The Tyranny of Numbers: Why Counting Can’t Make Us Happy. David Boyle
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
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 what they think they want was untested