scottish Covid Bereaved. Lady Hallett must have been bored, though gratified, since she could spend the entire day listening to lawyers repeat the standard line over and over again. (There was a pandemic: the people suffered, the Government did not suffer; there were necessary rules: the people obeyed them, the Government did not obey them.) However, this Scottish KC came armed with something a bit unusual. First of all, she used the word harmatia in a sentence. I have never come across that word outside of theology. It is the Greek word for ‘sin’ in the New Testament. A bit further on she used another Greek word, hubris, admittedly a bit less impressive than hamartia, but still fairly recondite: the word for the sin of pride, often contrasted with nemesis. Not content with two remarkable h-words, she went for a third. And this was where Hegel came in.
The transcript has the following:
Post facto suggestions that Hegelian decision-making was employed is laughable in the face of the evidence of the most senior civil servants in this country.
I couldn’t believe my eyes, so went to check the film of the public hearing to make sure she had actually said ’Hegelian’ and not another word (say ‘Hibernian’ or ‘Arcadian’) rendered incomprehensible by a Scottish accent. Well she did say it, though the stenographers botched it a bit. At 1:02:32 in the video on Youtube, one can find her saying, “Post facto suggestions that a Hegelian method of decision making was employed is laughable in the face of the evidence of the most senior s-servants in this country.” The typists were not infallible. But they got the word ‘Hegelian’ right. Of course Mitchell is not infallible either. Not only did she run aground on the sibilance of ‘senior civil servants’ but also forgot the ex of ‘ex post facto’.
Now, I rather like Hegel. In my office I have about 15 volumes of his original writings – the Logic, the Encylopaedia, the Philosophy of History, the History of Philosophy, the Lectures on Religion, the Aesthetics, etc. – all bound in the same shade of blue. But I have no idea what ‘Hegelian decision-making’ is. And, as usual when someone in this inquiry mentions something philosophical, there is no explanation. Hume, Mill and Hegel enter like strange phantoms and leave without having brought anything to proceedings except the brief hope that something profound might have been said: followed by the depressing realisation that nothing profound will ever be said.
I googled ‘Hegelian decision-making’ and found only one website had ever mentioned it, except the one featuring the public hearing. That website features an incomprehensible commentary by Dr. Price from the University of Houston. It sheds no light on what Hegelian decision-making is, or, in Mitchell’s version, “a Hegelian method of decision-making”. We know that Descartes had a method, but Hegel only had a logic.
This logic is dialectical. Hegel scholars hate it when anyone mentions the ‘logic of thesis, antithesis and synthesis’: though this is because Hegel scholars dislike seeing their hero simplified. And the simplification is useful. (Like simplifying Shakespeare by saying ‘ti-tum ti-tum ti-tum ti-tum ti-tum’). Hegel suggested that at every stage of thought one finds that anything one posits can be complicated or divided or added to by another element, some sort of opposite or contrary, which in turn requires that some sort of further understanding be made – whether in the form of reconciliation, or advancement or even the simple introduction of something else not yet mentioned. Hegel’s Logic is marvellous: it is like a myriad of wheels within wheels, like a thousand penny farthings of different sizes chained together in a Heath Robinson construction coming clatteringly down the cobbled road of reason. Formally, it is philosophy in the form of a waltz: ONE, two, three; ONE, two, three… But it is more hectic than Tchaikovsky or Johann Strauss. It is Carmina Burana or the Ride of the Valkyries transposed into thought.
Lord knows how the Scottish KC could extract a method of decision-making out of this. Perhaps she supposed that in government, 1. a Prime Minister sagely offers a thesis, whereupon 2. SAGE sagely offers a counter-thesis, after which 3. Dominic Cummings, Michal Gove and Simon Case, with the help of Nicola Sturgeon, who is not to be excluded from the logic, formulate a policy.
It does not sound like Hegel to me.
Hegel in the 1820s called America “the land of the future”: so perhaps ‘Hegelian decision-making’ means: ‘Let’s wait to see what the Americans do, and then do that.’ But Mitchell says that the Government did not engage in Hegelian decision-making. So what could she mean? I am fairly sure she means nothing at all. But it could, I suppose, mean decision making in relation to every possible relevant concern. And if so, it would mean relating one’s decision not to this or that supposed crisis, but to everything that has ever happened in the history of the world.
So perhaps she is right. For what we know is that the Government did not relate its decision to everything that ever happened in the history of the world. They didn’t even relate it to every matter of contemporary relevance in March 2020. The Government responded with panic and uncertainty.
It is odd, however, that Mitchell complains about a lack of Hegelian decision-making when it is obvious that her idea of a good decision is simply one which responds with panic and out of uncertainty but also with absolute puritanical consistency and totalitarian thoroughness. She complains that the decisions the Government involved itself in took the form of “Potemkin meetings”, with “breezy optimism” in the background and “a disgusting orgy of narcissism” in the foreground. This is grand Calvinist denunciation. But as far as I can see, such pretence, optimism and narcissism are at least signs of some limited humanity on the part of our rulers. But I do not expect the inquiry to understand this.
In fact, I do not expect much of the inquiry. But it is pleasant to see the occasional mention of words which come out of a great civilisational past, even if it is not clear that our lawyers know how to use these words.
Hume, Mill and Hegel would all have thought that this episode was a sorry one.
Dr. James Alexander is a Professor in the Department of Political Science at Bilkent University in Turkey.
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