Greetings.

It has occurred to me that my friends at Nature Network London might derive some little interest from a perusal of the accompanying triptych, which first entered the public domain in May 1832, barely a month before my own death. Whilst it might, at first glance, appear to anticipate the writings of Mr Charles Darwin regarding the descent of man, it will be seen upon closer examination that it is in fact founded upon some of the craniometrical theories of the physician and physiologist Petrus Camper, of the University of Groningen, formulated between 1768 and 1786, and published in English translation in 1794. Professor Camper devised a quantum which he termed the ‘facial angle’, viz. the degree of angle between a horizontal line drawn from the nostril to the ear, and a perpendicular line drawn from the supraorbital ridge of the cranium to the most prominent part of the maxilla. He himself was primarily concerned with establishing an objective mensuration of beauty, but certain of his disciples suggested that this angle – in man or beast – bore a direct relationship to intelligence. Modesty forbids that I should draw attention to the identity of the individual here selected to represent the acme of human intellect, but I trust that, for those with keen eyesight, the original legend may yet be read.

Image courtesy of the Goldsmiths Library, Senate House Library, University of London

The engraving supplied the frontispiece to a work published, anonymously, by Mr William Carpenter, entitled The Rights of Nations: a treatise on representative government, despotism, and reform; in which, political institutions are deduced from philosophical principles, and systematized. As may be inferred from his title, the author’s intention was to set matters of constitution and government upon a rational footing: he sought to abolish aristocratical and exclusive, plundering and inefficient, government; and to substitute representative and liberal, cheap and efficient, government. These were goals with which I was and remain wholly in sympathy, although I confess that I cannot concur with every word that Mr Carpenter wrote, and that in places I find his arguments somewhat crudely framed.

His particular purpose in making use of this engraving was to illustrate the fatuity – viz. the mental imbecility – of kings: for he conceived fatuity to be the disease of hereditary royalty and of ancient dynasty. The intermediate figure in the triptych represents King Ferdinand VII, who sat at that time upon the throne of Spain. Mr Carpenter’s contention was that the royal family of Spain was more remarkable than any other for intermarriage between parties so closely allied as to be almost incestuous; and that, accordingly, the ultimate result of these infamies had been the production of a sort of unnatural being. The comment on the engraving that King Ferdinand has, ‘like Kings generally, nearly the same facial angle as the negro!’, would have outraged the public sensibilities of my day as much as I suspect it does your own – albeit, as it must be confessed, for almost entirely opposite reasons.

I myself had some clashes by proxy with King Ferdinand, insofar as I exchanged ideas with several of his liberal opponents: it was a matter of inestimable regret to me that, even after they came to positions of power in the government of Spain, I was never invited to do what had at one time seemed in prospect, viz. to codify the laws of that land. I also enjoyed a correspondence with, and in certain cases met, some of those who led revolts against Ferdinand in the Spanish colonies in the Americas; men including Bernadino Rivadavia, José del Valle, Francisco de Paula Santander and Simón Bolívar. In the state of Colombia, my writings, and more particularly my arguments against religion and clericalism, became the occasion of the great cause known as La Querella Benthamista_, which lasted through the greater part of the nineteenth century: my works were, on several successive occasions, prescribed to be taught in the universities by the liberals, only to be proscribed in turn by the conservatives upon their attainment of power. Indeed, at the University of Rosario, it may astonish you to learn, the proscription remained in force until as recently as 2002colombia.htm.

All this is, however, to stray from the topic of the engraving in prospect. Professor Camper’s science, if such it can be called, has long been superseded, but his ideas retain a modicum of historical interest. It is perhaps time that a new measure of fatuity were determined, one that might be applied to some of the thinkers, politicians and celebrities of your own day.

Your ever laborious and devoted servant,

J.B.

Greetings my dear friends

I was interested to note that a few weeks ago the House of Commons Science Committee investigated the strength of evidence supporting government policy on homeopathic medicines. I learned, to my considerable perturbation, that despite the complete absence of experimental or observational evidence of their efficacy, your National Health Service expended £12 million on such medicines between 2005 and 2008—£12 million poured into a bottomless gulph of quackery, and no Curtius in prospect to seal the fissure! A fortnight since (and in accordance with notice given by Mr Brown upon this very blog) a public demonstration took place, in which some four hundred rationalists swallowed homeopathic pills by the bottleful, with no reported ill-consequences whatsoever.

I can at least understand the maxim, which I seem to recall is to be found in Paracelsus, that similia similibus curentur (or, Anglice : ‘Let like cure like’). Long ago, Mithridates, fearing assassination, took to ingesting small doses of various poisons in an effort to develop immunity against them, and thirty years before I was born the practice of inoculation—viz. the deliberate infection of a healthy patient with, for instance, the small-pox, as a prophylactic against a later fatal attack of the disease—was brought back to England from Constantinople by the intrepid Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, and successfully used to treat both her own daughter and the daughters of the future George II. In my own lifetime Dr Jenner discovered that inoculation with the cow-pox, a relatively harmless cousin to the fatal disease, also provided immunity against the small-pox, and thereby paved the way to saving countless lives. Notwithstanding that acquisition of immunity against future attacks of a disease by its deliberate contraction is not strictly to be denominated ‘cure’, there would seem to be some merit in the maxim.

However, homeopathic remedies are apparently produced by diluting an active ingredient with water or alcohol to such a degree that very often not a single particle of that ingredient is contained in the notionally therapeutic dose. This fact is so utterly extraordinary that I first thought my understanding to be erroneous—but no: homeopathic remedies are diluted to such a degree that they are scientifically indistinguishable from the dilutant: they are not simply as close to water as makes no difference, they are water! Homeopaths typically argue that the therapeutic effect of the original ingredient is enhanced by dilution—the weaker the solution, the stronger the effect. It seems to concern them not at all that their remedies contain no active ingredients whatsoever, because, they tell us, the dilutant water retains a memory of the original substance, and it is this memory which is responsible for the therapeutic effect. This assertion seems to me simply the postulation of an effect without cause: not a whit the less reprehensible for being a common practice. Indeed, I am told that water drunk in today’s Metropolis has already been through the digestive tracts of many people, and through the sewers and the sewage works many times, before issuing from your pipes. How many substances, noxious and otherwise, will have been dissolved in the water previous to its consumption by you?—Many. And will the water not retain the memory of all of them, even if they are all removed during the process of purification?—the homeopath’s argument depends on it! Surely then, you ingest a veritable homeopathic pharmacopeia every time you imbibe a glass of water?—undoubtedly! Why, then, expend further money on homeopathic remedies?

If consumers of medical services are credulous enough to dedicate their surplus monies to the purchase of such placebos, there seems to be only a limited rationale for preventing them from so doing. The ground for interference is strongest where homeopathic remedies cause harm directly, as, for instance, in the case where a small proportion of users of an American homeopathic cold remedy lost their sense of smell as a result—a clear case of not sufficiently diluting the active ingredient, zinc gluconate, to prevent it’s having an effect! There are further significant risks of indirect harms arising from the advice given by homeopaths, which too often is to avoid conventional medical interventions for ailments which could be easily treated by mainstream medicine. In such cases, death can be the result of faith in the homeopathic model: a cruel deception indeed.

Even where there are no perceptible risks to health, it is one thing to say that people should be left at liberty to dispose of their income as they wish, but it is quite another to maintain that public money, coercively extracted by government through taxes, should be used to fund such treatments. There are indeed competing priorities in health expenditure between treatments of proven effectiveness for different medical needs. For the government to use public money to supply homeopathic services supported by no clinical evidence whatsoever, the effectiveness of which depends upon contravening the laws of physics, chemistry, and pharmacology, and of which the very best that can be said is that they are harmless, seems to me a scandal of state sponsored Quackery! How did you allow this to happen?

Your obedient, though alarmed, servant,

JB

Greetings, my friends

The recent seasonal glut of useless holy-days and material profligacy, coinciding as it did with the somewhat lacklustre conclusion of the great international conference upon climate change in Copenhagen, has prompted me to devote a few words to that ubiquitous topic of scientific and political debate of these latter days, viz. the threat posed by over-indulgence in immediate pleasures to the quality, and indeed to the very existence, of future life upon this planet.

It is not, I must confess, a subject which greatly exercised my mind when I was living—nor, I would add, the minds of any of my contemporaries. With the advantages of hindsight, one may perhaps say that it should have done. It was, after all, over the span of my lifetime that forces such as those of wind, fall of water and expansive power of steam began to be harnessed in the service of industry and manufacture upon a scale previously unimagined, and that improvements in agriculture and husbandry, founded upon practical experiment, began to encrease prodigiously the quantity of food which could be taken from an acre of land. We acknowledged the benefits of these novelties—we did not foresee the dangers they posed if relentlessly pursued to their natural conclusion. Indeed, on occasion, I argued for an encrease in the stock of instruments of mere enjoyment, on the grounds that, the richer a community, the better secured it is against hostility and famine. I did not envisage a day when that stock might grow to such proportions as to itself pose a threat to the community.

If I failed in my lifetime, however, to anticipate the environmental problems in germination, it does not follow that the rational principles I espoused are without relevance in addressing those problems now that they are grown to ghastly fruition. The fulcrum of my ideas was ever the principle of utility—the belief that a right and proper action is one that promotes the greatest happiness. I consistently endeavoured to apply this principle to the political questions of my day, but I did so with regard to the happiness of the greatest number of the living . In the matter of the environmental issues now upon the carpet, it is evident that the calculus should be extended to include the happiness of those yet to be born.

Important as this subject is, a hasty and an incompleat consideration is all that in this place can be allotted to it, because to sift it to the bottom would require a work on purpose. I shall therefore limit my remarks on this occasion to some observations upon the curious emphasis given, as a solution to the environmental ills of the world, to what is dubbed ‘recycling’. The word, indeed, is one which has become almost as ubiquitous as those other staples of the soi-disant environmental propagandist, ‘natural’, ‘organic’ and ‘sustainable’—and, to my eyes, has come to be almost as devoid of meaning.

The principle, mistake me not, is one that I wholeheartedly endorse. Indeed, it might be said that that the provisions I made in my will to have my own remains preserved as an Auto-Icon, and the wider proposals I drafted to turn the dead to the beneficial account of the living, constituted an argument for ‘recycling’: I have written of these on a former occasion. When I was planning my pauper industry-houses (a project which sadly never came to fruition), I contended that there was not any species of refuse, animal or vegetable, that had not its value—in the shape of manure at the worst—and so, I argued, it ought to be among the objects of regulation to take care that not the smallest portion of such refuse should ever be thrown away in waste, but all should be preserved, collected, and employ’d. The corresponding principle I named the No-waste principle, or the Refuse-employing principle, or the Save-all principle. I was, as I have stated, thinking principally of animal and vegetable waste, but it is self-evidently also true that the recovery of raw materials from disassembled and degraded manufactured articles will tend to require less effort, be less costly, and to consume less energy, than the harvesting of those same raw materials from their natural sources.

Nevertheless, a man need hardly be in possession of a higher degree in some abstruse branch of the physical sciences to comprehend that a far greater saving could be obtained by the re-use of such articles without disassembly; and a saving greater still by refraining from their manufacture at the outset.

Yet we (that is to say, you—I rest complacent in my conviction that the ‘carbon footprint’ I generate in my present habitation provides scant matter for public concern)—you are ceaselessly exhorted by the agents of government, in the public prints and elsewhere, to ‘recycle’ your discarded goods, as if that action alone will save the world from destruction. Scarcely ever are you encouraged to desist from purchasing those goods in the first place. On the contrary, for every public notice or advertisement urging ‘recycling’, a dozen advocate the purchase of the latest HD this or Blu-ray that, a Go-Go Hamster or a suite of tubular-steel kitchen chairs, with the implicit promise that it will transform your lives immeasurably for the better.

This state of affairs could be changed with a few strokes of the legislator’s pen, to introduce fiscal measures to foster the repair, restitution and re-use of old articles, rather than the purchase of new. The commencement of the new calendar year has seen the restoration of the rates of Value Added Tax to their accustomed levels, and it is perhaps an appropriate moment to consider the anomaly of the tax raised upon building work. At present, V.A.T. is levied on repair and maintenance work to standing buildings at the standard rate of 17½ per Cent; while the erection of new buildings is exempt from the tax. The outcome of this distinction is that, not infrequently, the owner of a decayed building finds it cheaper to raze the entire structure to the ground and build afresh, rather than to take more modest—and less wasteful—measures to repair the existing fabric. A campaign has been waged for several years to urge the Government to address this imbalance, but it has, so far, fallen upon deaf ears. As rubble and refuse from demolition accounts for some 17 per Cent of the national quantum of waste, the case is of no little significance; but similar fiscal changes could, in theory, be framed to lengthen the life of almost every article of your quotidian existence, from the furniture in your homes, and the stoves that heat them, to the motor vehicles you drive, and the computers on which you labour.

Why, then, is such legislation not introduced? The answer is clear. It is because the adoption of such policies, although they would without doubt benefit the future environment, might harm the economy of the nation, by reducing the market for freshly manufactured articles. The danger then is that men and women would be thrown out of employment, to face indigence or destitution. Such an outcome is by no means inevitable: the experience of those nations, such as France and Spain, that have encouraged the maintenance and repair of buildings though fiscal measures is that employment, and tax yield, have in fact risen. However, the fear is there, and the matter now becomes one of sinister interest: no administration, no administration-in-waiting, that has its eye upon the next election—be it a few weeks or a few years into the future—would willingly put its name to any measure that might lead to such pernicious consequences. A token action to reduce waste is undertaken, through the clarion call to ‘recycle’; while a blind eye is turned to greater and more destructive evils, viz. unnecessary construction, manufacture and purchase.

Ah, but, you may say, at least a token action is better than none—at least recycling can do no harm and may do more than a little good. On the contrary, I reply, if a man is encouraged to believe that he has performed his public and environmental duty by placing a few discarded newspapers or wine-bottles into the correctly-coloured plastic sack, and so is enabled with a clear conscience to set off to the Brent Cross Shopping Centre to purchase a new suit of clothes or X-box for which he has no real need, a greater harm results than if he had buried his rubbish in a hole in his garden, but then remained guilt-ridden at home.

Death gives one a sense of perspective, and it seems to me that you must begin to take a longer-term view of the ills of your society. The economic recession through which the world is currently passing may, by reducing demand for manufactured articles, have done more to prolong life on earth than any amount of recycling; but, if the green shoots of recovery are indeed now beginning to be seen, their tendrils may yet grow to exert a stranglehold upon mankind. The time for half-measures is past, and ‘recycling’ is nothing if not a half-measure.

I remain, your ever laborious and devoted servant,

J.B.

Greetings, my friends.

I am delighted to hear that concerns akin to my own continue to animate the work of leading scholars in this University community. I refer to the public lecture given recently at the Darwin Lecture Theatre at UCL by the Dean of the Faculty of Laws at UCL, Dame Hazel Genn,

Dean Genn’s argument that the courts have a role to play in maintaining the well-being of all citizens almost as fundamental as that played by hospitals may have struck her auditors, none of them so much as a century old, as novel. Hers was a tune I had myself sung in my youth so many years ago.

I often compared enlightened legislators to physicians, and I was very well aware of the pains arising from the factitious delay, vexation and expense inseparable from procedure in the legal system. I demanded that the laws of England should be made clear, cognoscible, certain, consistent, complete, compact and available to every man who was to be made to abide by them. I foresaw a time when as a result of the improvement of legal procedure, the courts would be open without intermission rather as, with less salutary results, public houses have come to be today. I pointed out that the deaths and illnesses brought on by miserable conditions of incarceration were a needless and profligate squandering of human productive power. I showed that most parties brought into court had reason to regard the operations of ‘their’ legal system with a mixture of incomprehension and hopelessness.

It is perplexing to see one set of society’s institutions being expanded for the salutary purpose of serving health in all its forms, while another set creates or exacerbates health problems to an alarming degree in the pursuit of the equally useful end of justice. To Dame Hazel’s telling observations of the inhumane-ness of such ill-considered practices, I can but add that I have long since demonstrated their inexpediency. But will it suffice to demonstrate to your political masters the tragic costs of such deficiencies? I fear not. It hath been ever thus.

So my friends my battle cry is—law cognoscible, justice accessible.

J.B.

Greetings, my friends. I return to my native tongue, which, as I have long maintained, is far more suited to philosophical and scientific disquisitions than the tongue of our neighbours across the Channel.

I am a great friend to innovation and invention. I regarded myself as having a ‘genius for legislation’, and the notion of ‘genius’, after all, is rooted in that of invention. For much of my life I regarded myself as a projector—an entrepreneur of ideas. Yet nothing should be taken for granted, and so I would like to take this opportunity to consider whether innovation is, in and of itself, always a good thing.

I always loved music, being an enthusiastic violinist myself, so allow me to consider the modes by which you moderns listen to music. In my day there was, of course, no such thing as sound recording—all our music was, as you misexpressively say, ‘live’. You have a whole variety of mechanisms for storing and reproducing sound, including the vinyl record—2ozs of plastic with a hole in the middle, as one very fine rock’n’roll outfit (I can use flash language as well as the next sentient creature) intituled one of their Long Playing records—the tape, the Compact Disc, and the MP3 player. The question I pose is—is the innovation represented by digital recordings an improvement over the older analogue technology represented by the vinyl record?

I understand that there are many individuals who prefer the vinyl record to the Compact Disc and the MP3 player. They claim, quite simply, that the sound emanating from a vinyl record produces a more enjoyable listening experience. I am not in a position to offer a direct personal view on this, since I do not have space in my small box for the necessary equipment to listen to a vinyl record. I must admit, however, that I can appreciate the advantages of the small size of the Walkman CD player, and, even more so, of the iPod. I wish that I had had such wonderful devices when I used to exercise in St James’ Park. Listening to my favourite pieces from Handel would certainly have increased my pleasure as I undertook my ante jentacular circumgyration.

But I doubt that many of the people who listen to music on their iPods today listen to Handel. We might debate whether Bach, Handel, and Beethoven are more accomplished composers of music than the Beatles, Elton John, and Kanye West, or whether the members of the London Symphony Orchestra are more accomplished performers than the contestants on the X Factor. I understand that you good scientists have a variety of methods of analysing sound, but your instruments will never tell you whether a vinyl record makes a better recording than a Compact Disc, or whether Katherine Jenkins sings better than Tom Jones. May I remind you of a remark of mine which has gained some notoriety, namely that if it produces the same amount of pleasure, push-pin is as good as poetry. Hence, if you prefer to listen to hip-hop on iPod rather than Wagner on vinyl, that simply reflects your own sensibility, and you should expect neither praise nor blame because of your taste. My advice: be content in your own enjoyment.

Sound is as objective as any physical phenomena; our reaction to it could not be more subjective.

Until we communicate again, permit me to say—‘Rock On!’

J.B.

Blog d’un Anglois aux internautes du monde

La France est un pays surprenant. Je ne sais d ailleurs qui de la France ou des francois est reellement le plus surprenant. Capable du pire comme du meilleur, ayant oublié qu’ils ont combattu les privileges il y a de cela bien longtemps et s’idealisant encore de nos jours comme un pays ardent defenseur de ces absurdites sur des echasses que sont les droits naturels, il semble néanmoins que ce pays ait enfin commencé a apprendre de mes écrits.

Il apparait donc que les traductions d’Etienne Dumont aient rendu quelque justice a mon travail sur les Tactiques des assemblées politiques déliberantes et que, par consequent, mon francois n’etoit pas si mauvais.

J’ai en effet appris durant l une de mes longues promenades quotidiennes sur internet que des députes francois, trois députes socialistes – René Dosiere, Arnaud Montebourg et Jean-Jacques Urvoas – pour etre précis, ont decidé de rendre public les depenses liees à l’enveloppe de frais parlementaires qu’ils percoivent chaque mois (IRFM). Je tiens d ailleurs a signaler que la presse francoise auroit tout de meme pu me contacter ou que l’un de ces deputés auroient pu me remercier de l’avoir guidé dans son action. Mais je ne sais pas si je préfere ne pas être cité ou être tout simplement caricature comme c est le cas dans ce blog.

Fort heureusement, la reaction du Tribunal de l’Internet ne s est pas faite attendre puisque plus de cent quatre vingt douze commentaires debatent le contenu de cet article.

Sur cet exposé qui a retenu mon attention, revenons quelques instant et voyons ce dont il est question. Cette publication de l utilisation des dépenses parlementaires vise tres clairement un but de transparence. Comme le signale Jean-Jacques Urvoas: Je veux apporter ma pierre a la transparence necessaire

Voilà pour les faits. Mais que dire de la suite des evenemens ? Je ne peux que regretter que cette excellente démarche n ait pas été suivi par l’ensemble des deputés. Quant aux reactions des autres deputés, elles sont dommageables. Comme le signale cet article, les reactions sont pour le moins mitigees. Alors que des deputés rejettent totalement la transparence de leurs depenses, d’autres constatent que l on devroit avoir depasser cette question arguant que cela n’est qu’un « coup de pub » ou que « cela ne regarde pas forcément le concitoyen ! La transparence a ses limites. » Arretons la les declarations fallacieuses ! Comment se peut il qu une telle phrase soit prononcee par un deputé elu par le peuple et qui se doit de lui rendre des comptes ? A moins que cette personne n ait totalement oublié ce qu’est reellement sa fonction… Plus encore lorsque deux de ces mêmes deputés socialistes demandent lors du débat sur la reglementation de l’assemblée que les deputés presents en seance soient pointés, que leur répond-on ? « Et l etape d apres, c est le bracelet électronique ? » Mais pensent ils reeellement que c est en se soustrayant au regard du peuple, des citoyens qu ils agiront de la meilleure maniere possible ? Remarquons que la transparence de leurs depenses n en est que le premier pas vers une transparence plus generale de l’ensemble de l appareil etatique. Les deputés et de maniere general l’Etat doivent rendre des comptes aux citoyens.

L’intuition de ces deputés ne fait que renforcer ma certitude sur la necessité d etablir des regles a l egard de l organisation des debat parlementaires. Les deputés ne sont pas au dessus des lois, leur travail ne consiste pas a elaborer des lois sans aucun respect et sans aucune prise en compte des intérêts du peuple. Pour que l’on lutte contre cette tendance, il faut quelques mesures simples a mettre en place :

Premiere amelioration. Elaboration d’un code vestimentaire permettant d identifier les deputés presents dans l hemicycle.

Deuxieme amelioration. Tenue d’un registre de presence imprimé et mis a la disposition du public a la fin de chaque seance.

Troisieme amelioration. Enregistrement des débats qui seront ensuite mis a la disposition du public.

Quatrieme amelioration. Incorporation des citoyens dans le débat parlementaire par le biais des ecoles de legislation.

La question de la transparence depasse donc de loin le simple compte rendu des depenses de l enveloppe parlementaire. Si certains remettent en cause cette derniere, ce seroit cependant une erreur de la supprimer.

Il me semble que je vais ecrire des aujourd’hui un email au President francois afin de lui faire part de ma position. Il me faudroit d’ailleurs peut-etre pensé a une version moderne de mes Tactiques qui pourroient alors servir de guide a une reforme de la reglementation de l’Assemblée parlementaire francoise.

Je ne peux que me feliciter que certains deputés prennent maintenant conscience de la pertinence de mes travaux. Comme disent les francois : « Mieux vaut tard que jamais ».

Votre tres humble serviteur.

Greetings, my friends

I was struck recently by the tale of Mr Malcolm Darby, a retired architect of seventy years of age, domiciled in the county of Rutland. Some twelve months ago, Mr Darby had the misfortune to suffer what I am tempted to term an apoplexy, but which you will know better as a ‘stroke’. In my day, such a cerebrovascular accident would undoubtedly have resulted in severe incapacity for what remained of the victim’s life; but, such are the advances in medical treatments and care in the modern age, that Mr Darby has now been fortunate enough to recover to a considerable degree most of his faculties.

He has, however, encountered two unforeseen collateral consequences of his malady. The first is that he has lost the ability to speak or to understand French, a language in which he formerly enjoyed some fluency. Such a loss is curious, but, in terms of medical science, by no means unparalleled or inexplicable: it doubtless results from the abrupt disturbance in blood supply to those portions of the brain which control linguistic function. The second consequence is the more remarkable, and has confounded the medical authorities in the field. It seems that, since he was two years of age, Mr Darby has suffered from woefully poor eyesight, obliging him to wear very convex spectacles throughout the day. Following his recovery, however, he finds that his sight has been greatly improved, to such an extent that he is now able to do without spectacles for all purposes save reading the finest of print in the most ill-lit of rooms.

From a scientific perspective, the matter is intriguing, but unresolved, and I can say little more about it. The story prompts me, nonetheless, to consider the issue in terms of the felicific calculus. The question posed, then, is—which of the two is likely to promote the greater degree of happiness? the ability to see clearly, or the ability to speak French?

For Mr Darby (who has had but little choice in the matter) I cannot, of course, answer; but I can perhaps address the question in terms of my own happiness, both in esse and in prospect. For I had in my lifetime some experience of wrestling with both these aptitudes. I was able to read French, and to communicate in that tongue to what I fancy was a reasonable degree of comprehensibility, if not absolute fluency: what I spoke and wrote was, I suppose, a sort of dog-French. Indeed, I composed a number of philosophical tracts in French, although I have to confess that my confidence in their linguistic correctness was not entirely borne out by the reception which greeted them on the other side of the Channel. My friend and disciple M. Etienne Dumont of Geneva went so far as to advise me to desist from attempting to write in his native tongue, and I consequently came to rely instead upon his good offices as a translator. (One unsympathetic critic cruelly suggested that one of my translated works ‘contained too much nonsense for any Englishman to read, so he printed it in French’.) I am inclined to think, however, that M. Dumont greatly exaggerated the deficiencies in vocabulary and grammar of my French compositions—and, moreover, that the somewhat liberal translations which he published under my name evinced, on occasion, a tendency to contain rather too many of his ideas, and rather too few of my own.

As to eyesight, although my vision was clear enough in my younger days, my eyes grew dim with age, and I struggled, even with spectacles, to read the newspapers and tracts which provided me with the essential stimulation and material for the construction of my arguments—I struggled, indeed, to read my own hand, and had perforce to rely upon the eyes of my several amanuenses. My brother, Samuel, similarly suffered from failing vision in his later years, in his case the result of cataracts. At one point, I recall, he consulted Dr Joseph Forlenze (a renowned oculist of Italian birth, who practised in France), who assured Samuel that he would be able to couch (that is, to remove by surgery) the cataract in the worse-affected eye. My brother, however, chose to defer the operation until such time as the sight in his other eye had failed (these were, you must appreciate, the days before surgery could be performed under anaesthesia), and in the event he never underwent it.

I too found ways to surmount the obstacles to my eyesight, and, upon reflexion, I think that, even in exchange for the full restoration of my visual faculties, I would not willingly have surrendered the ability to communicate freely with our continental neighbours—to communicate, in fact, with much of the world, for in my day French was the lingua franca of international intercourse.

M. Dumont’s criticisms of my linguistic abilities continue to irk me, and I remain convinced that my mastery of the French language was not as defective as he would have had me believe. Perhaps in my next missive I shall address you, mes amis, in that tongue, and the linguists among you may judge for yourselves.

Your ever laborious and devoted servant,

J.B.

Greetings my friends.

I have been giving some thought, as might be expected of the advocate of utilitarianism, to the issue of happiness. According to recent research, gross domestic product (GDP)in Britain has all but doubled in the the last thirty-five years, whilst a ‘Life satisfaction index’, which purports to measure levels of happiness, has hardly shifted. The relative encrease in wealth since my own demise, some one hundred and seventy-seven years ago, must be significantly greater than that recorded by this research over a much shorter period, but I would not be surprised to find that people were not that much happier than they were in 1832. The question, over whatever time-scale, remains: if wealth is the source of happiness, why hasn’t encreasing wealth made us happier?

That wealth was a source of happiness I never doubted: of two individuals, he who possesses the most wealth will posses the greatest happiness, or chance of happiness. However, long before modern economics gave it a name, I identified diminishing marginal utility, and applied it to wealth. As a young man, I doubted that a King was five times happier than a poor labourer; towards the end of my life I doubted that multiplying an individual’s wealth ten thousand times would so much as double their happiness. Accordingly, I remain unsurprised by the stubborn immobility of the life satisfaction index in the face of encreasing wealth.

My contentment at seeing the developing body of empirical evidence for my own ‘axioms of mental pathology’ was cut short by the disquieting realization that the psychological foundations of my theory took it for granted that human beings typically wished to encrease their wealth, and that the acquisition of wealth delivered more, and more lasting, pleasure than its actual possession. While I had no doubt that the maximization of happiness, not of wealth, was the proper end of legislation, and while I appreciated that human beings desired many things other than wealth, I did think that growing prosperity brought true happiness. The important point was not so much to be rich, as to be_come_ rich_er_. The universal desire materially to improve one’s economic position, which I adopted without qualification from Adam Smith, did entail that encreasing wealth, or abundance, was a legitimate goal of state policy—albeit a lesser one than subsistence or security, and one best achieved through the latter, in the form of liberty under law. In my day, neither the potential exhaustion of the resources of the globe, nor calamitous climate change resulting from human actions undertaken in pursuit of growing wealth, entered the utility calculation.

I note that this situation has radically altered, and could wish that I were alive now, so that my genius could grapple with these issues. True, the first condition for the investment of effort or industry by individuals was hunger, but subsistence had natural limits, and once bellies were full, the natural aversion to the pains of labour could only be expected to be overcome by the anticipation of rewards in the shape of growing personal wealth, the hope of which was to my mind the greatest of all blessings. There was simply no limit to the bounds of wealth, meaning simply instruments of enjoyment, while the pursuit of happiness by means of the pursuit of wealth seemed to me a psychological datum of human beings. My own instinctive view was that a state or economy which self-consciously eschewed growth, what young John Mill would later go on to delineate in terms of some approbation as a ‘stationary state’, would be an unremittingly miserable place, in which economic life would be what modern theorists, I believe, call a zero-sum game, where every gain in wealth for one person entailed a loss of wealth for another, so that competition for ownership of resources threatened to become not so much ‘dog-eat-dog’ but ‘man-eat-man’. I may have been realistic about the actual benefits—as regards happiness—consequent upon the possession of wealth, but I remained convinced that the hope of encreasing one’s wealth, and thereby one’s happiness, was the engine that drove civilization forwards, even if that hope was in fact sustained by a misapprehension about the relation of wealth to happiness. Further thought needed here I think: perhaps I should email young Layard …

Yours ever,

J.B.

Greetings, my friends.

A few weeks ago, a gentleman who rejoices in the improbable name of Mr Paul J. J. Payack, and who is the founder of an organisation named the Global Language Monitor, based in Austin, Texas, in the Anglo-American United States, pronounced that the English language was about to gain its one millionth word. He established his prediction upon an intensive monitoring of writing published on the world-wide web, analysed through a complex of formulae and algorithms. Came the day—the 10th of June—and the ‘word’ was unveiled as ‘Web 2.0’. I was hardly alone in questioning whether this curiously unpleasant hybrid appellative qualified as a word at all. A Mr Benjamin Zimmer found Mr Payack’s method to be a ‘self-aggrandizing scam’; while Professor Geoffrey Nunberg, an authority on linguistics based at the University at Berkeley, California, opined that it was not so much ‘bad science as nonsense’. Another commentator judged the exercise ‘a load of old cobblers’, a somewhat baffling neologism in itself, but one which I understand to derive from a cobbler’s awl, and to mean nothing less than nonsense upon stilts. The consensus of informed opinion—and it is a view with which I would entirely concur—is that language is of its nature so entirely fluid, more especially in its less formal usages, that no absolute figure can, at any particular time, truly be placed upon the number of words which constitute its vocabulary.

Nevertheless, the incident prompts me to share with you some of my own ideas on English, and on language more generally, a topic which not infrequently claimed my attention in my lifetime, and which I strove to set upon a rational, logical and scientific footing.

Throughout my work of attempting to formulate, categorise, and codify complex notions and arguments, I frequently encountered the difficulty that the vocabulary at my disposal, the bequest of previous generations, was wholly inadequate to my purpose, and that it was necessary to introduce new coinages. Exceptions excepted, the more copious a language the better. ‘Aneunomothetic’; ‘phthisozoics’; ‘somatico-hedonistics’; ‘pneumatico-hedonistics’; ‘nooscopics’; ‘power-holder’; ‘chrestomathic’; ‘international’; ‘anthropurgic’; ‘physiurgic’; ‘living wage’; ‘locupletative’; ‘ante-jentacularization’; ‘Panopticon’; ‘friend-sickness’; ‘Ultramaria’; ‘Aristocratico-Monarchico-Anarchical’; ‘psychologization’; ‘pathematology’; all these, and many more, are invaluable words and phrases of my own invention. They are founded in every case upon sound etymological principles and precedents, and are, I trust, not inexpressive in their self-evident meanings. My regret is that, even after the passage of two centuries, the wider English-speaking world has yet to adopt several of them.

My thoughts on language, however, went far beyond mere copiousness. This is hardly the occasion for an exposition of my ideas in detail, but I attempted to analyse and expatiate upon the uses, operations and desirable properties of a language. I laid emphasis upon such matters as clearness, conciseness, facility of utterance, melodiousness, ornability, impressiveness, and dignity, and explained how these might best be achieved and rendered compatible with one another.

Regrettably, more pressing affairs claimed my attention, and so I was unable to bring my writings on these topics (as on so many others) to fruition within the course of my lifetime. They were, however, made public after my death—albeit in a somewhat defective form—and in the first half of the twentieth century they were taken up and further developed by a young disciple named Charles Kay Ogden. With much ingenuity and effort, but on a sound foundation of the principles I had expounded, he designed a simplified language as a lingua franca of international communication, naming it Basic English . (His invention is not, of course, to be confounded with BASIC, an erstwhile ‘language’ used in the programming of computers, with which some of my older readers are perhaps familiar.) Basic English reduced the number of verb-forms to just sixteen, and allowed a core vocabulary of just 850 words (a far cry from Mr Payack’s million!). With these, averred Mr Ogden, ‘everything may be said for all the purposes of everyday existence’.

Within a very few years, Basic English began to enjoy considerable success as a medium of essential communication in commercial circles, and as a foundation for a more sophisticated linguistic education. Later, during the Second World War, when military exigencies demanded rapid and unambiguous communication between individuals of multifarious nations, it attracted the attention of the Prime Minister, Mr Churchill. He appointed a committee of the Cabinet to address the subject, and propounded the adoption and promotion of Basic English as an instrument of government policy.

In pursuit of this goal, which remained upon the carpet at the war’s end, Mr Ogden was in 1946 asked to assign his copyright in the language to the Crown, and was offered a monetary sum by way of compensation. In a gracious acknowledgement of my own role as the ultimate progenitor of his scheme, the figure was settled at £23,000, the very sum which I had been paid in 1813 by the administration of the day in compensation for its failure to adopt my plans for a Panopticon prison.

Although Basic English is now largely forgotten within Europe, it continues to underlie much teaching of the English language in China, Japan, and elsewhere in the far East. I am pleased to think that, in this age of global intercourse and polyglot communities, so much of my work remains at the heart of communication between individuals.

Your ever laborious and devoted servant,

J.B.

Greetings my friends.

I hear that Parliament, some time ago, debated the Human Fertilization and Embryology Bill and decided not to reduce the time limit for abortion from 24 weeks to 20 weeks. I see that this Bill covers other highly contentious issues, but in this particular communication I wish to discuss the question of dealing with unwanted children. This was an issue upon which I wrote but, as with much of my work, never published. Why never published? Well, I was persuaded by my friends that my views, utterly rational and wholly unsentimental as they are, would outrage the sensibilities of the religious and well-meaning people of my day, and would, quite possibly, lead to my imprisonment if broadcast widely. These views, I dare say, will still now, in the twenty-first century, be viewed by many with horror.

At issue, it is said, is the right of the child versus the right of the mother to control her own body. I, however, insist that speaking the language of rights is unhelpful, because it introduces to the arena of law-making ideas from religion and metaphysics, and these, most emphatically, have no place in legislation.

In my time abortion was a dangerous affair, procured by dangerous potions or self-inflicted violence, such as women throwing themselves downstairs. There were no secure medical techniques as there are now. Unwanted pregnancies were often dealt with by simply abandoning the infant on the street or the ’dunghill’—the annual number of such foundling children in London was estimated at 800 in 1740—or, in effect, infanticide. I was prepared to advocate infanticide, and I will tell you why. All social sympathy was directed towards the new-born child, whereas, from a utilitarian point of view, it was the mother who should receive it. To the physical pains of parturition was added in her case the social stigma imposed on the mother of a bastard. If she spared the child, the popular sanction would destroy her reputation utterly, and pile contempt and misery upon her for the rest of her days. In contrast, the new-born infant lacked any sense of self: it had no anticipation of the future, no reflection on the past. If it survived, the exclusion of its mother from the good offices of the community held out only the prospect of a short life in which pain predominated massively over pleasure. The termination of such a life might be achieved quickly and painlessly, with the collateral benefit of preserving the mother from the loss of her good name. A proper application of sympathy would indicate that it is more conducive to the general happiness to destroy the baby than the mother.

What I contend is, that it is the attitude towards the unmarried mother that is at fault. Of course, the modern view of bastardy is, happily, less censorious that it was in my time. However, it appears to me that the issues are linked through the dangerous and irrational notion of sin, with its equally dangerous and irrational attendant, the notion of God-given, and thus absolute, moral principles. The evils produced by the elevation of personal tastes into prohibitions on the actions of persons with different tastes, in sex, and in many other areas of life not meet for the intervention of penal law, are legion. I had hoped that progress towards the sober calculation of costs and benefits might have banished theological name-calling from policy debates by now, but I always recognized that social attitudes are resistant to change.

In the face of a continuation of a punitive attitude to the fact of bastardy, I would accommodate both mothers and offspring in my projected poor panopticons, where each mother would give suck to another child in addition to her own, and where all inhabitants would be usefully employed. The economic prospects of bastard children could thus be improved beyond recognition, and their mothers protected from the temptation to commit crime in order to secure subsistence for themselves.

I may return to this theme in the future, both because the question of the role of law in regulating sexual affairs, and thereby population, was one to which I devoted considerable time, and because I hear that observers predict that this debate will be revisited if the Conservatives win the next general election. Anti-abortionists think they will have a better chance of winning a majority in such circumstances, which would be a most retrograde step in my view.

Your ever laborious and devoted Servant

J.B.