Nemesis as a wallpaper pattern - why Boris Johnson can't speak the language of truth
The prime minister is a post-modernist, argues George Pitcher, because he recognises no absolutes and knows only relative values
The current prime minister’s relationship with truth can most kindly be described as casual. From inventing sources as a correspondent for The Times, to lying as a frontbencher to his own prime minister about his extra-curricular activities at The Spectator, to (arguably) misleading the monarch with regard to his desire to prorogue parliament and bypass the democratic process, Boris Johnson exhibits the mores of the witness nobbler – the truth is anything he wants it to be at any given moment to serve his best purpose.
This is a version of verity that’s well known to journalists. I remember being counselled by my desk editor on a national newspaper when I was subject to a libel action: “George, there’s your truth, there’s my truth – and there’s the truth.”
Even that little aphorism nods to the notion of an absolute: THE truth. It’s far from clear that Johnson would acknowledge any such absolute. For him, it seems that the truth is constantly relative to his most advantageous position.
In that, he’s part of a respectable philosophical tradition, but not one to which he’d aspire. He affects to admire the ancient Greeks, but Aristotle and Plato would adhere far more closely than him to discernible objective truths. Johnson is more of a Sophist, for whom the aim is the decidedly middle-managerial phronesis – a practical truth that serves human purpose.
Post-modernist
But even that’s a bit too grand. Johnson, though the sheer proletarian connotations would make him shiver and cringe, is really a post-modernist, in the utilitarian sense that truth is whatever you want it to mean. It’s what keeps you comfortable, which Johnson would understand. Though he should be careful about how he expresses that at home – John Lewis furniture is invariably post-modern.
So classical moral philosophy isn’t really Johnson’s thing. But it’s important to understand the moving target that is his idea of truth, because it provides an insight into his use of language. Again, there is a relentless relativism here - like Humpty Dumpty in Lewis Carroll’s Through The Looking-Glass: "When I use a word… it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less." Thus it goes for everything from “There will be no border down the Irish Sea – over my dead body” to the vow “I will.”
And again, there is a respectable philosophical heritage here too. The logistician Ludwig Wittgenstein held that language is all that we have in order to understand the nature of reality – and so becomes the reality itself.
He coined the concept of the “language-game” (Sprachspiel) to demonstrate that a word or a sentence only has a meaning in the context of the rules of the game being played with language. So, for instance, the utterance “Water!” could either be a cry of thirst, an order or an answer to a question, depending on the context (a context that has no meaning without that single word).
Applied to Johnson, this Sprachspiel means that the sentence (expletive deleted) “let the bodies pile high in their thousands”, which he is said to have cried in resistance to a further pandemic lockdown last year, has no meaning without its context. That context is revealed in the way he said it – ironically, satirically, sarcastically, furiously or wantonly.
That is the most sympathetic of readings of Johnson’s use of language. It all begins to unravel a bit if you play Wittgenstein’s Sprachspiel with “Get Brexit done” or “Let’s fund our NHS instead”. The context of the linguistic game being played here reveals an altogether less flattering range of contexts (as does his fiancee’s “Get off me… Get out of my flat!”).
This all matters if Wittgenstein is right and that language is all we have to make sense of our reality, because it enjoys (or suffers, depending on your religious outlook) its climax in theology, in the contemplation of an eternal truth. Since the Middle Ages and Thomas Aquinas, we’ve wrestled with the problem that if our knowledge comes to us via our five senses then we cannot speak about God in human language because he is not an object of sense-perception.
That’s why we tend to say what God is not, with negatives such as incorporeal, infinite, impassible, invisible and so on, rather than what he is. One way to a more positive approach is through analogy, so that when we say that God is “Father” we don’t mean that he is the begetter of all humankind (leave aside the incarnation for now), but we do mean that his fatherhood is reflected in human parenthood.
It’s analogous in this way to say that we’re responsible and committed to our children in the way that God is to us. This seems to be yet another moral measure on which Johnson falls woefully short, even by the standards of a fallen world. If we’re called to respect that analogy by aiming for it, he doesn’t even appear to try.
“Unleavened bread of sincerity and truth”
And not to try is to offend against that truth, because it denies its existence. Johnson has his strategies – as we all have – to avoid confronting that, most of which are the bluster and bonhommie of light entertainment. But it’s more serious than that. As Paul writes to the church at Corinth, we’re called “to celebrate the feast… with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth.” By contrast, Johnson’s cake rises with “the old leaven of corruption and wickedness”.
The consequence of that is spelt out in another Pauline letter, to the church at Ephesus: We are “full of greed”. For power, for love, for tasteful soft-furnishings. And that’s why truth matters. Too much denial of it – in the lives that we lead or the language we choose to use to interpret it and the destination is Johnson’s current dwelling, what former attorney general Dominic Grieve calls a “vacuum of integrity”.
Albeit a tastefully decorated one. Though it’s difficult to see how Johnson and his perma-fiancee can enjoy non-Lewis opulence in light of all that it now represents.
The truth will out. Johnson would doubtless love to figure in a Greek tragedy. But it’s more prosaic than that – touching your mates for a makeover you can’t afford; hubris and nemesis as wallpaper patterns.
George Pitcher is a visiting fellow at the LSE and an Anglican priest