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