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

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 (#ulink_f3736518-f9d8-533e-934b-236972ba2cb2)

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, and still on display to the professors and students of London University and anybody else who wanders in, together with some very un-Benthamite rumours about ghosts.

It was a fittingly scientific end to the life of the man who gave us the philosophical school of utilitarianism. Because it was Bentham who told us that what is good and right is what most promotes human happiness – not necessarily what it says in law or the Bible. And it was Bentham who launched the world’s politicians on an increasingly determined set of calculations, so they can know what this ‘good’ is in any given situation.

The daily outpouring of figures and statistics that now so dominates our conversations began partly with Bentham, but he was also a symptom of his time. At the beginning of his life, as he stood with his father at the age of 12 to watch the coronation procession of George III, London was dirty, foul-smelling and dangerously brutal, with one congested bridge over the river. By the end there were eight bridges over the Thames and the streets were lit by gaslight, and steam trains – ‘self-moving receptacles’, as he described them – were beginning to change the shape of cities. What’s more, his native land had experienced no less than 30 years of census returns and was about to start the compulsory registration of births, marriages and deaths. The number-crunchers had arrived. Some people even predicted it at the time. ‘The age of chivalry is gone,’ moaned Edmund Burke in the House of Commons. ‘That of sophisters, economists and calculators has succeeded, and the glory of Europe is extinguished for ever.’ And if one person could be blamed for that, you could probably waggle the finger at Jeremy Bentham.

Now almost two centuries have gone by since his death, you would have thought it might be possible to get more perspective on the man who did so much to create this aspect of the modern world. But that still seems impossible. Bentham, for all his mild manners and gentle unemotional ways, has inspired passionate feelings of distaste ever since. Thomas Carlyle described Bentham’s contribution as a ‘pig philosophy’. Karl Marx went even further, describing Bentham as ‘the insipid, pedantic leather-tongued waste of the commonplace bourgeois intelligence of the nineteenth century’. Trotsky was immediately converted by reading his works at the age of 17, but later condemned Bentham’s ideas as ‘a philosophy of social cookbook recipes’. The humourless Nietzsche was even moved to verse to describe him:

Soul of washrag, face of poker,

Overwhelmingly mediocre.

Looking at Jeremy Bentham’s face now, in the glass case, it does seem a little on the poker side. Even his clothes seem ludicrous, as if they have been borrowed from a Disney cartoon, and don’t seem nearly dangerous enough to inspire such hatred. Nor do the stories of the old boy jogging from his home in Westminster to Fleet Street well into his 70s, about his ancient cat (whom he called the Reverend Dr John Langhorn) and his determined early-morning walks round the garden.

His works are impenetrable and his autobiography was bolwderized and put into an unreadable third person by his incompetent assistant John Bowring, so it is hard to get a sense of the man. The overwhelming impression is that here was a mild, vain, fastidious, pedantic, irritating obsessive, who never really lived a full life – hardly loved and barely lost – but who brought about a revolution which is still such an important part of our lives that he remains as ambiguous as ever.

II

Jeremy Bentham was born on 15 February 1748, the son of a successful City of London lawyer who provided him with such a miserable, monotonous and gloomy childhood that he put the attainment of happiness at the centre of his philosophy. His mother died when he was ten, and life with Jeremy’s overbearing and demanding father meant no games and little fun. No other children were ever asked to the house.

Instead of embracing the law as his father intended, Bentham used his small allowance to spend his time reading the works of the philosophers David Hume and Claude Adrien Helvétius. In them he found the basis for his philosophy – that you could estimate happiness from a number of different pleasures and that public ‘utility’ was the basis of all human virtue. Reading Helvétius during the 1770s, and walking a little way behind his family – you can picture their exasperation at this gauche and bookish adolescent trailing along after them – he asked himself: ‘Have I a genius for anything?’

Adolescents ask themselves this question often. But to Bentham, the answer came like the Angel Gabriel appearing to Mary. He took the clue from the book he was reading, where Helvétius gave his opinion that legislation was the most important of earthly pursuits, an opinion widely approved by legislators the world over. ‘And have I indeed a genius for legislation?’ said the young Jeremy to himself. ‘I gave myself the answer, fearfully and tremblingly – Yes.’

Enthusiastically, and already packing his mind with this sense of historic mission, he devoured as many of the works of moral and political philosophy as he could get his hands on. Tom Paine was starting to think up his Rights of Man, there was simmering discontent in the American colonies, and ideas were dangerous world-shifting things. Bentham flung himself in. But it was when he travelled back to Oxford to vote as a university MA in the 1768 parliamentary election, that he had his real breakthrough. He was rummaging through the small library in Harper’s Coffee House, when he came across the pamphlet by the chemist Joseph Priestley, which included the phrase ‘the greatest happiness of the greatest number’. Bentham let out a sharp ‘Eureka!’ and dashed out to make it his own.

It remains the phrase for which Bentham is best known. Priestley never used it again – he didn’t need it, said Bentham – so he adapted it as the centre of his philosophy. And there it is, in the first page of the first work he ever published, A Fragment on Government: ‘It is the greatest happiness of the greatest number that is the measure of right and wrong.’

Before Bentham (or so he believed) the laws of England and the morality on which they were based were a hopeless jumble of superstition, tradition, contradiction and privilege. After Bentham there would be a clear logical reason for laws, and governments would know automatically what to do. It would no longer be a matter of balancing distrust of the people with fear, as Gladstone said later, but a simple piece of arithmetic. Government action, all action in fact, should be based on what would make most people happiest.

For the rest of his life, Bentham devoted most of his intellectual effort to working out how his Greatest Happiness Principle might become clear in practice. Borrowing the popular thinking of the time which classified diseases or the Linnean classification of plants and animals into families, he set about classifying pleasures to meet the strict demands of his legislative theory. By the end of his life, Bentham had defined 14 broad kinds of pleasure and sent a generation of followers and enthusiasts away to measure them.

‘I wish I could return in six or seven centuries time,’ he was fond of remarking, ‘so that I can see the effects of my work.’ ‘Alas! His name will hardly live so long,’ wrote the essayist William Hazlitt, putting his finger on the whole problem with utilitarianism in one neat sentence: ‘There are some tastes that are sweet in the mouth and bitter in the belly, and there is a similar contradiction and anomaly in the mind and heart of man.’

But in spite of this put-down, Bentham has managed to remain famous for over a century and a half. For a long time, it didn’t seem as if he would even achieve this. He was much better known abroad. Hazlitt was also right when he said that Bentham’s fame was in inverse proportion to the distance from his house in Westminster. When the traveller and writer George Borrow found himself arrested in Spain, he was released from prison on the grounds that he shared a nationality with the man his captor called ‘The Grand Bentham’. And when Bentham visited Paris towards the end of his life (an honorary French citizen after the Revolution) the lawyers at the courts of justice rose to receive him.

‘The case is, though I have neither time nor room to give you particulars,’ he wrote in 1810, ‘that now at length, when I am just ready to drop into the grave, my fame has spread itself all over the civilized world.’

III

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 government is in itself one vast evil,’ said 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.