Dawkins, to my knowledge, never explained why he suddenly brought up eugenics out of a clear blue sky, but the word is in the news at the moment because Dominic Cummings hired the weirdo he wanted to hire, a man called Andrew Sabisky. Inevitably enough, the media has gone through his old social media posts and found various things he’s said, and he has since quit.
For the record: some of it is genuinely unsettling, for instance that “there are excellent reasons to think the very real racial differences in intelligence are significantly — even mostly — genetic in origin”. This is, I think, not true — I don’t know how you square it with the simple fact that poor black boys in the UK get better educational outcomes than poor white boys, for instance. And none of this should be seen as a defence of Sabisky’s hiring. (Watch me perform the decoupling ritual: will it work?)
But I thought a few of them were interesting from this high/low decoupling point of view. For instance, he described female genital mutilation (FGM) as a “moral panic”, because the actual numbers were low, so the risk to girls in the UK was pretty tiny. The full quote was “It is still unclear to what extent FGM represents a serious risk to young girls, raised in the UK, of certain minority group origins. Much of the hue and cry looks more like a moral panic.”
It seems fairly obvious to me that Sabisky is saying that FGM is rare in the UK – a view, incidentally, shared by at least one consultant obstetrician in the BMJ, who said “there is no evidence that large numbers of girls living in UK are having FGM”. He’s not belittling the impact itself.
Similarly, I’ve said before that claims about a wave of teen suicides are “absolute bollocks” and that the “epidemic of loneliness” is not real; that doesn’t mean I don’t think that suicide and loneliness are terrible things. You can decouple the frequency of the event from the seriousness of the event when it does happen. But for low-decoupling people, you can’t; by downplaying one, you are downplaying the whole package.
Similarly, Sabisky said that “women’s sport is more comparable to the Paralympics than it is to men’s”. But the context was that of Caster Semenya, a female runner who has an unusually high level of blood testosterone, and whether she should be allowed to compete in women’s sport. Sabisky is suggesting, as I understand it, that there is a need to draw boundaries around women’s sport in a way that you don’t around men’s, but you do around the Paralympics; if anyone could compete in women’s sports or the Paralympics, then lots of mediocre able-bodied men would win them and there would be no women’s sports or Paralympics left. The concept of “boundaries around the sport” has been separated from the idea of the sports themselves. But to a low-decoupler, it sounds, I think, as though he is saying they are inferior.
Even his “eugenics” argument, in an interview with Laura McInerny in SchoolsWeek in 2016, strikes me as quite a separating-the-feelings-from-the-facts, decoupling-style situation. In fact he even says so, explicitly: “You have to separate yourself from what you feel and from what are the facts of the matter.” He asks whether parents should be able to screen IVF embryos, whether for disability or schizophrenia, or for intelligence. The former is not a million miles away from our current situation, where pregnancies at high risk of chromosomal disorders can be terminated if the mother wishes; the latter will probably be happening in China in a few years. The fact is that it’s possible; that doesn’t say whether it’s right.
Sabisky himself, according to that interview, seems to be against it: “He is personally uneasy about the ethics of many of the things he talks about and as a Christian — he married in church last year — he has moral views on the topics that may not be what people expect.” It seems to me that he is explicitly decoupling what he thinks is true, or what he thinks is effective, from what he thinks is right.
I don’t think, as some people do, that these remarks have been “taken out of context”, as such. I think that even with the context, lots of people would still assume that when he says “FGM isn’t a major risk” he means “we don’t need to care about FGM”. Similarly, Dawkins’s tweet wasn’t taken out of context: the context was all there, but the magic ritual didn’t work. It’s a translation problem: some people think they’re having a cold, rational discussion; other people are alive to the implications; there will be frequent occasions when the two groups will hear the same words and yet understand totally different things by them.
Again, to perform the decoupling-ritual one more time, none of this is to defend the hiring of Sabisky — who, full disclosure, I met in 2017 and interviewed for my book. It wouldn’t surprise me, to decouple again, if he was a useful person to have around government: he is a “superforecaster”, which means that of the 20,000 people making predictions about the future for the Good Judgment Project, he was one of the 150 who scored best for accuracy. (Read a bit more about that here, if you like.) I suspect having people who are really good at predicting the future is useful, but that is decoupling his abilities from his views, and maybe that’s not a good thing to do.
But I think the decoupling thing makes me understand a bit more why Dawkins’s tweet got people so angry. Sometimes the ritual fails, and the spirits break through the warding circle.
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SubscribeIt seems that being a low decoupler is just being not very verbally intelligent. A person who cannot help one concept bleeding into another one is either not very clever or they are acting in bad faith, sending up a smokescreen for their own agenda.
It seems that being a low decoupler is just being not very verbally intelligent. A person who cannot help one concept bleeding into another one is either not very clever or they are acting in bad faith, sending up a smokescreen for their own agenda.
One should think that Mr. Harris would have asked Mr. Klein to define for him how he is using the term “racist.” All too often it would seem that in contemporary discourse the word functions as a discussion killer in a way similar to holding a cross up before a vampire causes the vampire to pull his cloak over his head and flee from the room. No discussion needed. In other words, a question begging reductio ad Hitlerum type of argument.
One should also think that Mr. Harris should have inquired why, precisely, being a “racist” is to be regarded as a bad thing. I understand the differences between the high/low decoupler Weltanschauungen, but that should not provide an insuperable obstacle to rational discourse. Unless, of course, rationality is not a part of the equation. If that is so then such an interchange is merely the occasion for the low-decoupler to virtue-signal his (self-regarded) morally superior point of view which is in no need of justification to anyone. If such be the case, then the Age of Reason is truly drawing to a close.