The long
read
Inside the
mind of Dominic Cummings
Illustration: Jim Stoten
He is now
the country’s de facto project manager, but what does he actually believe? In a
bid to find out, I read (almost) everything Cummings has written in the last
decade.
By Stefan Collini
Thu 6 Feb
2020 06.00 GMT
When the
prime minister of the day describes you as a “career psychopath”, your chances
of preferment in the political world may not seem rosy. When associates of a
leading minister refer to you as “that jumped-up oik”, you may sense you’re not
winning friends in high places. When a senior official in the department where
you are employed calls you “a mutant virus”, you may feel less than wholly
accepted. And when a prominent MP in the party you work for denounces you as
“an unelected foul-mouthed oaf”, it may seem that the game is up. Furnished
with these testimonials, some downsizing of career ambitions may appear to be
in order.
But Dominic
Cummings has never played by the rules, and now, as Boris Johnson’s de facto
chief-of-staff, he has become perhaps the most powerful unelected political
figure in the country. He thus has an exceptional opportunity to put his ideas
into practice. But what are his ideas? Commentators seem vaguely aware that,
although he studied history at university, he has dabbled in more than one
scientific discipline over the years, but no one, it appears, has really tried
to take the measure of Cummings as a serious thinker.
There has,
of course, been no shortage of comment on the various roles he has played in
British political life in the last couple of decades. He came to the fore as a
special adviser to the Tory politician Michael Gove between 2007 and 2013 (ie both
before and during Gove’s tumultuous years as secretary of state for education);
he attracted further attention as the chief administrative mastermind behind
the successful leave campaign in the 2016 referendum on Britain’s membership of
the EU; and when Boris Johnson became prime minister in July 2019, Cummings was
installed as his chief aide, directing operations from within Downing Street.
What may be
less well known is that for much of this period Cummings has maintained an
unusual blog, where he has posted extensive ruminations on his reading,
enthusiastic reports about breakthroughs in science and pungent contributions
to debates about education, spicing the mix with some notably unbuttoned ad
hominem side-swipes – for example, describing David Davis, then the Brexit
minister, as “thick as mince”. Several of these posts have an intrinsic
intellectual interest, but, given his current role at the heart of power, they
may also yield insights into the thinking of someone whose ideas could soon
have consequences for all of us.
I can’t
honestly claim to do much by way of community service but, as some twisted
equivalent of a new year resolution, I decided I would sacrifice myself for the
common good in January by spending the greater part of the month reading The
Complete Blogs of Dominic Cummings. Well, perhaps not quite complete, as I have
only gone back to 2013 and I have skipped several of the more functional or
repetitive pieces, but I have more than compensated for any light-footed skimming
by reading all 133,000 words of his magnum opus, posted in 2014 and titled
“Some thoughts on education and political priorities”, in which he described
his ideal of “an Odyssean education”. What follows is my report on this unusual
body of work.
Dominic
Cummings is the best-known unknown historian of ideas in the country. Learned
contributions to this scholarly field are, of course, not what he is celebrated
for, but a surprising amount of what he writes falls under this label. He is
fascinated by ideas – partly fascinated by their beauty and power, partly
fascinated in the same way as a small boy is fascinated by firecrackers that
can be let off behind unsuspecting old ladies. In Cummings’s view, the world
seems to be largely populated by old ladies, metaphorically speaking – timid,
easily spooked people whom he delights in unsettling.
But his
firecrackers are assembled from genuine scientific components. Cummings is
knowledgeable about an impressive variety of disciplines, and from this
formidable if eclectic reading he has attempted to synthesise ideas he believes
would transform the way the world is run (lack of ambition is not a defect of
his thinking). The sense in which I am, tongue only slightly in cheek, calling
him a “historian of ideas” is that he traces in some detail the evolution of
the ideas that interest him, and gives us, especially in his remarkable
book-length essay on the elements of a university curriculum that comprise his
“Odyssean education”, a crash course in the history of mathematics, physics,
genetics, psychology, economics and much more.
He takes
the term “Odyssean education” from the Nobel-winning physicist Murray
Gell-Mann, referring to “an education that starts with the biggest questions
and problems and teaches people to understand connections between them”. The
aim would be to “train synthesisers”. He appears contemptuous of most
politicians, almost all media commentators, and all civil servants: none of
these people really understand statistical modelling, quantum computation,
synthetic biology, and so on. (Too many of them studied PPE (philosophy,
politics and economics) at Oxford University – which, in his view, just turns
duffers into bluffers.) As a result, they make or encourage poor decisions.
Better “project management in complex organisations” is what we need, and his
essay sketches a wide-ranging syllabus that would educate the effective
decision-makers of the future.
More
broadly, Cummings repeatedly argues that the processes of government need to
include 1) a number of outstanding scientists capable of bringing fundamental
science to bear on policy formation, and 2) a general level of scientific and
numerical literacy such that MPs, officials, journalists and others can
understand basic scientific discoveries and their significance. The overall aim
should be to make the UK “the leading country for education and science”.
At times, he
can make this seem like the merest common sense; at other times he sounds like
CP Snow on speed (Snow’s Two Cultures lecture of 1959 is mainly remembered for
its ardent advocacy of the need for scientific literacy among policymakers). He
has attained an impressive level of scientific understanding himself, but with
it has come more than a touch of the boffin’s bee-filled bonnet. A good example
of this unsteady combination is provided by his attempt to imagine the effect
that genome-sequencing may have on the NHS in terms of identifying risk factors
for certain diseases, eliminating congenital defects, and so on. The potential
benefits and efficiencies are certainly striking. But he cannot resist going
further, a little too quickly: “We will soon be able to re-make human nature
itself,” he writes. No point in pussy-footing around just doing hip
replacements – let’s do a complete makeover while we’re in there.
As all this
suggests, Cummings is undeniably clever, even if not always notably judicious.
Intellectual restlessness is one of his hallmarks: his capacity to stretch his
mind, to absorb new ideas, to see parallels and analogies that jump across the
tracks, is constantly on display. He is an Oxford history graduate who has
turned himself into a numbers guy, or at least into the frontman for the
numbers people – someone who understands enough of what they do to make the
case for its importance to the rest of us. He says he’s happy to be told where
he’s wrong, though you can’t help feeling that he doesn’t expect there will be
much call for such frankness.
And there
are any number of things he is right about, or anyway right-ish. One is the
foolishness of diverting funding away from basic “blue skies” scientific
research in order to promote more applied work. Governments are prone to think
that doing this will lead to more immediately useful outcomes, and hence it
will be easier to justify the public expenditure involved, but the historical
record is against them. Over and over again, theoretical enquiries that looked
at the time to have no useful application turn out to be what enabled various
later practical advances and inventions, from code-breaking to computers.
Cummings understands this: he not only prioritises basic science, but he gets
the need to give people the autonomy and security to explore not obviously
useful-looking avenues of enquiry.
At times,
he can seem to flirt with a kind of anarchic libertarianism, attracted by a
vision of unconstrained individual creativity, but against this is his recognition
of the need for central state funding of basic science. He rightly stresses the
role of federal funding in providing the research base for the Silicon Valley
phenomenon in the US, for example, and he looks favourably on institutions such
as the CNRS in France that are designed to sustain research on a long-term
basis. (He also says, rather gnomically, that he is not a libertarian because
it’s “not consistent with evolutionary biology”.) Overall he is surely right
that public debate desperately needs more statistical literacy, as well as a
better appreciation of the long-term benefits of basic research.
Cummings’s
call for a curriculum that might combine, say, maths, science and history is
driven by his focus on “project management” in politics. Such an education
would, he contends, provide a training in the calculation of probabilities when
weighing competing proposals. But there is a recurring difficulty with schemes
that attempt to build in “interdisciplinarity” from the start. Yes, it sounds
great to scorn those who are “stuck in their disciplinary silos” and to laud
imaginative thinkers who address the really “big problems”, and so on, but the
fact is that you can’t educate someone to be interdisciplinary. You have to
educate them in particular disciplines (possibly more than one), and then set
up more specific or temporary or opportunistic arrangements for bringing them
together and cross-pollinating. If we are to stay on Cummings’s preferred
ground of intellectual history, we would have to point out that, in modern
times, nearly all the influential ideas and great discoveries have come from
people working within a particular discipline. Specialisation is the
precondition of intellectual advance, even if subsequent interdisciplinary thinking
can then sometimes be an effective way to address complex practical problems.
In his
ambitious intellectual and educational synthesis there are some obvious, and
rather predictable, lacunae. He is dismissive of most of the social sciences,
especially sociology and anthropology, precisely because they purport to
explore the distinctive power of “the social”: their practitioners are mostly
“charlatans”. Here he sounds like a souped-up version of Margaret Thatcher:
there is no such thing as “society”, just the patterned interaction of
evolutionarily moulded individuals. There are frequent irritable swipes at
something called “French literary theory” and the damage it has allegedly done
to the humanities; here we seem to be encountering nothing more than a lazy
journalistic stereotype, a headline-happy approach that contrasts so strikingly
with the care with which he expounds ideas from, say, evolutionary psychology.
His
voluminous writings suggest no cultivated interest in the study of art or
music, nor, a few allusions to Dostoevsky and Tolstoy aside, in literature, or
anyway not in literary criticism, though one wonders whether he might not have
a taste for certain forms of science fiction. A few philosophers get walk-on
parts (he quotes Nietzsche fairly often, but then who doesn’t?), but on the
whole he seems to treat modern philosophy, certainly the discipline of academic
philosophy, as an irrelevance or an obstruction. Although he expresses a
general commitment to including the humanities in his synthesis, in practice
they (with the exception of history) seem marginal to his main interests.
However,
there is another omission that is less predictable, yet, in its way, more
revealing. Cummings is practically silent about jurisprudence and the law. (In
his diatribes against the always obstructive civil service, “legal arguments”
are occasionally mentioned, but only to be swatted aside as another typical
ruse by these masters of delay.) This is significant because legal systems and
legal reasoning involve attempts to draw up general rules and procedures to
govern human interaction. The law, especially in a common-law system, is a
historical enterprise in a way that Cummings should, in principle, approve of.
That is to say, it seeks constantly to modify the agreed rules in the light of
new circumstances; in this respect, it is one large feedback loop. And it
attempts to take into account not just the purposes informing any given
individual’s actions, but the likely effect of such actions on the interests of
others, now and in the future. Accumulated legal reasoning becomes, therefore,
the great repository of wisdom about the social consequences of allowing this
action or preventing that action, and it is, in an important sense, no
respecter of persons: no one, as the phrase has it, is above the law.
Great
leaders, revolutionaries, “men of action” and over-confident mavericks of all
types always want to sweep the law aside, seeing only its negative character as
a slow-moving body of outdated constraints on freedom of action – but that, of
course, suggests why it is so precious. There’s a fine exchange in Robert
Bolt’s play A Man for All Seasons between Sir Thomas More, the lord chancellor
who was to be executed for his opposition to Henry VIII’s break with Rome, and
his earnest son-in-law, William Roper, in which Roper says he would cut down
every law in England to get after the Devil, and More replies: “Oh? And, when
the last law was down, and the Devil turned round on you – where would you
hide, Roper, the laws all being flat?”
More’s
point, of course, is that if, when we have the power, we impatiently strike
down all the laws that stand in our way, we shall have no protections to turn
to when power is in the hands of others. Cummings writes from the perspective
of someone who’s in a hurry to get the thing done, never from the perspective
of the judge who has been schooled to reflect on the potentially damaging
consequences in the future of licensing this particular action in the present.
To balance
Cummings’s imagined course of maths, science and history, I could, teasingly,
suggest that a no less valuable preparation for public life might be a
combination of philosophy, jurisprudence and literature. Philosophy would
introduce habits of analysis and undermine certainty or dogmatism;
jurisprudence would teach an appreciation of rules, procedures and the judgment
of consequences; and the study of literature would weaken the hold of cliche
and all exaggerated beliefs in the fixity of meaning. It might be said, not
altogether unfairly, that Cummings’s course would produce doers and mine would
produce critics (though the disciplines I suggest constantly generate new ideas
rather than merely criticising old ones), but I would say that a healthy
politics needs both, and that the more we emphasise the first category and try
to give its occupants their head, the more we need the virtues of the second
category to hold them in check.
Cummings,
of course, believes that this is just what we don’t need. We “don’t want more
Oxbridge English graduates who chat about Lacan at dinner parties with TV
producers and spread fake news about fake news”, he wrote last month. This is
an economical bit of target practice – everyone knows, don’t they, that one can
hardly move in north London these days without falling over “chat about Lacan
at dinner parties” – but there may be deeper cultural antagonisms at work here.
The datedness of the jibe about Lacan may suggest a long-nurtured touchiness.
At one point Cummings says of himself, rather engagingly, “I am not
articulate”, but you sense that he doesn’t particularly rate articulateness in
the first place. So much of what others think of as “culture” he regards as
“noise”. Perhaps his recent call for “super-talented weirdos” to apply for
staff jobs in Downing Street should be seen as something of a dating pitch.
In
Cummings’s ontology, the world appears to be made up of an extremely small number
of outstandingly clever individuals and a mass of mediocrities. Human progress
depends on giving those with the highest IQ (he’s very keen on the notion of
IQ) the education that will allow them fully to develop their talents and then
the freedom to apply them. His culture heroes are those few outstanding
mathematicians and scientists who fundamentally changed a whole intellectual
field, such as Kurt Gödel, John von Neumann and Richard Feynman. He has an
abiding interest not just in what kinds of conditions have favoured scientific
breakthroughs in the past and how we might replicate those today, but even more
in the organisational or management processes that enabled complex, long-term,
science-based projects to translate brilliant new ideas into successful
practical outcomes, such as Nasa (putting the first man on the moon) or Parc
(the Palo Alto Research Center, which was the foundation of Silicon Valley’s
triumphs), and he gives illuminating accounts of their modus operandi. Just how
far such procedures could be transferred to the muddy, shifting, contested
world of politics is an open question, but Cummings insists they would be a big
improvement on what we have now.
Politics
is, by definition, the terrain of conflicting convictions, and although in principle
Cummings lauds the idea of “feedback” and the correction of error, in practice
he seems to struggle with the idea of genuine intellectual disagreement. There
are traces of that kind of absolute certainty that is more often shown by
fellow-travellers of science rather than by first-rate scientists themselves.
And he is a bit quick to write off opposition to his ideas as yet another
example of the self-protective vested interests of the establishment (as the
maverick’s maverick, he, of course, is not part of “the establishment”). “The
political-media system actively suppresses thinking about, and focus on, what’s
important”, he writes. One of the things that irks him about politics is that
it involves so much damn talk. For example, he speaks contemptuously of the
debate about the EU referendum in 2016, the outcome of which he played such a
signal part in influencing: “Most of the ‘debate’ was moronic as political
debate always is.” At least he cannot be accused of seeking cheap popularity.
In a curious
way, there is very little politics in Cummings’s political thinking: it’s
largely about the operational process, not about the substantive aims, and
there does not seem to be much feel for the irresolvable conflicts over
fundamental values that are at the heart of political life. He extols the speed
at which the denizens of Parc got things done: meetings in the political world,
by contrast, “tend to be just jibber-jabber”. He has a natural antipathy to
entities that seem to him to do little but block innovation – professional
associations, the civil service, trade unions, big organisations generally. His
ideal form of government is one that operates like a small start-up: a few
bright guys (they mostly seem to be guys), some unconventional thinking, no red
tape and hey presto, something actually gets done. If Cummings has some claims
to be regarded as an intellectual among technocrats, there is also a sense in
which he is a technocrat among intellectuals. He is far more interested in
abstract ideas than most technocrats, but he is far more interested in results
than most intellectuals.
A striking
further aspect of Cummings’s worldview is a lively conviction that total
disaster for humanity may be right around the corner: as he says darkly, “it’s
just a matter of when”. Think about the possibility of pathogens escaping from
high-security bio-labs and causing a global pandemic: we urgently need to be
testing these labs’ security by setting up a new team that should include
“specialist criminals” (well, yes, I suppose they are the experts in “testing
security”). Or again, if you can understand probability – few can, in his view
– then you will know that the Earth will be destroyed by an asteroid before
long unless we do something about it: “We know this for sure”. One major reason
for exploring outer space is to find somewhere habitable in which humans can
sit out the destruction of the Earth (no, really), “thus avoiding the difficult
problems of keeping humans alive for thousands of years on spaceships” (just
when you thought you had enough to worry about). Existential paranoia on a
galactic scale is, it seems, the new normal.
But no
summary does justice to the fizz and energy of his forays into the world of
ideas. Here’s a representative example of Cummings wearing his
historian-of-ideas hat:
“What we
have learned about our world vindicates the evolutionary perspective of the
pre-Socratics (Anaximander, Heraclitus), Thucydides, Hume, Smith, Darwin, and
Hayek over the anthropocentric perspective of Plato, Aristotle, Descartes,
Hobbes, Rousseau (“the general will”), Bentham, Mill (who introduced the
concept of the “natural monopoly”) and Marx. Evolutionary biology,
neuroscience, cognitive science, and behavioural genetics have undermined the
basis for Descartes’ Ghost in the Machine, Locke’s Blank Slate, and Rousseau’s
Noble Savage and have established a scientific basis for exploring a universal
human nature. Economic theory, practice, and experiment have undermined the
basis for Cartesian central planning: decentralised coordination via market
prices is generally a better method for dealing with vast numbers of
possibilities than Cartesian or Soviet planning, though obviously markets have
problems particularly with monetary policy and financial regulation.”
There is a
grandeur and sweep here that it is hard not be impressed by. Just think: all
those big names in the second list – they all got it wrong. It turns out that
evolution and neuroscience and all that neat stuff explain everything. Descartes
and Soviet planning can be put in the same box because they’re both about
people deciding things, and that’s so last millennium.
But wait –
aren’t some people playing for the wrong team? If the first group are all about
impersonal evolutionary systems and the second about individual human
reasoners, shouldn’t Marx be in (perhaps even captain of) the first team? Come
to that, is Thucydides such an evolutionary thinker, or doesn’t he emphasise
the power of unchanging basic human motives in a way that has some affinities
with, let’s say, Hobbes? (Certainly that was Hobbes’s own view.)
The point
is not to juggle the team selections so much as to wonder whether any useful
historical purpose can be served by operating at such a high, and high-handed,
level of generality. The differences among the names on the first list alone
are far more interesting than any putative common characteristic. But also, is
there really a logical connection between the diverse ideas of the first group
and a commitment to markets, or is that list of big names a cross between
window-dressing and bullying? Aren’t we moving a tad quickly to the conclusion
that prices do better than planning? (It’s hard to know what “Cartesian
planning” would look like: “I think, therefore I plan”?)
In so far
as there is a consistent politics here, it looks Hayekian – that is, akin to
the anti-statist thinking of the Austrian economist Friedrich von Hayek, whose
1944 book The Road to Serfdom influentially argued that central planning was
inimical to liberty as well as being ultimately self-defeating. He quotes with
approval Hayek’s dictum that “order generated without design can far outstrip
plans men consciously contrive”. Cummings scorns traditional political labels,
but his admiration for single-minded entrepreneurs, his obsession with the role
of off-the-scale IQ and his belief in self-regulating economic systems scarcely
make him a promising recruit for the left.
More
generally, it’s hard to know how one could decide whether his “Odyssean
education” essay, which his subsequent blogs draw upon extensively, is a) an
astonishing intellectual tour de force knowledgably knitting together material
from a wide range of disciplines, or b) a load of cod-science based on cobbling
together hasty conclusions from random reading. Rather to my surprise, I now
think it’s more of the first than the second. A lot of the time I found myself
struggling to keep up, while admiring the sheer intellectual courage involved
in trespassing so daringly. At other times, I felt I had been backed into a
corner at a party by a wild-eyed obsessive jabbing his finger into my chest and
saying, “Not many people know this, but … ”
Cummings
clearly has a talent as well as an enthusiasm for expounding really quite
technical scientific ideas. Even I had moments, reading his account, where I
thought I half-understood something of what is involved in, say, sequencing the
genome. But at other times, the jump from the science to the policy seemed
altogether too confident to be persuasive. For example:
“Most of
our politics is still conducted with the morality and the language of the
simple primitive hunter-gatherer tribe… Our ‘chimp politics’ has an
evolutionary logic: our powerful evolved instinct to conform to a group view is
a flip-side of our evolved in-group solidarity and hostility to out-groups …
This partly explains the persistent popularity of collectivist policies … and
why ‘groupthink’ is a recurring disaster.”
Whoa, hold
on! There is a good reason why all attempts to draw a straightforward inference
for current social life from something referred to as “evolution” always end up
with a lot of egg on face: the supposed “evolutionary logic” explains
everything and nothing. No amount of Attenborough-like attention to the
gambolling of chimps in trees (a gaze already vitiated by its
anthropomorphising tendencies) can yield an explanation for the “persistent
popularity of collectivist policies”. After all, quite a few “chimps”, it turns
out, prefer to vote Tory. And anyway, why is the popularity of “collectivist
policies” any more in need of deep (and in some sense discrediting) explanation
than that of, say, individualist policies? Somewhere along the journey from the
science to the politics, an awful lot of non-scientific baggage seems to have
got stacked on the wagon.
Dominic
Cummings is now, in effect, the country’s project manager. He’s the Downing
Street version of the Deliveroo guy who doesn’t care whether you’ve ordered
pepperoni or four-cheese: his job is to make it happen, and if that involves
cycling the wrong way up one-way streets then that’s probably a plus. His
writing displays an alarming ability to focus on a goal to the exclusion of
noticing, or caring about, any amount of collateral damage. Emotions mostly
figure as forms of irrational distraction. Toes, after all, were put in the
world largely to be trodden on. People around him don’t have to take umbrage:
he gives it to them, makes a present of it, with a liberality that would put a
drunk in a bar to shame. He knows he has the intellectual firepower to be able
to say: “Get your thinktanks off my lawn.”
Cummings
himself quotes William James’s pronouncement: “When superior intellect and a
psychopathic temperament coalesce … we have the best possible conditions for
the kind of effective genius that gets into the biographical dictionaries.” It
may be that that’s how we should think of Cummings – as “an effective genius”,
or, rather, a genius of effectiveness. He is admirably committed to learning
from science and to basing policies on evidence in a more than cursory way, but
in the end, delivery is the point. “Get x done”, where (we might
pseudo-mathematically say) the value of x equals a multiple of results from
focus groups plus the square root of whatever appears to favour breakout
thinking.
I would
hesitate to treat Cummings as representative of anything: he’s made being a
one-off into an art form. But in so far as his writing chimes with certain
contemporary cultural traits, perhaps one common element is a kind of
dismissive impatience. The widely remarked decline of deference over the past
couple of generations has been welcome on several counts, but in many quarters
it has gone along with an unwillingness to find much of value or interest in
anything that doesn’t speak directly to one’s own wishes in the present. When
expressed in political terms, this kind of impatience is obviously not a
monopoly of the left or the right; if anything, it can tend towards a rejection
of the traditional forms of politics and political debate altogether. When
combined with a fascination with the potential of science and technology, this
urge translates into a form of technocracy; when laced with a hostility to
traditional “elites”, this generates that distinctive modern hybrid, populist
technocracy. Screw all those convoluted arguments: this is what we want, let’s
get it done.
It may be
that the left has more to fear than the right from this irritable dismissal of
political argument, since any progressive politics is reliant on reasoned
discourse in making the case against the injustices of the status quo, and such
discourse is inevitably a laborious, uneven business, much indebted to the
thinking of earlier generations. Cummings is clearly not a conventional Tory,
but perhaps his impatient individualism does express one of the most
fundamental structures of feeling informing contemporary attitudes towards
politics – one that the left needs to challenge rather than simply to
accommodate.
There is a
long tradition of advisers to princes sharing their political understanding
with the rest of us. To take just the best-known example, Machiavelli’s
reflections after working in Renaissance Florence’s equivalent of Whitehall
became a classic. Nothing Cummings has written up till now is in this league,
but it will be interesting to see what he produces once he has laid down his
carrier bag. Thus far, if there’s timeless political wisdom here, it’s more
Warren Buffett than Walter Bagehot (Buffett is another of Cummings’s heroes, a
model of focus). But I suspect his place in future “biographical dictionaries”
will depend more on what he does than what he writes, despite all the
indisputable power of mind exhibited in his forays into recent quantitative and
biological research. And from that perspective, I only hope that, rather than
figuring as an amalgam of Thucydides and Stephen Hawking, he doesn’t end up
looking more like an unnerving cross between Robespierre and Dr Strangelove.
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