A quote from James Vincent “Beyond Measure: The Hidden History of Measurement from Cubits to Quantum Constants”

 “To measure something, after all, is to impose limits on the world: to say this far but no further. It means fitting reality into categories that can never capture its full complexity. For when we try to measure some particular aspect of the world, we are inevitably making a choice that reflects our biases and desires. Measurement is a tool that reinforces what we find important in life, what we think is worth paying attention to. The question, then, of who gets to make those choices is of the utmost importance.

These dynamics can play out in very different ways. Some examples of mismeasure may be petty and slight, like the humiliations of workplace bureaucracies – painful in the moment but forgotten easily enough. Others are difficult to fathom in the extent of their cruelty. Consider the horrors of eugenics or scientific racism: movements motivated by ugly notions of racial hierarchy but justified through the pretend objectivity of measurement, conveyed through comparisons of skull sizes and IQ tests.

For Blake and his sympathisers, such barbarism is an expected product of the civilised world. The twentieth-century philosophers Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno noted that the entire process of abstraction – of creating generalised rules and categories – is one of the foundations of modernity, for better or worse. It is a product of the same Enlightenment thinking that made Blake shudder and that continues to shape the societies we live in today. ‘Classification is a condition of knowledge, not knowledge itself, and knowledge in turn dissolves classification,’ they wrote. The world as we know it today is ‘ruled by equivalence’; by a desire to reduce everything to number and make ‘dissimilar things comparable by reducing them to abstract quantities’.”