Unfathomable Numbers

Wisdom From the Agrarians: Humanity struggles to cope with big numbers

“Power deals efficiently with numbers that affection cannot recognise”

- Wendell Berry, It All Turns on Affection

A picture of a CAFO industrial farm. Photo by Amelia Bates on Unsplash

Humans, with our limited energetic and cognitive capacities, struggle to cope with big numbers — both in managing them and comprehending them. For the majority of human history, the average person only had to deal with numbers that could be counted with their own two eyes: namely 1-100, or if they were wealthy, 1-10000. As these numbers (and the physical entities they represented) were in coherence with the limitations that all humans possess, they could be called humane numbers; enough to keep us occupied, but not enough to overwhelm us.

Nowadays, we are “blessed” (as the industrialists would say), with huge, unfathomable numbers; numbers we can scarcely imagine. No longer are these huge numbers the sole domain of the rich and the powerful. All of us are confronted with them on a daily basis — especially those of us who live in metropolises, shop in supermarkets, and who are burdened with a mortgage. Hundreds of thousands, millions, billions: these are the numbers that dominate our modern industrial age. These are the numbers we are “cursed” with.

Humanity has had precious little time to adapt to this unfamiliar world of gigantic scale and volume. We have been left disorientated and confused — overwhelmed by endless choice, information overload, and by endless responsibilities that seem to never stop growing in size, scale, and extent. Our limited capacities for attention, care, and affection — and thus good work — have been stretched to inhumane proportions. No wonder both we and our world are suffering from burnout.

But industrialism — and the efficiency that fuels it — relies on big and ever-growing numbers such as those of capital, of power, of output and volume, and of economies of scale. And as industrialism is the road we “enlightened moderns” have chosen to travel down, we are condemned to let these inhumane numbers grow ever larger and ever more overwhelming.

In such a disorientating world of gigantic numbers driven by relentless industrialism, agrarianism offers a beacon of hope and a refuge from the unfathomable. Agrarianism explains to us that “The reality that is responsibly managed by human intelligence is much nearer in scale to a small rural community or urban neighbourhood than the “globe.””¹ Agrarianism reminds us of the goodness of limits — and the goodness of small numbers.