22 November

One of my reasons for thinking of Gabriel Tarde as a forgotten genius, is that he completely rejected one of the foundations of modern life. The separation between qualitative and quantitative thinking. Like this example, in our world today the questions on the right - how the person felt, and why - are just as easily quantified as how many ice creams people bought. There's a sort of moral dimension to this false distinction too I think. The distrust of numbers, and seeing them as dehumanising things. Numbers are just a way of studying patterns, they're not a separate domain of reality. They're as human as love, or ice cream. One of the most boring parts of modern life for me is the separation of things into numbers on one side, and warm, 'subjective' humanity on the other. It's nonsense.