During a recent nighttime bout of insomnia, I plucked from my shelf a paperback of Charles Dickens’s Hard Times. A receipt tucked inside informed me that I acquired the book on a 1998 visit to Shakespeare & Company in Paris, but of course the book was first published in London in 1854, first as a serial in Dickens’s magazine Household Words and subsequently as a book. That makes it all the more remarkable that Hard Times tells the story of Sam Bankman-Fried.
Hard Times is Dickens’s most sustained attack on utilitarianism, the philosophy, invented by Jeremy Bentham, that says the sole aim for a moral society is to achieve the greatest good for the greatest number. In Hard Times the stand-in for Bentham (more precisely, for James Mill, father to John Stuart Mill) is Thomas Gradgrind, a successful wholesaler of hardware turned educator who’s on his way to becoming a member of Parliament. Here is how Dickens, the greatest caricaturist in English literature, introduces Gradgrind:
A man of realities. A man of facts and calculations. A man who proceeds upon the principle that two and two are four, and nothing over, and who is not to be talked into allowing for anything over.… With a rule and a pair of scales, and the multiplication table always in his pocket, sir, ready to weigh and measure any parcel of human nature, and tell you exactly what it comes to. It is a mere question of figures, a case of simple arithmetic.
