CHAIRMAN: Will the meeting come to order, please. Our subject today is panetics and its relationship, if any, to the l9th century English philosopher--or perhaps I should say political movement--known as Utilitarianism. Of course, Dr. Siu, the chairman of our International Society for Panetics, would normally be in charge here, but he heard of my interest in Jeremy Bentham, James Mill, John Stuart Mill and the others, and wished to have their views aired so that his difference with them, such as it is, might be clarified.

In the introduction to his third volume on panetics, Siu says this:

"Jeremy Bentham's utilitarianism of the late 18th century called for 'the greatest happiness of the greatest number' as the primary guideline for ethical individual and governmental action in the West. An old Sanskrit proverb suggests another criterion, i. e., 'Non-injury is the highest duty.' The minimizing of suffering has never really taken hold in actual practice on a national scale, East or West. As a result, suffering abounded and abounds."

With Dr. Siu's blessing I have therefore called this informal meeting. I am no authority on utilitarians, but I have a staunch Benthamite (Mr. B) at my right hand who professes to be. We are joined by a different kind of authority, an academic Cynic who has always thought of utilitarianism as just another l9th century pie-in-the-sky phenomenon, and who will doubtless enjoy being critical. Also present is our lawyer for today, a sensible feminist (Ms. L) who may or may not have a complaint or two. Finally there is an odd fellow at the end of the table who might be described as our representative Sufferer, or incurable inhabitant of the world of pain. He has a tendency to read poems. For what follows, I beg the indulgence of those of you not at the table, but listening.

SUFFERER: Mr. Chairman, since you mentioned my poetry-reading vice, I should like to offer up, as a starter, a sufferer poem I have always liked by Kenneth Fearing, called “M. D."

We cough. We shiver. We have

seizures of pain, and weakness.

Often there is blood.

We are not as strong as we thought

ourselves to be.

Doctor, we urge you, help us--

Our throats are simply throats, not as

good as the least of our amplifiers

made of bright and lasting steel,

Our minds are not as swift and sure as

the machines that add, subtract,

divide in the twinkling of an eye,

Our eyes themselves are subject to

strange fatigues, less discerning

than the many magic eyes that we

have made, There is a certain amount of fear that

we ourselves shall never be able to

compete--

Yes, it is the fear. And also the blood.

Always the blood.

No, it is the muscles. Or something

in the bones. Perhaps in the very

heart itself.

If you could see us in the morning,

shivering in that dread--

Understanding death, but knowing

something worse than death is

there, present in the blood.

Or in the unsteady tendons. Or is it

the nerves? The joints.

The teeth. The hair. The clumsy

limbs. Perhaps the soul--

We have had so much contact with

one another, each has been so ofen

exposed to each,

The dangers of this contamination are

so very great, so terrible--

O Doctor, Doctor, Doctor--

CHAIRMAN: Thank you, sir. Now if I may call upon my Benthamite friend for a few words--Mr. B, tell us a little bit--not very much!--about Jeremy Bentham, 1748-1832.

MR. B: Bentham, as you know, is commonly listed in encyclopedias as the founder of Utilitarianism, a theory based upon the proposition that “the greatest happiness of the greatest number is the fundamental and self-evident principle of morality." From that proposition emerged, though perhaps with somewhat less clarity, his proposition that pain is the opposite of pleasure, and therefore logically (but not always convincingly) immoral. Bentham was a discriminating admirer of opposites. From the age of perhaps four he was a master logician who took on traditional authorities in the law--particularly Blackstone--and found their common-law principles littered with what he thought to be unjust fallacies. For many years he assaulted the English Parliament with proposals to make sense--logical, rational, scientific sense--of its legislative muddles. His pleasure-pain principle underlay all his proposals--for he was nothing if not orderly--and he was always in search of ways to regularize the principle. The pain element in his philosophy is clearly the equivalent of suffering in panetics; and he also had statistical approaches to pleasure and pain that are roughly parallel to the dukkhas described by Dr. Siu.

CHAIRMAN: I follow you, Mr. B, with respect to the connection between pain and suffering--surely pain encompasses suffering, suffering encompasses pain--but before we get to the dukkhas, I wish you would elaborate on Bentham's procedure for rendering the opposition between pleasure and pain in a logical manner. Was he statistically logical on this point?

MR. B: Yes and no. He insisted that both pleasure and pain were subjective phenomena, and admitted that nothing subjective is readily quantifiable. Yet he had many many distinct categories for the subjective--kinds of pleasure, kinds of pain--surely a preliminary step to quantification. I have his very words on this subject in my briefcase.

CYNIC: I confess that I am getting a headache. Are you sure that you need to open your briefcase?

MS. L: I am not disturbed by your briefcase, Mr. B, but as yet I cannot foresee the connection you are planning to make between this subjective theory about pleasure and pain, and any possible legislation. I have always understood that Bentham and the Utilitarians were political philosophers, hence concerned with legislative action.

MR. B: I sympathize with your concern, Ms. L, and will try to come to earth after setting forth his categories. They are to be found in his INTRODUCTION TO THE PRINCIPLES OF MORALS AND LEGISLATION, a title that in itself suggests his concern for tying theory to practice. Here, condensed, are Bentham's divisions. First, pleasure. “The several simple pleasures of which human nature is susceptible seem to be as follows: the pleasures of sense ... wealth ... skill ... amity ... a good name ... power ... piety ... benevolence ... malevolence ... memory... imagination ... expectation ... association ... [and] relief." And now, pain. “The several simple pains seem to be as follows: the pains of privation ... the senses ... awkwardnass ... enmity ... an ill name ... piety ... benevolence ... malevolence ... memory ... imagination ... expectation ... [and] association.” As you may imagine, these categories led Bentham to divide into parts, with equal persistence, sense, wealth, skill and so on. I will not trouble you here with all those divisions but would have you note that wealth, for example, as a pleasure seems to be balanced against privation as a pain, while malevolence and benevolence are both given an opportunity to produce both pleasure and pain. Of this anomaly I can only say that my own experience confirms Bentham here. He was, though a logician, a student of human nature, and he ...

CYNIC: I agree that he was a student. How good a student is a matter of dispute. I have been reading, and recommend, a three-volume work on the Utilitarians by the great English biographer, Leslie Stephens, and in it I found mentioned various quirks in Bentham's personality that for me simply disqualify him as a student of human nature. For example, Stephen remarks that he “was never guilty of a single act of intemperance"--which should give him an "F” on the spot. Then he too he seemed to favor animals over people in his reclusive life; cats were his favorites, but he once possessed a “beautiful pig," and even "encouraged mice to play in his study." Furthermore--and this aspect of his character should give our poetic sufferer even more to suffer--he had no feeling at all for poetry. He once compared it to prose as follows: "Prose is when all lines except the last go on to the margin. Poetry is when some of them fall short of it." I submit, gentlemen, and Ms. L, that this distinction is not a sign of authority we should suffer the presence of. As an alternative, I point to the humanity displayed in the pleasant poem that was read to us. There the pains being suffered were not analyzed and crudely distinguished, but made into a wholeness of suffering, surely the usual way of suffering. I also point to how the poem's sufferers pled for help from a doctor, any doctor. Not that any doctor could be expected to help--the poem is not aimed at help--but at least any doctor, except perhaps Bentham if he had been one, would have too much knowledge of biology in his head to credit any effort to slice up a human organism's suffering in neat pieces.

Mr. B: I understand your complaint, Mr. C, but must repeat that Bentham acknowledged the subjectivity of pleasure and pain. His way of measuring them reached for precision only in relation to acts producing them. These he offered up details, even quantitative details. Thus he went after the pleasure of owning property by enumerating various pleasures a property owner might derive from using his property. He did not then proceed, I admit, to describe property uses responsible for pain in others. He was no socialist; he made or tried to make money at some of his pleasure-pain schemes. Hence to illustrate actions productive of pain he switched over from property ownership to criminal activity--he called it mischievous activity--and to pauperism, which could be described--but he did not so describe it--as not owning property. In general his solution for the suffering caused by both criminality and pauperism was to put the offenders to work!

Cynic: I thank you for making a point I was about to make about Bentham's favorite early-life scheme, the devising of a Panopticon--which has no connection at all with panetics. Leslie Stephen reports a cynical view of the Panopticon; it was a "mill for grinding rogues honest, and idle men industrious." At one time Bentharn thought, for instance, that convicts might be useful in replacing steam. His Panopticon seems to have resembled in theory a utopian socialist community of the 19th century variety--except that it was not socialist. I believe that no Panopticon ever achieved full steam ahead!

Ms. L: I am reminded of a rural Calvinist creed accepted by such Scotch thinkers as Carlyle, that “whosoever is not working is begging or stealing." What strikes me is that with pauperism and criminality Bentham was at least able to lay out specific schemes for his theories, since in those fields he had a body of law to contend with.

Mr. B: Exactly. And it was a body for which he had only contempt. As Stephen points out, English traditional or cornmon law was--and for that matter still is in many ways--lacking in syrnmetry and scientific precision, having not principles, but precedents behind it, precedents that were a muddle, a muddle productive of muddled, unpredictable judicial decisions usually made (as Bentham liked to say) by muddled and self-interested judges. Bentham became in effect a self-appointed codifier for reasonable criminal and pauper legislation, in a legislative climate well summed by Stephen:

The rough classification of crimes into felony and misdemeanor, and the strange technical rules about 'benefit of clergy’, dating back to the struggles of Henry II and Becket, remained like ultimate categories of thought. When the growth of social conditions led to new temptations or the appearance of a new criminal class, and particular varieties of crime became conspicuous, the only remedy was to DECLARE that some offense SHOULD BE felony without 'benefit of clergy,' and therefore punishable by death. By unsystematic and spasmodic legislation the criminal law became so savage as to shock every man of common humanity."

Confronted with such conditions Bentham's rationalism about "justice", together with a good deal of political drumbeating, became much talked about, and...

Ms. L: But could you describe the logic by which Bentham placed his pleasure/pain theory ABOVE all this unjust justice?

Mr. B: As Stephen puts it, Bentham started by being annoyed with the authors of the “Federalist Papers” (Hamilton, Madison, and Jay) for saying that justice was the end of government. Not so, said Bentham, that which produces the maximum of happiness is the end of government. Justice is the means, not the end.

Ms. L: A MAXIMUM of happiness? There and elsewhere Bentham is certainly setting forth happiness as a positive entity, not just the absence of pain. But I wonder how its positiveness might be described.

Cynic: I remember reading somewhere that happiness is a bluebird. I am not joking. . .

Ms. L: What would you do with the author of that remark if you knew him?

Cynic: I think it was a female, a saint. I would ask her to tell me how she knew that happiness was a bluebird. And of course she would replay that she did not have to know how she knew, she just knew that there it was, on a branch. It was primal beauty, energy, what not, something to be taken for granted, a gift of God. My problem with such a given is that I keep wondering if the bluebird or the bluebird-observer is the one with the happiness.

Ms. L: Does it matter? For either it is a given, and as a given , it is not something that has a maximum and minimum. It is just there, an organic absolute, until somebody comes along and starts depriving it of some of its essence. ln saying this I am not giving you a saint’s view, but straight romantic Wordsworth. Wordsworth has children as his equivalent for bluebirds--God is with them though we know it not--but my point is that Bentham seems not to have been either a saint or Wordsworth.

Mr. B: You are quite right. He had a curious relativity theory built into his idea of happiness, and it does distinguish his views from those of saints and Wordsworth’s. It also distinguishes his views, though erratically, from the Eastern view cited by Dr. Siu as his base for panetics: “non-injury is the highest duty." For example, Bentham seems to agree with noninjury as the highest duty when he says, "the general object of all laws is to prevent mischief;" but then he wildly adds, "that is to say, when it is worthwhile." What do we do with that qualification?

Cynic: My headache worsens.

Mr. B: I'll answer my own question--without bringing in details of what is "worthwhile"--by saying that his whole intellectual inheritance told him that he could not assert a positive without finding a negative to accompany it. I'd say he was committed, by some sort of cultural osmosis, to a balancing act invented by the Greeks when they birthed Socrates, dialectic, rhetoric, all the agonic modes. Bentham kept struggling to be amoral but he couldn't get away from good and bad. All he could do to look amoral was to describe good and bad as utilitarian rather than moral opposites. The effort sometimes made him a relativist of ridiculous precisions. Here is a sample:

“Take an account of the number of persons whose interests appear to be concerned; and repeat the above process with respect to each. Sum up the numbers expressive of the degrees of good tendency, which the act has, with respect to each individual, in regard to whom the tendency of it is good upon the whole: do this again with respect to each individual in regard to whom the tendency is good on the whole: do this again with respect to each individual, in regard to whom the tendency of it is bad upon the whole. Take the balance; which, if on the side of pleasure, will give the general good tendency of the act, with respect to the total number of individuals concerned; if on the side of pain, the general evil tendency, with respect to the same community."

Ms. L: I now see, and all too clearly, the Bentham drift, and am amazed at how his prose suddenly sounds like the God awful legal prose that keeps piling up in my own office in this last decade of the 20th century. It is here that I, though a female, begin to suffer with our Cynic. When I first went into the law I knew the extent to which the law had been dominated by males since the beginning, but I did not understand the ways and means of dominance, other than physical dominance: keeping the female out of the courts and in the nursery and kitchen. But Bentham's syntactical precisions here are among the ways and means I have come to understand; they are false precisions rendered authoritative by balancings at least as confusing as those to be found in the common-law tomes to which he objected.

Cynic: Hear! Hear! A Daniel come to judgment.

Ms. L: You cheer prematurely, Mr. Cynic. Your cynicism is another male characteristic I have grown to be depressed by. And from what I have now learned about Bentham I would say that he was not--except perhaps in relation to poetry--a cynic. He was reaching for reforms badly needed in corrupt male legislation, and I respect him for that. I just shudder when I hear his balanced clauses.

Chairman: Ahem. Please, let us put aside these small differences among committee members. What I would like to know at this point is where Bentham and Dr. Siu differ.

Mr. B: The difference is not easy to describe, since at first glance it seems to be largely an historical difference, a difference resulting from cultural changes over nearly two centuries. Looked at in this way, their likenesses are perhaps more striking than their differences, especially in their ways of measuring pain. Bentham's units of measurement foreshadow Dr. Siu's dukkhas. Bentham tried to establish a code of pain “values” so that in criminal law, if someone seeking pleasure were accused of causing someone else's pain, the pain could be quantified. He went at it pretty much as Dr. Siu does, by first considering the value of one unit of pain in one person. He noted that it would be "greater or less according to the four following circumstances: ( 1 ) its intensity; (2) its duration; (3) its certainty or uncertainty; and (4) its propinquity or remoteness." He then added a couple of other “circumstances" that I will not trouble you with, so that ...

Cynic: Ihank you for being so considerate.

Mr. B: ... so that he could arrive at his next step, which was literally to sum up what his four (or six) considerations amounted to for one pain recipient. Then he was ready to proceed to other pain recipients and sum up their units. Dr. Siu has done roughly the same thing with his dukkhas, but more precisely. He defines a dukkha as a "quantitative unit of suffering, equivalent to that endured by one person experiencing one intensity unit on a scale of nine for one day," Now Dr. Siu's unit distinctions, though phrased informally, are backed up by steady references to modern experiments in psychology, as of course Bentham's could not have been, but it seems to me that essentially Bentham and he are at one in their method of quantification. Bentham would have liked dukkhas.

Chairman: But their difference, Mr.B, their difference.

Mr. B: I would say that Bentham's struggles in balancing happiness and pain are not of interest to Dr. Siu. Those struggles sometimes seem comic to us, for as a psychologist Bentham was a true primitive, but they made him a true relativist, whereas Dr. Siu is an absolutist.

Chairman: What? Please explain yourself, sir. I think it is quite clear Dr. Siu's learned discourses on panetics that he approaches the subject before us in a thoroughly scientific manner.

Mr. B: Yes, and scientists have their absolutes, Mr. Chairman. And our culture's philosophers, politicians and justices have their absolutes, too. Thus our concepts of civil rights and human rights are absolutes--or at least a reaching for them, a denying that they are rights to be recognized only when it is “worthwhile" to do so. These concepts are not, as concepts, utilitarian, though of course in practice they are treated with plenty of relativity. But Bentham, theorist that he was, included worthwhileness as part of his theory. I am not approving or disapproving.

Cynic: At this point I would like to do some approving. And disapproving. I would like to approve Bentham after all, and to worry about Dr. Siu's fixities. I would have nothing against his dukkhas if they were to be placed in the hands of quantifiers like Dr. Siu himself, but I look around me at the quantifiers now at work among us, and all I can think of is how, in their hands, dukkhas might be, could be, would be misused--and therefore how important Bentham's cautionary approach is. Would the use of dukkhas by these s.o.b.'s be worthwhile? Mostly it would be deadly. Our culture is being destroyed before our eyes by quantifiers. Humanity has never before been so beset with detailed measurements of itself--head to toe, outside and inside, waking and sleeping. The quantifiers have become a plague among us from which there seems no escape--because they are so strong, healthy, and inexorably PRESENT. On what does “pc” depend? Where do our tastes in art, literature, clothes, cars, political candidates and headache pills come from? Who among us can say that he or she has not been quantified somehow since yesterday noon? If we are to quantify suffering we should certainly quantify how much suffering is inflicted upon us by quantifiers. And the most insufferable form of the infliction is not the quantifying itself but the arrogance of the quantifiers. Their game is to tell us what we think and then quantify our thought. They provide us with our major concerns, our opinions, our votes, our jargon, our mouthwash, and then they tell us what they have discovered about us. Our quantification climate is extraordinary. Our whole cultural weather is in the hands of quantitatively oriented perception manipulators.

Now I ask you, should weather be in any group's hands? Surely not. And surely, surely not in the hands of greedy manipulators. What do these manipulators manipulate for?--Power, my friends, power, power: their quantified bottom line.

Dr. Siu is himself a critic and an angry one, of the power people who have inflicted suffering on humanity. In his panetics trilogy he races right through most of the earth's great cultures from 8000 B. C. up to our own time, describing the powerful persons and forces of each culture that have inflicted suffering upon humanity; but in what I have read by him he has not dealt with the quantifiers--villains I am talking about. I do think they have to be reckoned with in any quantification theory, since they now dominate most of our sciences, professions, disciplines. My depressing impression of them--subject of course to scientific quantification:--is that Dr. Siu's pleasant dukkhas would rapidly become, in their hands, a major mechanism for INFLICTING suffering. If amoral Jeremy Bentham had not been on our agenda today, I might even now venture to call their machinations evil.

Chairman: That was very eloquent, sir, for a cynic. Are you sure you are not an idealist in disguise?

Cynic: No comment.

Mr. B: Let me diversify this quiet, objective discussion for a moment by mentioning another current psychological actively for our cynic to “worry” about. Perhaps he will see evil in it that I do not. Many psychologists are now searching out ways to define with precision the nature of creativity. One way is historical or anthropologica1, with researchers moving from monkey to primitive man to you and me with all their methodical social science weapons. Another way is to call in poets and their unmethodical kind, in order to pick up a few clues from living and chattering self-styled creators about the PROCESS of creation, as the creators see it from the inside. I sat in on such a venture two years ago, and watched the contenders move from monkeys to poets effortlessly. For though we did not have monkeys on our committee to argue with, we had very persuasive films of monkeys. We watched these monkeys as they figured out ways, for example, to remove an almond from the center of a glass tube three feet long and too narrow to admit a monkey’s hand. The smart monkeys went for the almond by going off to fetch a stick, bringing the stick back, putting it in the tube, and pushing the almond out. Everybody on our committee agreed that what the smart monkeys did--individually, mind you, with no accumulated knowledge, monkey to monkey--was creative. And we also agreed--or so I gathered at the time--that the monkey's act represented something relatively primitive in the creation trade, in contrast to, say, a poet's sonnet (unless it was a terrible sonnet). In other words our committee studies for six successive Saturdays gave us a preliminary hypothesis about creative action--what it is and, loosely, its range. But we are not in agreement about what we could do with what we had learned--for there were two poets on the committee who insisted upon the essential mystery of creation, and did not wish to proceed with further analysis. If our chairman had proposed that we inaugurate a new round of meetings at which we would, like Bentham and Dr. Siu, try to devise a precise scale for creativity, with number degrees of complexity, maturity, innovativity, and so on, our poets would have rushed off indignantly. Or at least I would have. Why do I mention this?

Chairman: I think the connection is clear, though if someone wishes to declare that creativity and suffering are unrelated, they may do so. As for myself, I do not plan to call another meeting on suffering.

Cynic: I am delighted.

Ms. L: You boys, if I may use that word, are being awfully clever and nasty, but I will not deny that what you are talking about is important. It is what all scholars face when searching out certainty where facts, if there are any, are slippery. So we have, let us say, the humanities and the sciences--and the two disciplines argue. Or we have the classicists and the romantics, the poets and the critics, the academics and the "beasts", and even the males and females--and they argue. At the moment we definitely have the males and the females arguing, so it might seem appropriate for me to take the line that the males have for centuries been the ones putting the kibosh on sensible approaches to the creating-and-suffering world inside each of us. Especially they have done so in modern times by asserting their precise quantitative scientism, while the females--as well as the poets at that creativity meeting--have sat on the sidelines murmuring of the unsliceable wholeness of feeling and true knowledge. I mention "wholeness" because that is the word that our cynic used in describing the suffering of the hypochondriacs in Kenneth Fearing’s poem. I ...

Sufferer: Ma'am, I don't know why you call those sufferers hypochondriacs.

Ms. L: Please do not call me "Ma'am".

I think that you and our cynic quite misunderstand that poem, though certainly the sufferers in it are unanimous, that is to say, one and whole in their suffering. Fearing’s point, as I hear him, is that those miserable people are so beaten down that they have achieved a state of stasis. They cannot imagine doing anything for themselves; they are resigned to suffer their suffering. Fearing surely did not approve of that. He was himself a social activist, and he suffered much from the passivity of such sufferers; he thought they should move, act in their own behalf. Now I, though a female and a (secret) poet, am on his side there, but also on the side of both Bentham and Dr. Siu as reformers. Though poet and female I have no intention of falling on the thorns of life in order to bleed, and at the moment I do not even wish to worry about whether Dr. Siu is an absolutist and Bentham a relativist--though the issue is a major one.

Quantification is not, as a process, in itself a scientific vice--even our cynic admits this--and if there is vice lurking in its neighborhood, we should therefore get after the neighborhood, not the process. Leslie Stephen said of the "unsystematic and spasmodic legislation” in England in Bentham's time that it was "so savage as to shock every man of common humanity," and while I wish he had included women among those shocked, I am sure he was right about the legislation. I am also sure that his words can be applied to our own legislative condition right now. What a mess! And it still is a male mess largely, just as it has always been. Being outnumbered here, I will make no further plea for a female presence in rational and if necessary quantitatively based reform. I merely ask that you consider the possibility that females are also, despite traditional rumors, possessed of reasoning powers, and also, therefore, even capable of fallacious reasoning. I say onward. Let us hear more from Dr. Siu.

And let us hear more from Bentham too, if he can be found. For it was Bentham, I want you to know, who created a word for our English language that is now in the very name of Dr. Siu's society: "international".

Cynic: No!

Ms. L: Yes! I refer you to pages 324 to 327 in his “Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation”, where he not only coins the word but also explains why he did. And if it is of any interest to you, he also coined the word “codification”.

Cynic: I am much impressed with "international", Ms. L. The other I can do without.

Chairman: Hear! Hear! Thank you, gentleman, and Ms. L. The meeting stands adjourned.