The Sabisky files: The problem with hiring a Dom Cummings mini-me

“The two successful recipes for restricting ethnic violence seem to be either democratic institutions specifically adapted to the demands of blood, or the brutality of a hegemonic dictatorship.” Andrew Sabisky, 14th February 2014.

Dominic Cummings’s Twitter handle is “OdysseanProject,” a phrase which has its origin in a 257 page long document he published on his blog in 2013. He quotes the physicist Murray Gell Mann:

“[There is] the distinction (made famous by Nietzsche) between “Apollonians”, who favor logic, the analytical approach, and a dispassionate weighing of the evidence, and “Dionysians”’, who lean more toward intuition, synthesis, and passion…[4] But some of us seem to belong to another category: the “Odysseans”, who combine the two predilections in their quest for connections among ideas… We need to celebrate the contribution of those who dare take what I call “a crude look at the whole.”

The word “crude” appears several times throughout the document. An “Odyssean education” would inculcate “crude, trans-disciplinary, integrative thinking,” “a crude but useful grasp of connections between the biggest challenges based on trans-disciplinary thinking about complex systems”, “a crude look at the whole”, “crude interdisciplinary integrative thinking about big issues” etc etc.

“Integrative thinking,” Cummings admits, is only suitable for “a substantial fraction of teenagers, students and adults,” who would be educated in “our biggest intellectual and practical problems, and be trained to take effective action.”

Andrew Sabisky, who was recently appointed in Number 10’s drive to hire “weirdos” certainly fits that mould – a biography on the website ResarchED describes his research interests as follows: “Evolutionary psychology, behavioural genetics, mental chronometry, and individual & group differences in intelligence and personality.” In an interview with Schools Week, he speaks of his love of literature (he recommends that every 16-year-old read Tolstoy), music (his favourite period is “around 1720” when “we had new Handel operas written at the rate of a couple of a year”) and theology (he runs a podcast called The Tractarians, much of which is dedicated to niche liturgical disputes).

At the weekend he ran into severe criticism from the press for a range of comments he has made over the last decade – on websites, blog posts and comment pages. There is a lot to look at.

In a review posted in 2014 on a blog entitled HBD CHICK of the political scientist Tutu Vanhanen’s 2012 book Ethnic Conflicts: Their Biological Roots in Ethnic Nepotism, Sabisky begins by making a broad claim about the direction of European politics towards nationalism. “Ostensibly fired by opposition to both Islam and the European Union, Marine le Pen & Geert Wilders – amongst others – have made major polling gains.”

The key word is “ostensibly.” Remember that.

He continues: “Vanhanen reveals that the level of ethnic heterogeneity explains 66% of the variance in the level of ethnic conflicts.”

However, he misses out a major component of Vanhanen’s work – that, in a Neo-Darwinian sense, he believes that all politics is a competition for scarce resources: “The competition for scarce resources leads to ethnic conflicts in ethnically divided societies,” wrote Vanhanen.

Indeed, it’s one of Vanhanen’s important commitments. In 1999, he completed a journal article that elaborated on how the “disposition to favour kin over non-kin becomes important in social life and politics when people have to compete for scarce resources.”

This crunch point (ie the salience of scarcity) in Vanhanen’s account of ethnic conflict is entirely absent from Sabisky’s review article.

But Sabisky is an “integrative thinker” and not to be deterred, he turns quickly to a series of speculations about the future direction of Western culture: “As mass immigration irrevocably changes the face of the West, when will it also change our political cultures? Can they adapt to the new and unexpected requirements of sociobiological logic?”

Political culture has two ways it can adapt, according to Sabisky’s interpretation of Vanhanen’s work: “The two successful recipes for restricting ethnic violence seem to be either democratic institutions specifically adapted to the demands of blood, or the brutality of a hegemonic dictatorship.”

So Sabisky’s analysis of a resurgence in nationalism on the Continent is, on a close reading, rather distinctive – the cultural factor, as he sees it, “Islam” or “the European Union”, is ultimately secondary to “sociobiological logic.” This is what Cummings calls “integrative thinking,” the ability to think in “crude” terms about “the whole”.

The pushback from commentators on the right defending Sabisky has mostly presented this story as a classic piece of offence archaeology a la the Roger Scruton affair. Tom Harwood of Guido Fawkes tweeted: “The media dredging up out of context quotes in an attempt to get intelligent people fired is a sure fire way to stuff Government full of deeply average boring talentless drones.”

No government is immune from scrutiny and it is perfectly legitimate to scrutinise public appointments, even those as unconventional as the Sabisky hire, who appears to be working as a contractor for Dominic Cummings.

Alongside this, Cummings has dispensed with numerous traditional advisers attached to ministers.

Special Advisers have played an important role in the executive for some time. Even though their numbers increased during the Blair years, there was always an understanding that they worked day to day for the relevant minister, although they were cleared by Number 10. There is an ironic reversal at work here – Cummings’s appointment as an adviser to the education apartment was blocked in 2010 by Andy Coulson at Number 10. Cummings was appointed later and duly ran a guerilla war against Number 10 and the “blob”. Now he is the gamekeeper he is cracking down on poachers. He wants total control – and that raises important questions about the transparency of the hiring process.

This administration is not the first Tory government to want to bring in outside “expertise,” but there are sensible ways to do it. Margaret Thatcher had enormous respect for unconventional intellectuals of all stripes – but she also valued institutional expertise, and academics with tenure and a track record. Her greatest lieutenant was arguably the career civil servant Robert Armstrong.

Today’s Number 10 operation is storing up serious trouble down the line. In the British system, a feeble opposition does not guarantee the dictatorship of the executive. The press, increasingly worried parts of the Tory establishment and events (a financial black swan event, the impact of coronavirus on global supply chains, or sleaze) can quickly derail a government, even a government with a large majority.