The Tyranny of Numbers: Why Counting Can’t Make Us Happy. David Boyle

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СКАЧАТЬ the frustrated philosopher, and set about doing something about it. So, with a sigh of relief, he went back to writing his impenetrable prose. And in 1802, it all came right. The Swiss publisher Pierre Dumont at last managed to get him to agree to publishing some of his work. By the time Dumont had finished with it, it was even easy to read and was attracting attention in Paris, Moscow and Madrid. This was the Traités de Législation Civile et Pénale. It included crucial parts of Bentham’s Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, and it was the first of many.

      He soon found that although he had a good deal more influence abroad than he did in London, he still had little power. By the time he had sent out his constitutional code to the revolutionary governments of Spain and Portugal, both had succumbed to counter-revolution. He sent it in nine instalments to the provisional government in Greece, with much the same effect. His ideas were welcomed at first by Rivadavia in Argentina and Bolivar in Columbia, though it wasn’t long before Bolivar was busily banning his works from the universities. His letter bombardment of Sir Robert Peel seemed to leave Peel pretty cold. And the Duke of Wellington did not respond to his promise that his name would be as great as Alexander’s if he took his advice on law reform. He had more success in Italy because Cavour remained a fan. The Tsar Alexander even sent him a ring, which he returned with the seal unbroken. And thanks to Lord Macaulay, he did have an influence in shaping the new laws of India. So he was increasingly optimistic. In a calculation reminiscent of those by his medieval forebears, he predicted that his code would finally be adopted in every country in the world in the year 2825, presumably exactly a thousand years since he made the prediction. It was a letter from Guatemala that same year which gave him the title which stuck: ‘legislador del mundo’ – the legislator for the world.

      The idea of measuring happiness was central to almost everything he wrote. But when he began to consider exactly how the formula would work – something his followers had to tackle after his death – he fell back on the moderate thought that any kind of calculation was better than none. ‘In every rational and candid eye, unspeakable will be the advantage it will have over every form of precision being ever attained because none is ever so much as aimed at,’ he wrote. All you needed was the formula, and that meant calculating the pleasures and pains against their intensity, duration, certainty, rapidity, fecundity, purity and extensiveness. Simple!

      From the start he realized that this principle, whatever it was called, depended on being able to measure the way people felt. ‘Value of a lot of pleasure or pain, how to be measured’, was the title of chapter 4 of his Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation. He imagined that this was a simple proposition: ‘who is there that does not calculate?’ he asked airily, but the complete absence of any official figures made him think again. Where was the raw data? He asked the Bank of England how much paper money was in circulation. They didn’t know. Neither had the Foundling Hospital any idea about the cost of living for paupers.

      In a sudden burst of enthusiasm for figures, he persuaded the great agricultural reformer Arthur Young to use his Annals of Agriculture to send out a questionnaire about rural poverty. Young even wrote an encouraging introduction to it. Unfortunately, Bentham’s enthusiasm got the better of him, and the questionnaire included no less than 3,000 questions. Not surprisingly, only a handful of answers ever arrived back at Queen Square Place.

      And even if they had poured in, how could you compare these different pleasures and pains? You couldn’t count the number of people affected by them and you certainly couldn’t compare how much they were feeling them. What if slaves were happy – did that make slavery right? This was a difficult question for Bentham, who was a lifelong critic of slavery. And how do you compare the one person who gets a great deal of pleasure from building a multi-screen cinema on a well-known beauty spot with the thousands of people who are mildly inconvenienced? It’s still an absolutely impossible question to answer satisfactorily.

      Luckily for the utilitarians, there was an answer to some of these practical problems in the new ‘science’ of economics. You can measure it all with money, what Bentham called the ‘only common measure in the nature of things’. Using money means you can find the zero point between pleasure and pain, he said. So Bentham plunged himself into all things economic, getting to know the pioneer economist David Ricardo and seeing the new economists as the intellectual force which would put his movement into practice.

      Towards the end of his life he worried that people would think only the majority mattered if he used the phrase ‘the greatest number’. He also worried that people would think only money had any value – ‘a vulgar error’ he said. By 1831, just a few months before his death, he had carefully reformulated what he meant: the optimal goal is ‘provision of an equal quantity of happiness for everyone’. But that makes the calculations even more difficult to manage. Especially these days, when the happiest people in the world were shown to be the Mexicans (the poorest) and the most miserable are known to be the Americans (the richest).

      What about beauty? If you convert morality into a pseudoscience, how do you recognize the great benefits of creativity? What about spirituality? Bentham had three pianos and loved music, but it was Cardinal Newman who pointed out that he had ‘not a spark of poetry in him’. This was confirmed in a letter the philosopher wrote to Lord Holland. The difference between poetry and prose, he explained, is that – with poetry, the lines don’t reach the margin.

      This was the stick with which his critics have beaten him ever since. But he seems to have agreed with them with his great defence of the game of shove-halfpenny: ‘Prejudice apart, the game of push-pin is of equal value with the arts and sciences of music and poetry.’ Fripperies, fripperies.

      IV

      When Bentham died, on 6 June 1832, he was surrounded by 70,000 pieces of un-indexed paper. It was left to his adoring disciples to do something with them, the first task of the political utilitarians before they got down to measuring the world. And foremost among them was James Mill, one of those frighteningly dour and driven Scots pioneers who had driven the reputation of the country in the eighteenth century. From the time he met him in 1808, Mill was walking from his home in Pentonville to have supper with Bentham every evening. By 1810, the whole Mill family had moved into John Milton’s draughty old house, which happened to be in Bentham’s garden, but he soon discovered this was so unhealthy, he moved back out to Stoke Newington. It was over the question of whether he could accept Bentham’s subsidy of his rent that the two eventually fell out. Mill needed someone to hero worship, and he found it in Bentham. Bentham needed followers and a driven mind to organize them. It was a perfect match. Rigid and stern though he was, Mill signed his letters to Bentham as ‘your most faithful and fervent disciple’.

      Soon the patterns of Bentham’s days were set. Dictating as he powered round the garden early in the morning, – ‘vibrating in my ditch’, as he put it. There were very occasional meetings with visitors during the day. Then dinner was served progressively later to allow for more work, as Mill, Bowring and Chadwick ministered to his needs. At the end of the day there was an hour-long ritual, after which he tied on his night cap, gave his watch to his secretary, who then read to him, and after a strange ritual with his window, he leapt into a special sleeping bag of his own design.

      It was a disturbing time, and as well as parliamentary reform, the talk was of education. Mill and Francis Place even started a school, which collapsed by 1816, only to be replaced by plans to build another one in Bentham’s back garden. David Ricardo even donated £200 to build it, but Bentham began to realize what having his home overlooked constantly by schoolboys might mean, and the scheme was abandoned. Meanwhile, Mill was trying another educational experiment of his own – on his eldest son. His history of India, dry and stern, had appeared in 1817 and as a result he was made Assistant to the Examiner of Indian Correspondence, with a hefty salary of £800. By 1830, he had risen to the rank of Examiner. By then he had been using every spare moment from writing the book to concentrate on John Stuart Mill’s СКАЧАТЬ