Effective policymakers must have an understanding of both the humanities and the sciences. Dominic Cummings, trained in the humanities but zealously enthusiastic about the sciences, seems to be trying to bridge this divide. This union must be seen as a positive, but we must not lose sight of the fact that data is nothing without an understanding of the context in which is was gathered. 

In 1959, C.P. Snow delivered a well-publicized lecture at Cambridge on what he had already dubbed ‘The Two Cultures’. It focused minds on a problem that had existed in academia for a century and which after the Second World War had migrated to the political sphere. ‘The two cultures’ in question refer to the arts and the sciences, two forms of knowledge that operate in radically different ways. Whereas the arts – understood as the humanities – are verbal and historical in orientation, the sciences – understood as physics – are mathematical and experimental.

Snow, who was himself trained as a physicist but was known mainly as a novelist and policy advisor, had a foot in both camps. Indeed, he often functioned as a kind of translator between them. However, Snow believed that effective policymaking required closer integration of the mind-sets that inform the arts and the sciences. Is Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s chief advisor, the Oxford-trained historian and arch science enthusiast Dominic Cummings, the solution to Snow’s original problem?