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

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ can – but I doubt it. Any more than the Nazis could know anything about the victims in concentration camps by branding a unique number on their arms.

      We are more than branded now. We are in a world obsessed with numbers, from National Insurance and interest rates to buses, from bank balances and bar codes to the cacophony of statistics forced on us by journalists, politicians and marketeers. They seem to agree with Lord Kelvin that it provides us with a kind of exactitude. Actually it is exact about some of the least interesting things, but silent on wider and increasingly important truths.

      We have to count. I’ve used piles of statistics in this book. Not counting is like saying that numbers are evil, which is even more pointless than saying that money is evil. We need to be able to count, even if the results aren’t very accurate. ‘Without number, we can understand nothing and know nothing,’ said the philosopher Philolaus in the fifth century BC, and he was right. But 25 centuries after Philolaus, the French philosopher Alain Badiou put the other point of view, and he was right too: ‘what arises from an event in perfect truth can never be counted’. Both Philolaus and Badiou are right. The more we rely on numbers to understand problems or measure aspects of human life, the more it slips through our fingers and we find ourselves clinging to something less than we wanted. Because every person, every thing, every event is actually unique and unmeasurable.

      This is the paradox. If we don’t count something, it gets ignored. If we do count it, it gets perverted. We need to count yet the counters are taking over our lives. ‘The measurable has conquered almost the entire field of the sciences and has discredited every branch in which it is not valid,’ said the French poet Paul Valery. ‘The applied sciences are almost completely dominated by measurement. Life itself, which is already half enslaved, circumscribed, streamlined, or reduced to a state of subjection, has great difficulty in defending itself against the tyranny of timetables, statistics, quantitative measurements and precision instruments, a whole development that goes on reducing life’s diversity, diminishing its uncertainty, improving the functioning of the whole, making its course surer, longer and more mechanical.’

      There was a time when numbers had significance beyond just ‘how many’, but we have lost the ancient understanding of numbers as beautiful and meaning something beyond themselves – the discredited and forgotten wisdom of Augustine and Pythagoras. We snigger patronizingly when we read St Thomas Aquinas’s solemn injunction that 144,000 would be saved at the end of time. Though probably the last thing he meant was that literally 144,000 people would make it to heaven. To Aquinas, a thousand meant perfection, and the 144 is the number of the apostles multiplied by itself. ‘I speak in parables of eternal wisdom, my honoured sir,’ he might have said, like a character in Andrew Sinclair’s novel Gog. ‘I leave statistics to plumbers.’

      The old way of looking at numbers means nothing to us now. The historian of the medieval mind Alfred Crosby called it the ‘venerable model’. ‘We sniff and cluck at its mistakes – that the earth is the centre of the universe, for instance – but our real problem with the Venerable Model is that it is dramatic, even melodramatic, and teleological: God and Purpose loom over all,’ he wrote. ‘We want (or think we want) explanations of reality leeched of emotion, as bloodless as distilled water.’

      Bloodless one-dimensional messing can dismiss a horse so sensitive that it can read the faintest human gestures, just because it doesn’t meet our narrow definition of intelligence.

      

       Bizarre measurement No. 2

       Momme

       (Unit of mass in Japan used for measuring the size of pearls. 1 momme = 10 fun.)

      Amount of time the average American spends going through junk mail in a lifetime: 8 months

      Amount spent by Americans every year breaking into broken automatic car locks: $400 million

       Chapter 2 Historical Interlude 1: Legislator for the World

      Nature has placed Mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure. It is in them alone to point out what we ought to do, as much as what we shall do.

       Jeremy Bentham

      There is nothing which has yet been contrived by man, by which so much happiness is produced as by a good tavern or inn.

      Samuel Johnson, 21 March 1776

      I

      It was one of the strangest funerals ever held. Three days after his death on 6 June 1832, the body of the great utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham (dressed in a nightshirt) was unveiled to his friends and admirers, gathered together at the Webb Street School of Anatomy in London. It was a stormy early evening, and the grisly occasion was lit by flashes of lightning from the skylight above, as Bentham’s young doctor Thomas Southwood Smith began a speech which included a demonstration of dissection on his old friend.

      Among the faithful were some of the great figures of reform from the immediate past and future, the radical tailor Francis Place and the future sanitation reformer Edwin Chadwick in the shadows. In their minds, we might imagine, was a sense of enormous achievement – two days before, the Great Reform Act, which had been the focus of all their hopes, had been given Royal Assent. There might also have been the occasional less welcome echo from Mary Shelley’s Gothic novel Frankenstein, published 14 years before, as Southwood Smith’s scalpel glinted in the candlelight – with all its warning for the Godless who meddle with the untouchable moments of birth and death.

      They might also have been wondering whether this was the right way of remembering their hero. Dissection was then regarded as such an appalling end that it was handed out as an extra punishment for the murderers who normally found themselves cut open in this room. Southwood Smith the former preacher managed to keep his voice steady, but his face was as white as the corpse’s. Bentham’s funeral guests would have reassured themselves that they were carrying out the details of his will, and that they were men of the new age of science, and could put aside those old-fashioned notions of superstition, emotion and shame.

      Could those things be measured in Bentham’s new political morality of ‘utility’? The facts – yes, the rigorously logical facts – were that it was more ‘useful’ to dissect the philosopher’s body than it was to bury it. And as Bentham had written himself, if you were going to have statues or portraits of him, it was more ‘useful’ to use the real thing, rather than let it go to waste in a coffin in the earth.

      When Smith finished his work of cleaning and embalming, Bentham’s body was to be an ‘Auto-Icon’, a modern monument and a more exact replica of the man than any artist could possibly achieve. It would be dressed in his own clothes, with his walking stick (which he used to call Dapple, after Sancho Panza’s mule) firmly in his hands. It would remain in a glass case in University College, London, which he had done so much to turn into the reality of bricks and mortar.

      The plan didn’t go quite as expected. Despite Bentham’s best endeavours to study the head-shrinking methods of primitive tribes, his own head shrivelled ghoulishly and extremely fast. A few years later, the college decided to replace it with a waxwork. The original was placed between his legs, from where it has occasionally been stolen. And there Bentham’s Auto-Icon remains, wheeled gravely into important college meetings, СКАЧАТЬ