One of my undergraduate philosophy professors had a note pinned to the lintel of her door saying, “quantification is the tool of the oppressor.” I was struck by this at the time, as I had recently read René Guénon’s The Reign of Quantity and the Signs of the Times, one of the major theses of which is that the modern world is characterized by the domination of quantity and that this has had a radically detrimental influence upon the spiritual life of humanity. For Guénon, the modern mind is one in which form—what a thing is, its essence—has been increasingly replaced by quantity. Whereas form is the dynamic unity of a thing, an intelligible reality participating in being, quantity stands on the side of pure potentiality as sheer number without quality; without form, quantity is empty, for a mere numerical unit is unqualified, not yet truly existent. Pure quantity hovers over an existential abyss, not quite nothingness but not any particular thing.
Quantity is closely related to the concept of “matter,” understood as pure potentiality, that goes back to Aristotle and through him into much subsequent philosophical thought in numerous traditions. Simply put, matter, pure potentiality, is contrasted to “act,” or form. These are the two poles of change, and every being that changes consists of act, what it currently is, and potency, what it may become. All beings capable of change are composed of matter and form, and the degree to which a being has realized (or participated in) its form is its act, while the degree to which a form has not been realized is that being’s potency.
It is not hard to see the “reign of quantity” when considering the modern world. From the mass production of increasingly meaningless and useless products to modern ideologies idolizing the individual to the abstract numerical potentiality that constitutes currency, quantity is everywhere and form appears to be ever more buried or explained away as an epiphenomenon arising from a collection of homogenous units. Upon observing the note on my professor’s door, then, I was inclined to agree.
I was reminded of this note recently by an article by L. M. Sacasas (whose Substack, The Convivial Society, I highly recommend) in which he outlines the difference between databases and narrative and how the capacity of human beings to coherently form the latter is disrupted by the dominance of the former. To briefly summarize, Sacasas argues that databases represent fields of possibility, placeholders for trajectories of choices that remain open but indeterminate, whereas narratives represent the collapse of these possibilities into a set course through which the mind may traverse, achieving understanding:
In other words, when you read a narrative, for example, you are encountering the product of a series of choices that have already been made for you by the author out of a myriad of possibilities from the database of language. The countless other choices that were possible are present only to the imagination. You see the words the author chose, not the ones she could’ve chosen. You see the path marked out for you as a reader, not the multiple paths that were rejected. When you encounter a database, however, you see the opposite. You see the field of possibility and any number of paths through the database remain hypothetical and potential.
I was particularly struck by this because it seemed to me that the matter-form distinction tracks neatly onto the dichotomy of databases and narratives described in Sacasas’s article. Narrative is the form, the structuring principle that organizes the chaos of potentiality, actualizing it into a coherent whole; data, on the other hand, represents the non-actualized quantity of possibilities. This is of course an analogical similarity, as the units in a database are units of something, but they are nevertheless in a state of potentiality relative to concrete narratives, by which they are organized.
It is worth noting that narrative, like form, has a limiting element. In order to be anything at all, a narrative must select which points of data to include to the exclusion of others. Likewise, in order to be what it is, a being must exclude that which it is not; certain characteristics must be excluded from possibility. To fail to do so is to be denatured by the foreign, to be deformed in a state of failed actualization. In terms of narrative, a story that tries to include too much fails to be a story. Taken too far, it fails to be coherent at all, a mere listing of incongruous elements without any ordering principle. It sinks, in short, into the morass of potency that constitutes a database, into a plethora of unconnected and meaningless points of information—pure quantity.
Of course, this does not make data inherently evil, as a certain brand of Platonist may be tempted to suppose (although metaphysically speaking it arguably makes it less good). Rather, it means that it is in need of structure. Yet in a world overrun by data, by quantity, there is a risk of failing to order the information one is presented with or of falling prey to narratives purposely distorting information in order to gain influence. We see this in the primal chaos of data that constitutes so much digital media these days, and we are too often lost in this chaos without any sure footing.
Moreover, the reduction of qualitative realities to pure data opens the door to rampant ethical violations. For there can be no moral status of quantity as such. In order to be good, and thus deserving of moral respect, a being must be something rather than a mere unit. The more something is reduced to pure quantity, the easier it becomes to justify violence or oppression in relation to it. If a creature is understood purely in terms of data, there is no reason not to abuse it, to twist and mold it as one sees fit. It is, after all, primarily potentiality, pure unit that can be harnessed as a tool or disposed of with impunity. It is no coincidence that the lives employed and lost in the machinations of warfare are so often referred to in terms of statistics or that the inmates of concentration camps are so often assigned numbers by which they become known. If one hears the story of an individual life and its tragic end, that tragedy is understood in its depths because the person is known; the kind of being that suffered is understood. When one deals with data, there is a risk of obscuring the person (or the animal, or the ecosystem, or what have you).
It is for this reason that we should be wary of any technology that deals primarily in quantity and that seeks to reduce the world to numerical data. It should be obvious that much digital media does precisely this, although it also provides opportunities for narrative. The risks remain, however, and the opportunities for dehumanization are immense. I believe this is especially the case with biometric technology, with tools (such as the Fitbit) that track physiological events and translate them into numerical data to be viewed by the user. On the one hand, the users of such devices are themselves the key by which this information can be organized and brought into accordance with a meaningful principle. One can understand one’s own physiological data as representing parts of a narrative, as details of a story that one is living and that can provide information to navigate that story. There is, however, a danger that we shall come to view ourselves and others through the lens of the data by which these devices speak. If we are not careful, we may become accustomed to seeing human beings as conglomerations of units, as statistical quantities, and thus forget the dignity of persons and open ourselves to inhuman behaviors and attitudes. Such has already happened too frequently in the relations between members of humanity and between humanity and the natural world.
I believe that this danger is present with all forms of digital technology. Of course, there are other dangers involved as well. The insanity of much online discourse and the rampant spreading of conspiracy theories may be attributable to the overwhelming quantity of information presented to us on a daily basis. Drowning in this sea, people grasp at narratives that make sense of the terrifying array of information that they cannot interpret and so become open to unreliable and malicious stories. Such a situation may also serve those in power who wish to confuse the masses and their enemies by inundating them with data that hides the truth and obscures the narrative by which reality has actually unfolded, or simply by overwhelming otherwise perspicacious minds by an overwhelming amount of data.
Yet most terrifying of all is the risk that we shall lose our grip on our humanity, on the inner life and relationships that constitute creation. For if we fail to see, to really see, the other as a living whole, a mystery to be known, experienced, and respected, rather than as a conglomeration of units to be violated or used, than we have sunk beyond the realms of sleep into an abyss, and the world will descend with us. For the world itself may in its way come to resemble a database: no relation, no connection, only the brute isolation of increasingly homogenous (because they are increasingly unqualified) units and the destruction of meaning. Such worlds arise regularly throughout history in the sinking of any order into the mixing wastes of potentiality, the vast swirling of units unconnected and in disharmony with each other. In forgetting our humanity, in believing only in quantity, we forget what we are, both to ourselves and to each other, and become the slaves of forces that would use us as resources. My professor was right: quantification is indeed the tool of the oppressor.