Chances Are (23 page)

 

Wherever statistics showed uniformity, whether the matter was physical or moral, then social law was at work—and there was nothing that Church or Crown could do about it:

 

Buckle's
History of Civilization in England
appeared in two volumes—one a preamble and the other a trial run on Scotland and Spain (easiest to describe because, in Buckle's terms, so little worthwhile had happened in either country). The third was to have covered Germany and the United States, before limbering up for the actual subject of the book's title—but fate intervened. Buckle's mother died in 1859, prompting him to rethink his previous denial of the immortality of the soul. Distraught, unable to work, he traveled to the Holy Land and succumbed to a fever at Damascus. They say that his deathbed delirium was one familiar to any author: “My book! I have not finished my book!”

He should not have worried: like Quetelet's, Buckle's thesis was all the more powerful for not having been fully elaborated. As open-ended speculation his ideas circled the earth. In America, the young Henry Adams felt sure a science of history had arisen. Strindberg based
Master Olof
on Buckle. Young Romanians looked to Buckle's work as the pattern for development of their country. Dostoevsky told himself in his notebooks to read and reread Buckle; in every word of the Grand Inquisitor in
The Brothers Karamazov
you can hear the voice of that “protective spirit” Buckle described and hated.

Yet Dostoevsky, with characteristic contrariness, also presented an extreme form of
resistance
to the implications of a statistical world. The unnamed protagonist of
Notes from Underground
mocked the efforts of the nineteenth century to erect a Crystal Palace of certainty over everything: “to affirm, for instance, following Buckle, that through civilization mankind becomes more gentle and consequently less bloodthirsty . . . Logically it does seem to follow from his arguments. But man has such a propensity for systems and abstract deductions that he is ready to distort the truth intentionally, he is ready to deny the evidence of his senses only to justify his logic.” Dostoevsky's own notebook makes the point more clearly: “How does it come about that all the statisticians and experts and lovers of humanity, when they enumerate the good things of life, always omit one particular one? One's own free and unfettered volition, one's own caprice, however wild, one's own fancy, inflamed sometimes to the point of madness—that is the best and greatest good.”

Because statistics was a philosophical stance before it was a numerical technique, the first objections to it were on similarly philosophical grounds. Many German schools of thought disliked the way Buckle's ideas made lonely atoms of us all. Yes, there might be laws to history, but the proper subject of these laws was collective: our Culture, our Class, our Community, our Nation—our Race. You can begin to see the ways these ideas would play out in the twentieth century.

Novelists split into those who sought realism through true depiction of statistically revealed types—Balzac, for instance, appeared to be checking off a list of French subclasses with every novel—and those who stood against the implications of uniformity and determinism. Tolstoy's claim that every unhappy family is unhappy differently is a rumble of protest against the presumption of statistics. Dickens
loathed
the statisticians, with a city boy's conviction that every street and every tenement was unique. His attack on the tyranny of social law is most overt in
Hard Times,
where poor Cissy must learn her statistics in the unforgiving school of Mr. Gradgrind: “In this life, we want nothing but Facts, sir, nothing but Facts.” Gradgrind gets his comeuppance when his son Tom turns out a thief—but the boy had learned all too well the statistical view of fate: “So many people are employed in situations of trust; so many people, out of so many, will be dishonest. I have heard you talk, a hundred times, of its being a law. How can
I
help laws?”

Even some determinists disliked the notion that numbers constituted the most important facts. August Comte, the creator of Positivism, in all other respects a committed believer in social law, dismissed this quantification as impossible: he never forgave Quetelet (“some Belgian savant”) for taking his term “social physics” and applying it to this numerical travesty. In revenge, he invented the word “sociology,” which he thought far too ugly for anyone to steal.

Are we individuals or collectives? Is experience determined or free? Do its laws remain constant or change? Can we quantify life without losing its essence? It took much wrangling over the philosophical and moral implications of Quetelet's work before people went back to look more closely at the numbers. When they did so, they found less certainty than had been advertised. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, Wilhelm Lexis considered the raw material again, comparing birth, suicide, and crime figures with their probabilistic equivalents. That is, he created a probabilistic model for a given statistic: an urn filled with balls, either marked (“boy,” “despair,” “murder”) or blank, in the ratio of their mean value from the observed figures. He then calculated the likelihood of getting the same values observed for a given year by drawing from the urn—in effect comparing real experience with the ideal that Quetelet had said lay behind all phenomena. For births, the model and the real fit perfectly—a demonstration that the proportion of male to female births really is determined by independent random events. Beyond that, though, only Danish suicides for 1861-1886 actually corresponded with the stable distribution of urn-drawing. Other phenomena were just too variable to be explained in these terms only.

Lexis created what he called the “index of dispersion,” Q, which compared the observed phenomena with their probabilistic model. Where Q = 1, they coincide: the real world is behaving like the flip of a coin—events are independent and random. Where Q is less than 1, the world is being driven by some underlying law; things are happening for a reason; Buckle rubs his hands. When, however, Q is
greater
than 1—as Lexis found it was for most social statistics—then fluctuation is king: at least a considerable subgroup is changing significantly but unpredictably. Society may look stable and determined—but that's only because we are looking at too short a time-series.

 

Who, though, wants just to look at society? When children are dying of cholera, old women of cold; when families are huddling in rat-haunted rooms, accessible only by wading through filth? Who would not want to
change
society? The nineteenth century saw great conflicts of ideas, but it was also—particularly in Britain—a period of enormous practical energy. For the women and men who looked around them and felt a call to action, social numbers were not just an object of contemplation—they were a powerful tool for getting things done.

Take those Scottish chests: the original article in the
Edinburgh Medical Journal
was not about the wonderful uniformity of Scotland's soldiers; it was about the worrying difference between the stout farm boys of Kircudbrightshire and the wizened mill hands and miners' lads of Lanark—forty miles away. Nor were these the only social data collected in Scotland. In 1791, a Highland landlord, Sir John Sinclair, had begun the first national study ever undertaken: the
Statistical Account of Scotland
.

With genial high-handedness, Sinclair had stolen the word “statistics” from the Germans during a Continental tour in the 1780s. He felt he had a better use for it:

 

“Quantum of happiness” was taken from Jeremy Bentham; like him, Sinclair looked for the basis of improving society in the examination of particular facts with an eye to putting them to use: he wanted to improve life for the Highlands—a region of extreme poverty, stoically borne—so he set about collecting his material.

Following the practice of the German mortality tables, he took local clergymen as his reporters—but he did not allow any respect for their cloth to stand in the way of his desire for complete information. He wrote his final letters of reminder in red, allowing their recipients to draw their own conclusions from “the Draconian color of his ink.”

Sinclair succeeded: all 938 parishes returned records of their population, classes of inhabitants, agriculture, employment, manufactures, commerce, corn prices, and mortality—with a fine range of further detail besides. The real victory, though, came through the measures Sinclair, armed with his twenty-one volumes of incontrovertible evidence, was able to wring from the government: the creation of a Board of Agriculture, the reduction of coal taxes, the abolition of abusive charges for grinding corn, the increase in schoolmasters' salaries, the improvement of sheep, and a royal grant of £2,000 to the families of Scottish clergymen. Moreover, the fact that such a complete statistical account could be collected by a single citizen gave the impetus for a national census of the rest of Britain, which would be—not a secret index of national power—but a public guide to legislation.

As the Industrial Revolution took off, the need to investigate the causes of events became ever more pressing. Why was life expectancy twice as high in Rutland as in Manchester? Why was mortality twice as high in London's East End as in its West? Why did the river washing the Parliament of the world's most powerful country smell so dreadful that sheets soaked in carbolic had to be hung over the windows? These practical applications required particular facts—and, in the 1830s, England became the world's great producer of facts.

Parliamentary Committees, Royal Commissions, municipal statistical reports—all freely published, all widely circulating—made early Victorian England a place more self-aware than any before and many since. A contemporary, Douglas Jerrold, said that in 1833 no one thought of the poor, while by 1839 no one thought of anything else. The indefatigable Edwin Chadwick, secretary to the Poor Law Commissioners, bludgeoned local authorities into providing uniform answers and quantifiable reports on the effects of public hygiene on public health. Thanks to these, he was able to confront government with conclusions invincible because armored in fact: for instance, “That the annual loss of life from filth and bad ventilation are greater than the loss from death or wounds in any wars in which the country has been engaged in modern times.”

Reports were a start—but action was the goal. In a neat tale of statistical inference, Dr. John Snow was able to analyze and address one of the worst cholera outbreaks in London's history. Five hundred people in Soho had died during two weeks of September 1854, all within a quarter-mile of one another. Taking the evidence of 83 death certificates and plotting the addresses of the dead on a map of the area, Snow came up with a visual distribution in two dimensions, centered on the pump at the corner of Broad and Cambridge streets.

Snow took his map to the parish Board of Guardians and got them to remove the handle of the pump; the epidemic died down. Not only were lives saved, but the association of cholera with contaminated water was established—up until then, it was thought possibly to be transmitted through bad smells. The site of the pump is now the John Snow public house; thanks to the efforts of those who put statistics into action, you can safely drink the water there.

The assertive power of statistics was expressed most clearly in the work of Florence Nightingale.

 

The work she did in reversing the horrifying trend of death through illness in the British Army in the Crimea—at one time the rates suggested that the entire army would be dead within a year—was only a beginning. Resistance at the War Office (its minister, Lord Panmure, was known as “the Bison”) was so stubborn that all the lessons of the war could well have been lost. Words, even barbed and swift-shot words, could be countered and baffled by other words, soothing and evasive. Only numbers could make the point stick.

Miss Nightingale knew how to supply numbers in a memorable form (p. 138). Her command of graphics—her misleading “coxcombs,” frightening “bat's wing” diagrams, and dour “lines” of mortality—made their incontrovertible mark without her presence, convincing the public, the monarch, and even her opponents that dispute with her was futile.

Florence Nightingale called herself a “passionate statistician.” Muffled by her time and gender into having to deal with the world at one remove, she had always been attracted to numerical information as a passport to the real. Her personal religion—an odd amalgam of Unitarianism and Quetelet—sought out the revelations of statistics: