Postscript
Counteract
Patrick Marnham
Welcome to 1981, a year of Census, 'And there went out a decree from Mrs Caesar that all the world should be enrolled, and all went to enrol themselves, everyone to his own city, and when they had come into their own front halls they found a long list of bloody silly questions that had to be answered in permanent ink on pain of pain. And there was no end to the numbers that Mrs Caesar could extract from the mountain of bloody silly answers when it was all gathered in. And legions were employed for a further decade in this work.'
The instinctive struggle between the naturally numerate and the naturally literate, which can be viewed in miniature every year as a new generation endures its first week at school, is no longer carried on with its ancient vigour. The numerate have all but won. But the literate, an unhappy and increasingly tongue-tied minority, can still dream. They dream of the days when the world was run by words rather than figures; that felicitous era when populations starved to death and drew inspiration from the yitamin-deficient visions of 5 st 3 lb mystics. And the literate have a hero, Popeye the Sailorman.
Popeye was, still is, an international cartoon celebrity whose particular accomplishment was eating cans of spinach. He was presumably dreamt up by the US spinach growers association, eager to increase sales and relying on the fact that spinach contained ten times as much iron as any other green vegetable. Eat iron and you grew Popeye-type muscles, beat up other larger sailors and won that girl with the permanently dripping nose called Olive Oyl. The benefits of boiled spinach were reputedly passed to spinach water, the greenstained residue of the cooking process, which the wiser Hausfrau was advised to use as the basis for a specially nutritious stock. You can buy cook books carrying this tip to this day in most branches of W.H. Smith. No doubt all over Europe and North America women are saving their slimy spinach water and using it for stock, and all to no benefit.
Because it has recently been discovered that spinach does not, after all, contain an undue proportion of iron. The tests establishing this 'fact' were made early in the century and were so authoritative that they became the basis for nutritional guidance 'through all the world'. Then, a few years ago, some busybody researcher with nothing better to do, noticed how old the research was and decided to repeat the analysis. Everything was correct, with a single exception. The figures for the iron content of spinach were multiplied by ten. A decimal point had, it seemed, been misplaced at the time of first publication and the myth had grown from there. Popeye was therefore a completely misleading character. Whatever it was that was pushing up those muscles it was certainly not the spinach. Popeye stood as the representative of numerate truth and he was a deceiver. To the world's in numerates he is a portent of a more hopeful future, Pending this happier time, innumerates who have read the entire newspaper only to find that they are still waiting to see the doctor are recommended to read it again, this time deleting all the numbers from the news stories of the day, and all superlatives — which are numbers masquerading as words. If the numberless remnants of the news story still make sense they will not be news, they may not be history but they are almost guaranteed to be worth printing. So, 'Customs officials made their biggest haul when they seized 10 tons of cannabis, including a ton-and-a-half washed ashore after being dumped at sea by smugglers. It was part of a 15-ton consignment of which some 3 to 31/2 tons had been sold for more than £2 million' becomes — 'A large haul of cannabis was seized in Inverness', a fair summary of the interest of the story. Or we have, '6 per cent of women say they faced sexual blackmail at work'. Obvious rubbish, rumour masquerading as scientific fact. Remove the figure and you have a statement of the obvious. The casting couch is not restricted to Hollywood. But with the addition of the magic 6 per cent the • European Commission will doubtless be drawing up some sort of Code of Management Conduct'. Well, they have to spend the money on something.
Drunken illiterates should be encouraged to line up with innumerates if they read the gibberish which is made of the National Council on Alcoholism's Guide on Problem Drinking once the figures are removed. It would seem that there are 740,000 heavy drinkers in Britain, although 1 am sure that I personally know many more than that. Some of them 'become merry without being aware of what they are doing'. Tragic. Unless we do something about our drinking habits as a nation, 'we could go the way of France'. (Good. I am willing to bet that most of the men who built Chartres Cathedral were frequently merry without analysing exactly what they were doing.) 'Alcoholrelated problems cost the country £500 million a year'. Money well spent; and what about the amount of money saved every year by the healing consumption of alcohol?
It is probably fair to say that in 83.25 per cent of cases officious bodies which are hopelessly over-equipped with blank forms and loaded calculators are producing 300 million miles of misleading and inaccurate figures every third week which are solely intended to increase their powers of interference over our capacity to enjoy ourselves. It is high time they were stopped. If they cannot be stopped we can at least drink enough seasonal fluids tO make their figures run all over the page at a surprising rate of knots.
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