Like many people in the last few months, I have watched the numbers to learn how to feel about Covid-19 and “the war” currently being waged against it. I want to know when it might be over or contained, or how much risk or loss might accrue to me or my loved ones, given demographic data about age, race, sex, and region, and the numbers that represent economic markets. The epidemiological models that have saturated our news are not just projections of a possible or likely future; they are the metric by which enormous decisions about human activity have been and will be made. These statistics mitigate or inflame our fear; the numbers tangle with concepts like risk and freedom, and when they are sufficient or convincing or convenient, they determine policy. They determine when we might touch others, when we might return to restaurants, when we might again have toilet paper or instant yeast or childcare or jobs.
But these statistics are not likely to help us much in the true accounting ahead. Though history is recursive, there are moments when the previously unthinkable becomes thinkable. What helped usher in the Civil War notion of countable death was, on the one hand, the basic expansion of public education and the new accessibility of mathematics and statistics: put simply, by 1860 in the US, many more people than in any previous era knew how to do math.
But representational statistics—numbers that represent an average, like an approval rating, but also, more complexly, aggregations that produce majorities and minorities—took their first, partial shape in a revolution five thousand miles away from the Southern battlefields and seventy years earlier. The French Revolution, with its language of representation and the common man, set off a chain of global events that toppled monarchies and authoritative regimes, and ushered in the era of the democratic republic.
It is from the French Revolution that we get the term en masse, used to denote collectivity but also dissipation. Democracy, in both concept and execution, demanded the counting of human souls, in order to dispense resources and determine governmental representation. But it also meant relying on majorities to name and guide group experience, which overlaid and muddied, politically, the individual and empirical.
In the nascent American Republic, where some humans could vote and most others were in coverture to their voting husbands or were the property of those men, the notion of majority representation was corrupted a priori. Representative democracy was reframed—warped, in fact—through such ideas as republican motherhood, in which women’s voting rights were expressed not by them but by the male children they raised and educated. One of the great efforts of revisionist history in our own century has been to account for and number the slaves owned by Americans. The resulting calculations are both horrifying, because of their extremity, and empowering, because they give contour to the individual lives represented by those numbers.