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 and unfamiliar. Yet Mill instinctively knew that measuring happiness was just too blunt an instrument.
Generations later we make the same kind of discoveries ourselves over and over again. But we tend to solve the problem by measuring ever more ephemeral aspects of life, constantly bumping up against the central paradox of the whole problem, which is that the most important things are just not measurable. The difficulty comes because they can almost be counted. And often we believe we have to try just so that we can get a handle on the problem. And so it is that politicians can’t measure poverty, so they measure the number of benefit claimants instead. Or they can’t measure intelligence, so they measure exam results. Doctors measure blood cells rather than health, and people all over the world measure money rather than love. They might sometimes imply almost the same thing, but often they have little to do with each other.
Anything can be counted, say the management consultants McKinsey & Co., and anything you can count you can manage. That’s the modern way. But the truth is, even scientific measurement has its difficulties. Chaos theory showed that very tiny fluctuations in complex systems have very big consequences. Or as the gurus of chaos theory put it: the flapping of a butterfly’s wings over China can affect the weather patterns in the UK. The same turned out to be true for other complex systems, from the behaviour of human populations to the behaviour of share prices, from epidemics to cotton prices.
The man who, more than anybody else, undermined the old idea that measurements were facts was a Lithuanian Jew, born in Warsaw before the war, the son of a clothing wholesaler who found himself working for IBM’s research wing in the USA. Benoit Mandelbrot is probably the best known of all the pioneers of chaos because of the extraordinary patterns, known as fractals, that he introduced by running the rules of chaos through IBM’s computers. And he got there with a simple question that makes the kind of statistical facts the Victorians so enjoyed seem quite ridiculous. The question was: ‘How long is the coastline of Britain?’
On the face of it, this seems easy enough. You can find the answer in encyclopaedias. But then you think about it some more and you wonder whether to include the bays, or just to take a line from rock to rock. And having included the bays, what about the sub-bays inside each bay? And do you go all the way round each peninsula however small? And having decided all that, and realizing that no answer is going to be definitive, what about going round each pebble on the beach? In fact the smaller you go, to the atomic level and beyond, the more detail you could measure. The coastline of Britain is different each time you count it and different for everyone who tries.
There was a time when accountants were able to deal with this kind of uncountable world better than they are now. In the early days of the American accountancy profession, they were urged to avoid numbers. ‘Use figures as little as you can,’ said the grand old man of American accounting James Anyon, who came from Lancashire. ‘Remember your client doesn’t like or want them, he wants brains. Think and act upon facts, truths and principles and regard figures only as things to express these, and so proceeding you are likely to become a great accountant and a credit to one of the truest and finest professions in the land.’
Anyon had arrived in the USA in 1886, to look after the firm of Barrow, Wade, Guthrie and Co – set up three years before by an English accountant who realized that there was a completely vacant gap in the accountancy market in New York City. Unfortunately, the day he arrived, he was threatened with violence by the very large chief assistant, who had been secretly
