The Tyranny of Numbers

by David Boyle

  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 education.

  And so began a strange intensive indoctrination, which involved starting to learn ancient Greek at the age of three, with gruelling studies from 6 to 9 am and from 10 am to 1 pm every day. There were no holidays. There was no birching, but his father’s sarcasm was almost as unpleasant. There was to be no mixing with other children – the young John wasn’t even allowed to go to church. What he learned in the morning, he was expected to pass on to his eight brothers and sisters in the afternoon.

  John could not exactly love his father tenderly, he said later in his Autobiography. He described him as ‘the most impatient of men’, and we can imagine what that simple sentence conceals. For the rest of his life, he confessed that his conscience spoke with his father’s voice. But he certainly gave him a 25-year head start over his contemporaries, which must have helped him slip into the role of the great Liberal philosopher of the Victorian age. The only area of human knowledge that he was kept in ignorance of was Utilitarianism: this he had to choose for himself, his father decided. Mill Senior needn’t have worried. When he introduced the idea to his 16-year-old son in a series of ‘lectures’ as they walked along, demanding an essay on the subject the next morning which would be re-written and re-written again, John Stuart was so enthusiastic that he formed his own Utilitarian Society. James Mill’s friends and allies looked on in astonishment. There was no doubt that John was a prodigy, said Francis Place, but he would probably end up ‘morose and selfish’. Unfortunately, he was right.

  In 1820, just before he left for a life-broadening trip to Paris, James Mill took his son for a grave walk in Hyde Park, and told him that his education would single him out, and this should not be a source of pride. It was because of his father’s efforts and nothing to do with him. In fact, it would be disgraceful if he didn’t know more than everybody else in those circumstances.

  It is hard to warm to Mill senior, or any of the unemotional utilitarians. Bentham said that his sympathy for the many sprang out of his hatred for the few. James Mill despised passionate emotions, describing them as a kind of madness. He showed almost no feelings at all – except for one: he was quite unable to hide how much he disliked his wife. He ‘had scarcely any belief in pleasure’, according to his son. ‘He would sometimes say that if life was made what it might be, by good government and good education, it would be worth having: but he never spoke with anything like enthusiasm even for that possibility.’

  James Mill lived only a few years longer than Bentham. The dust he inhaled in his regular journeys to his country cottage in Mickleham gave him a serious lung haemorrhage in 1835, and he died on 23 June the following year, leaving it to his son John as the second generation to carry the baton for Utilitarianism. It was John who gave the movement its name: he found it in a novel called Annals of the Parish about a Scottish clergyman who warns his parishioners not to abandon God and become ‘utilitarians’.

  At 20 John Stuart Mill – regarded by both his father and Bentham as their spiritual heir – set to with a will to finish Bentham’s Rationale of Evidence for publication. ‘Mr Bentham had begun his treatise three times at considerable intervals, each time in a different manner, and each time without reference to the preceding,’ he wrote. He spent months unpicking his crabbed handwriting, chopping his sentences up into manageable parts, and finally sending five volumes off to the printers. The following year he had a nervous breakdown or a ‘mental convulsion’ as the Victorians put it. The breakdown took the form of a series of doubts about the whole Bentham legacy.

  ‘Suppose that all your objects in life were realised; that all the changes in institutions and opinions which you are looking forward to, could be completely effected at this very instant: would this be a great joy and happiness to you?’ And an irrepressible self-consciousness distinctly answered, ‘No!’ At this my heart sank within me: the whole foundation on which my
life was constructed fell down. All my happiness was to have been found in the continual pursuit of this end. The end had ceased to charm, and how could there ever be any interest in the means? I seemed to have nothing left to live for.

  It was an important question and it seemed to fly in the face of everything that Bentham stood for, just as the harsh unemotional education that he had received at the hands of his father seemed completely inadequate to deal with it. If the question couldn’t be answered, how could any calculation of pleasure come to any conclusion? Life seemed complex beyond anything Bentham could have imagined.

  For much of the year, Mill could hardly work at all. Music was a relief, and so were the poems of William Wordsworth, who he was convinced had experienced something similar himself. But, still in the grip of Bentham, Mill worried about music. If there were only a limited number of notes, wouldn’t the music run out? Can you calculate the potential number of pieces of music in the world? Experience shows that it is too complicated to count, just as you can’t count the combination of possible poems by the 26 letters of the alphabet. But these are the fears of a Utilitarian who has looked into the abyss.

  He never fully recovered. A decade later he had another collapse, and for the rest of his life he suffered from a nervous twitching over one eye.

  With antecedents like Bentham and Mill, it is touching to think of John Stuart struggling to find some kind of emotional meaning. He found it by coming out of his reclusion to dine twice a week with Harriet Taylor, the intelligent wife of a wholesale druggist. Mr Taylor seems to have been generous enough to overlook whatever was going on between them. His family roundly condemned him for the relationship and he retired from the world completely, finding that any reference to her by anybody else made him overexcited.

  Instead he wrote a book about logic, then his magnum opus Political Economy. And when Harriet’s husband died in 1849, he married her. When she died in Avignon of congestion of the lungs, he was absolutely devastated, and bought a house there so he could spend half his time near his wife’s grave. ‘The highest poetry, philosophy, oratory, and art seemed trivial by the side of her,’ he said. At last love had come to the Utilitarians. She probably enabled him to humanize the Utilitarian gospel. She certainly inspired him to write The Subjugation of Women in 1869, and his lifelong support for votes for women.

  In 1865, he was persuaded back into public life to stand for Parliament for the Liberal Party. He agreed, on condition that he didn’t have to canvass, spend any money or answer any questions about religion. His disarming honesty seemed to win him support. ‘Did you declare that the English working classes, though differing from some other countries in being ashamed of lying, were yet “generally liars”?’ asked a hostile questioner during a public meeting.

  ‘I did,’ he replied, to tremendous applause, and found himself elected with an enormous majority. And there he sat until he lost his seat to W. H. Smith the newsagent in 1868, small and slight with his eyebrow twitching, his weak voice hard to hear above the hubbub. Sometimes he would lose his drift during a speech and stand in complete silence for a moment, but his fellow parliamentarians listened with respect. It was Mill who first dubbed the Conservatives the ‘stupid party’. On 5 May 1873, he walked 15 miles in a botanical expedition near Avignon, and died unexpectedly three days later. He was, in a real sense, the last of the line.

  V

  ‘All emotions were abhorrent to his cold, precise but admirably balanced mind,’ wrote Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, introducing the great detective Sherlock Holmes to the public just over half a century after Bentham’s death. You can point to other figures, from Victor Frankenstein to the Duke of Wellington, who provided role models for human beings as calculating machines – Wellington’s dispatch from the battle of Waterloo was so modestly written that the American ambassador reported back home that he had lost. But it was Bentham the ‘reasoning machine’ who tried to strip morality and government of its emotional and traditional baggage, who made Sherlock Holmes possible, with his detailed knowledge of inks and papers.

  ‘He was, I take it, the most perfect reasoning and observing machine that the world has seen …’ went on Conan Doyle on the opening page of his first Sherlock Holmes story, ‘A Scandal in Bohemia’. ‘He never spoke of the softer passions, save with a gibe or a sneer … For the trained reasoner to admit such intrusions into his delicate and finely adjusted temperament was to introduce a distracting factor which might throw a doubt upon all his mental results.’

  Holmes could use his delicate and unemotional brain to see through the complex fogs of London to the truth, just as Bentham wanted to be able to do with the confusing mists of government. Whether you can actually get to any truth coldly and calculatingly, certainly any truth worth having, is an issue we still don’t know the answer to. The twentieth century has rehearsed the arguments backwards and forwards, balancing the respective claims of the so-called Two Cultures, and probably the twenty-first century will as well. Can science find meaning? Can scientists make any kind of progress without leaps of imagination? We still don’t agree, but we do now live in Bentham’s world. He didn’t have the necessary figures to make his calculations; we are drowning in them. He could not see some of the moral consequences of his ideas; we have some of the more unpleasant Utilitarian creeds of the century etched on our hearts. But he made the rules.

  Yet his creed was softened by John Stuart Mill, who rescued utilitarianism for the modern world, so much so that it is now the Western world’s dominant moral creed, among government ministers just as it is among everyone else. He also recognized that Bentham may have been ‘a mere reasoning machine’ and said the same could have been said of himself for two or three years before he learned to appreciate the value of emotions – though there are still precious few of those in his Autobiography. Mill’s repeated depressions showed him also that happiness must not be the conscious purpose of life, or paradoxically, it would slip through your fingers. Bentham would never have understood.

  Bizarre measurement No. 3

  Gry

  (A very small linear measurement proposed in England in 1813 that was intended to make all measurements decimal. 1 gry = 0.008333 of an inch. ‘Gry’ means literally ‘speck of dirt under the fingernail’.)

  * * *

  Number of times every year that hackers infiltrate the Pentagon’s computer system: 160,000

  Average time people spend watching TV in the UK every day:

  3 hours 35 minutes

  Chapter 3

  Elusive Happiness

  I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope, For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith

  T. S. Eliot, ‘East Coker’

  A scientist may explore the Universe, but when he comes home at night, he doesn’t understand his wife any better.

  Simon Jenkins, The Times, December 1999

  I

  But suppose you get everything you want, wondered John Stuart Mill at the start of his first nervous breakdown and his rejection of Bentham’s puritanical legacy: ‘Would this be a great joy and happiness to you?’ And the irrepressible self-consciousness distinctly answered, ‘No!’

  Mill’s irrepressible self-consciousness definitely got it right. The human psyche is too complex and far too fleeting to be pinned down in quite that way. You can carry out Bentham’s calculations of happiness with incredible accuracy, you can measure what you want precisely, but somehow the psyche slips away and sets up shop somewhere else. Or as Gershwin put it: ‘After you get what you want, you don’t want it’. While Mill was locking himself into his bedroom, Samuel Taylor Coleridge was coming to similar conclusions: ‘But what happiness?’ he said to the Benthamites with a rhetorical flourish. ‘Your mode of happiness would make me miserable.’ Mill was having his collapse 30 years before Freud was even a flicker in his father’s eye, and the idea that human beings might secretly want something different from w
hat they think they want was untested and unfamiliar. Yet Mill instinctively knew that measuring happiness was just too blunt an instrument.

  Generations later we make the same kind of discoveries ourselves over and over again. But we tend to solve the problem by measuring ever more ephemeral aspects of life, constantly bumping up against the central paradox of the whole problem, which is that the most important things are just not measurable. The difficulty comes because they can almost be counted. And often we believe we have to try just so that we can get a handle on the problem. And so it is that politicians can’t measure poverty, so they measure the number of benefit claimants instead. Or they can’t measure intelligence, so they measure exam results. Doctors measure blood cells rather than health, and people all over the world measure money rather than love. They might sometimes imply almost the same thing, but often they have little to do with each other.

  Anything can be counted, say the management consultants McKinsey & Co., and anything you can count you can manage. That’s the modern way. But the truth is, even scientific measurement has its difficulties. Chaos theory showed that very tiny fluctuations in complex systems have very big consequences. Or as the gurus of chaos theory put it: the flapping of a butterfly’s wings over China can affect the weather patterns in the UK. The same turned out to be true for other complex systems, from the behaviour of human populations to the behaviour of share prices, from epidemics to cotton prices.

  The man who, more than anybody else, undermined the old idea that measurements were facts was a Lithuanian Jew, born in Warsaw before the war, the son of a clothing wholesaler who found himself working for IBM’s research wing in the USA. Benoit Mandelbrot is probably the best known of all the pioneers of chaos because of the extraordinary patterns, known as fractals, that he introduced by running the rules of chaos through IBM’s computers. And he got there with a simple question that makes the kind of statistical facts the Victorians so enjoyed seem quite ridiculous. The question was: ‘How long is the coastline of Britain?’