The Tyranny of Numbers: Why Counting Can’t Make Us Happy. David Boyle
zero was among the Arabic numbers banned in 1229. But the enormous increase in trade because of the crusades and the activities of the Hanseatic League meant that something of the kind was needed. Italian merchants increasingly used zero as an underground sign for ‘free trade’. Bootleggers and smugglers embraced the idea with enthusiasm. Like the V sign across the continent under Nazi tyranny, zero became a symbol of numerical freedom, a kind of medieval counterculture.
What normally happens with countercultures is that they get adopted by everyone, and that’s exactly what happened here. Soon everyone was using zero quite openly and adding and subtracting happily using a pen and ink. Soon the abacus had died out so much that it became a source of fascination. One of Napoleon’s generals was given one in Russia when he was a prisoner-of-war, and he was so astonished that he brought it back with him to Paris to show the emperor. Don’t let’s dismiss the abacus completely, though. In occupied Japan in 1945, the US army organized a competition between their automatic calculator and skilled Japanese abacus-users. The abacus turned out to be both quicker and more accurate for every computation except multiplication.
The people of Western Europe resisted negative numbers for much longer. They called them ‘absurd numbers’, believing they were futile and satanic concepts, corresponding to nothing real in the world. Now, of course, our lives are dominated by them, because the debts they represent correspond to positive numbers at the bank. Debt opened the way to negatives via the world-shattering invention of double-entry book-keeping. This may not have been the brainchild of a friend of Leonardo da Vinci, a Milanese maths teacher called Fra Luca Pacioli, but it was Pacioli’s destiny to popularize it. The writer James Buchan described his method as a ‘machine for calculating the world’. It was one of the ‘loveliest inventions of the human spirit’, according to Goethe. It could work out, at any moment, when your complex deals were profitable, allowing you to compare one deal with another.
Pacioli was a Franciscan who knew all about profit. He had special dispensation from the Pope (a friend of his) to own property. ‘The end and object of every businessman is to make a lawful and satisfactory profit so that he may sustain himself,’ he wrote. ‘Therefore he should begin with the name of God.’ Pacioli and his followers duly wrote the name of God at the beginning of every ledger. Before Pacioli, traders tended to give any fractions to the bank. After Pacioli they could record them. They could grasp at a glance where they stood while their cargoes were on the high seas, or while they waited two years or more for them to be fabricated into something else. They could make them stand still to be counted.
A Neo-Platonist, fascinated by Pythagoras and his ideas of divine proportion, Pacioli filled his book with other stuff like military tactics, architecture and theology. He chose a potent moment to publish it: the year after Columbus arrived back from discovering America. But despite his Pythagorean roots, Pacioli provided the foundations for a more complex idea of profit and loss, of assets and liabilities, making all of them clearly measurable. His critics feared he had abolished quality altogether. All that you could put down in the double entries were quantities – numbers of sheep, amounts of wool: there was no column for qualities like good or bad. The numbers had taken over, simplifying and calculating the world in their own way.
‘If you cannot be a good accountant, you will grope your way forward like a blind man and may meet great losses,’ said Pacioli, the first accountant. He explained that it was all a matter of taking a piece of paper, listing all the debit totals on one side and all the credit totals on the other. If they add up and there’s a profit – the result is happiness, he said, sounding like a Renaissance Mr Micawber. If not, you have to find out where the mistake is – as millions of frustrated amateur accountants have been doing ever since.
Within three centuries, accountants had developed into the professionals you called in after bankruptcy, a kind of undertakers for the business world, which is why the Companies Act of 1862 which regulated such matters became known as ‘the accountant’s friend’. ‘The whole affairs in bankruptcy have been handed over to an ignorant set of men called accountants, which was one of the greatest abuses ever introduced into law,’ said Mr Justice Quinn during a bankruptcy case in 1875. By 1790, the Post Office directory for London lists one accountant. By 1840 there were 107 of them and by 1845 – right in the middle of the railway boom – there were 210, ready to assist cleaning up the mess in the financial collapse the following year. Maybe they were even responsible for the rash of suicides in London in 1846; maybe they helped prevent more. We shall never know. Either way, it was just the beginning for the accountants. By the turn of the century there were over 6,000 in England and Wales. Now there are 109,000, but – as far as I know – no counting horses left at all.
IV
Pacioli and his spiritual descendants have helped to create the modern world with its obsession with counting, and the strange idea that once you have counted the money, you have counted everything. There is a hard-headed myth that numbers are serious and words are not – that counting things is a rigorous business for a serious man’s world. ‘When you can measure what you are speaking of and express it in terms of numbers, you know something about it,’ said the scientist Lord Kelvin. ‘When you cannot express it in terms of numbers your knowledge of it is of a meagre kind.’
Armed with this attitude, Lord Kelvin dismissed radio as pointless, aeroplanes as impossible and X-rays as a hoax, so we might wonder if he was right. But is my knowledge really of a meagre kind? Can I express something about myself in numbers? If Lord Kelvin’s successors managed to express my entire genetic code in numbers, would they know me better than I do myself when I can do no such thing? Well, in some ways, maybe they 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