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

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ

      So what kind of man was the legislator for the world, the philosopher who thought you could calculate human happiness? Not a very worldly one. You know instinctively that anyone who calls his morning walks something as pompous as ‘antejentacular circumgyrations’ is likely to be pretty cut off from life. This after all was someone with sufficient mental space to have a pet name, not just to call his walking stick, but for his teapot (Dick) – and who probably never talked to women at all, except for his cook and housemaid. He was never once drunk, and fell in love briefly twice – but without obvious effect. He proposed to Caroline Fox in 1805. They never met again, but when he was 80, he wrote her a nostalgic letter saying that not a single day had gone by since then without his thinking of her.

      He surrounded himself with luxuries of bread, fruit and tea, but he never read literature. He covered his walls with Hogarth prints, and happily wandered round and round his garden in Queen Square Place, Westminster, scrupulously dressed with his straw hat on his head.

      He loved animals more than people. It somehow makes him a little more human and endearing to think of him encouraging mice to play in his office while he struggled to classify human experience (though it was difficult to manage their relationship with his beloved cats). But it hardly seems like the description of a man so fired with life that he could settle down and measure the unmeasurable passions. His putative ward and interpreter John Stuart Mill certainly thought so, and he knew him: ‘He had neither internal experience, nor external,’ Mill said of Bentham. ‘He never knew prosperity and adversity, passion nor satiety; he never had even the experiences which sickness gives … He knew no dejection, no heaviness of heart. He never felt life a sore and a weary burthen. He was a boy to the last.’

      He pottered about his writing, enthusiastically starting gigantic projects of classification, the first chapter of which would turn out to be so voluminous that he would have to concentrate on that and abandon the rest. It was a pattern that continued for the rest of his life. He began by writing a long critique of the distinguished jurist William Blackstone, part of which came out in 1776, as A Fragment on Government. The rest was expanded and expanded and abandoned because it was out of control. Next there was the Treatise on Punishments. Only the introduction was ever near to being finished. The rest had once again expanded beyond control and had to be turned into a study on laws in general. And so on and so on, collating, noting in margins, packed with expletive and rage, then putting the papers aside never to be looked at again.

      Luckily, according to the historian Leslie Stephen, he ‘formed disciples ardent enough to put together these scattered documents as the disciples of Mahomet put together the Koran’. Even so, it was hardly enough to make him a bestseller. One reviewer in his lifetime described his style as ‘the Sanskrit of modern legislation’ and those were the days when nobody could understand Sanskrit. ‘He has parenthesis within parenthesis, like a set of pillboxes,’ wrote his erstwhile secretary Walter Coulson. ‘And out of this habit have grown redundancies which become tiresome to the modern reader.’

      Nor did the Fragment have the desired effect. He published it anonymously, and it was immediately pirated in Dublin, so that the first 500 copies were sold without any profit to him, but it did attract some interest as people in political circles wondered who the author was. Unfortunately for Bentham, he confided his authorship to his father to prove he was achieving something in his career. But his father was extremely indiscreet, and as soon as people knew the pamphlet had been written by a nobody, the sales collapsed.

      It was the Panopticon that changed Bentham’s life. This was his invention of an efficient, modern prison, build in the shape of a flower, with the prison keeper at the centre able to watch over all the prisoners at once. The governor would run the new institutions as profit-making concerns, which would use the prisoners as motive power for a range of inventions that would make a profit and at the same time ‘grind the rogues honest’.

      To Bentham the idea was a masterpiece of enlightenment. Because the new prison governors relied for their profit on the prisoners’ health, it was in their interest to keep them healthy and well-fed. It was never built, so we shall never know whether the prisoners would actually have thanked him – as Bentham believed they would. But since he was intending to work them 14 hours a day with another hour on the treadmill for exercise, it’s hard to believe their gratitude would have been overwhelming.

      For the next 20 years, Bentham barraged the government with his plans, and with some effect. They even bought a site for it on Millbank, where the Tate Gallery stands today, but the final signature was frustratingly difficult to obtain. Bentham was so certain the money would come through that he sank at least £10,000 into the project as early as 1796, and he soon found himself on the verge of imprisonment for debt. Day after day he wandered the Treasury corridors, writing letters, his hopes rising when William Pitt was replaced as Prime Minister by Henry Addington, only to be dashed again. ‘Mr Addington’s hope is what Mr Pitt’s hope was,’ he wrote in despair, ‘to see me die broken-hearted, like a rat in a hole.’

      He asked everyone he could for help. ‘Never was any one worse used than Bentham,’ wrote the anti-slavery campaigner William Wilberforce. ‘I have seen the tears run down the cheeks of that strong-minded man, through the vexation at the pressing importunity of creditors and the insolence of official underlings.’

      In the meantime, he turned himself into a Professor Branestawm of crazy ideas. He tried to interest the Treasury in currency schemes (always a sign of mild instability) and speaking tubes. He suggested the idea of a train of carts drawn at speed between London and Edinburgh. He told the Americans they should build a canal across Panama, and suggested to the city authorities that they should freeze large quantities of vegetables so that there could be fresh peas available at Christmastime. Not content with that, he linked up with Peter Mark Roget, later to write the first Thesaurus – a Benthamite project of classification if ever there was one – to invent what he called a frigidarium to keep food cold. He told the Bank of England how they could create an unforgeable banknote. He wrote widely in favour of votes for women and proposed, in unpublished writings, that homosexuality should be legalized, at a time when you could be hanged for sodomy. ‘How a voluntary act of this sort by two individuals can be said to have any thing to do with the safety of them or any other individual whatever, is somewhat difficult to be conceived,’ he wrote.

      Absolutely none of these ideas was taken up. He had more luck with inventing new words. ‘International’ is one of his. So is ‘codify’ and ‘maximize’. He had less success renaming astronomy as ‘uranoscopic physiurgics’. Still less renaming biology as ‘epigeoscopic physiurgics’. And his letters urging the government to rename the country ‘Brithibernia’ remained in the minister’s in-trays. His attempts to reshape the cabinet also had to wait more than a century. He suggested that there should be twelve ministers: including one for education; one for ‘the preservation of the national health’; one for ‘indigence relief’; one for ‘preventive service’ (to stop accidents) and an ‘interior communication minister’ (transport). In fact he died the year before the government first voted any money to education at all.

      The hopelessly old-fashioned shape of the government was probably why the Panopticon stayed stubbornly unbuilt. That is certainly what Bentham thought, even when a parliamentary committee took pity on him in 1813 and voted him £23,000 in damages, with which he paid off his debts. The Panopticon story is important here because it made him realize that the whole of government needed reform. If Lord Spencer could hold up the project for a generation, simply because it was near his London landholdings, then the whole system was corrupt. He needed a method of government to calculate right from wrong, rather than letting it fall to whoever happened to have the ear of the prime minister of the day. If the system of government could not see that it was in the general interest to adopt his plan, then how could you construct a system of government that would automatically want to improve human happiness?

      ‘All СКАЧАТЬ