Heroes Not Zombies

We humans have invented incredible cultural tools which help us to make sense of the world, to bring about changes, to create connections, and to express ourselves. Alphabets, language, words, symbols and art are some of the ones I’ve written about over the last few days, but there is another class of cultural tool entirely – numbers.

We love to make measurements. Well, some of us love it more than others I suspect, but how often do you hear questions such as “How big is it?” “How heavy is it?” “How long is it?” and so on…..?

I can see the point of favouring measurements when it comes to building and maintaining houses and machines, but I find them partial, or even distracting once we try to apply them to non-physical, invisible phenomena…..like subjective experience, qualities and time.

This photo is of an astonishingly beautiful, elaborate clock. Have you ever stopped to wonder about this idea of measuring time? It’s a complete invention because time isn’t a phenomenon which can be measured. We arbitrarily agreed to divide the day into small pieces, 24 hours, each of 60 minutes, which each has 60 seconds. But why those figures? Why those “units of time”? Other creatures deal with time without making measurements which produce figures. They deal with the natural periods of time, from sunrise to sunset, sunset to sunrise, from one solstice to another, from one equinox to another. They live according to the rhythms of Nature’s cycles and the rotations of the Earth, both on its own axis, and in its orbit around the Sun. They live according to the rhythms of the Life in each of their cells. We do too, but we stand apart from all that, or at least we try to, and we impose a human invention instead – measured time.

The thing about measured time is it can’t tell you anything about the quality of the time. It can’t tell you the difference between a “good time” and a “bad time”. It can’t tell you about the “best time of my life” or the “worst time of my life”. It can’t tell you about the experience of “passing the time”, “wasting time”, or “saving time”. It’s not enough to measure the number of minutes a consultation lasts, you have to know what the doctor and patient are doing and experiencing during that consultation.

I heard a story once. It was told to me by a dentist who was running a Facial Pain Clinic. He said he’d taken the clinic over from the colleague who had created it, once that colleague retired. He told me about his first day in the clinic. When the first patient came in, he introduced himself, asked the patient how they were and they replied “14”. He was a bit puzzled but let it pass and carried on with the rest of the consultation. The next patient did the same strange thing, telling him “9” before telling him anything else. When it happened with the third patient he asked the nursing staff if they knew what was going on. Oh, yes, he was told, the previous colleague had invented a numerical scale of pain severity, from 0 to 20. He trained all the patients to tell him what number they were applying to their level of pain each time they came for a check up. He was a pretty intimidating and demanding man and the nurse said that if a patient started by telling them what had been happening in their life since the last visit, he’d say “Stop! I want the next thing to come out of your mouth to be a number!” They all learned to comply!

Well there’s a whole movement within Medicine to try to quantify qualitative phenomena – ie symptoms, like pain, dizziness, nausea and so on, symptoms which can’t be “seen” or “measured” in any other way.

What do you think of that?

Both of these examples, the measurement of time, and the measurement of pain, highlight an important division in our values – do we pay more attention to numbers, to what can be measured, or to which we can invent and apply artificial measures? Or do we pay more attention to the lived experience? That is, do we favour the quantitative over the qualitative or vice versa?

I find some people fall into the former camp, whilst others fall into the latter. You know what I’m going to say, don’t you? “And not or”! I think both can be helpful. It depends on context. If we are dealing with machines, I can see that the quantitative approach is really helpful…..if we are dealing with human beings…..not so much! By that, I don’t mean there is no point in measuring somebody’s blood pressure, checking their haemoglobin levels, etc. I just mean the numbers are never enough. They always, and, yes, I believe that’s the right word, always, need to be put into the context of this individual, unique human being’s life……and we do that by paying attention to the qualitative.