The Reign of Quantity

There is a wonderful book on this topic, written by a French scholar and intellectual called René Guénon, which is called The Reign of Quantity. In that book he talks about the idea of moving away from a quality-based culture into a quantity-based culture, and he considers this to be what the Hindus called the Kali Yuga period, the last period of man on earth: a period of great disruption and turmoil, in which there would be a massive upheaval of traditional models and a radical new type of way of looking at the world, one related more to quantity than to quality.

And it is interesting: one of the things that we as a Western people have done, which is quite unique and a radical departure from traditional cultures, is the quantification of everything. We have really set out to measure everything — measure space, measure gas, measure air, measure the speed of light, all of these things — wanting to measure in order to quantify.

There is the account of a statistics course at college where the professor teaching it said, at the beginning of the course, that one of the things one will learn about statistics is that it does not work very well with qualitative data. It works very well with quantitative data, but when one gets into qualitative data, we have problems. That is interesting, because so much of our society is based on statistics. We really do base a good percentage of our policies, even in school and education, on this. So much is based on: well, what are the stats here? Before we give you money, show us some stats. And immediately when one moves into that model, one is moving into a quantitative and not a qualitative model, generally.