The Tyranny of Numbers: Why Counting Can’t Make Us Happy. David Boyle
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.
The idea of measuring happiness was central to almost everything he wrote. But when he began to consider exactly how the formula would work – something his followers had to tackle after his death – he fell back on the moderate thought that any kind of calculation was better than none. ‘In every rational and candid eye, unspeakable will be the advantage it will have over every form of precision being ever attained because none is ever so much as aimed at,’ he wrote. All you needed was the formula, and that meant calculating the pleasures and pains against their intensity, duration, certainty, rapidity, fecundity, purity and extensiveness. Simple!
From the start he realized that this principle, whatever it was called, depended on being able to measure the way people felt. ‘Value of a lot of pleasure or pain, how to be measured’, was the title of chapter 4 of his Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation. He imagined that this was a simple proposition: ‘who is there that does not calculate?’ he asked airily, but the complete absence of any official figures made him think again. Where was the raw data? He asked the Bank of England how much paper money was in circulation. They didn’t know. Neither had the Foundling Hospital any idea about the cost of living for paupers.
In a sudden burst of enthusiasm for figures, he persuaded the great agricultural reformer Arthur Young to use his Annals of Agriculture to send out a questionnaire about rural poverty. Young even wrote an encouraging introduction to it. Unfortunately, Bentham’s enthusiasm got the better of him, and the questionnaire included no less than 3,000 questions. Not surprisingly, only a handful of answers ever arrived back at Queen Square Place.
And even if they had poured in, how could you compare these different pleasures and pains? You couldn’t count the number of people affected by them and you certainly couldn’t compare how much they were feeling them. What if slaves were happy – did that make slavery right? This was a difficult question for Bentham, who was a lifelong critic of slavery. And how do you compare the one person who gets a great deal of pleasure from building a