Djelloul Marbrook

Once human beings learned how to speak and write it was inevitable they would soon start counting everything and everyone. King David, for example, ordered a census, and his critics, more obsessed with counting than their king, added it to their list of his sins. Herod even more infamously started counting people.

Attic and Roman numerals were almost as awkward as stacked rifles. They stood around like lounge lizards. The much more fluid and elegant Arabic numerals advanced the cause of counting almost magically, especially when the Arabs began savoring the potential of the Hindu zero.

After that it was only a matter of time that those geniuses Sir Isaac Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz would invent calculus, almost simultaneously.

None of them—Greeks, Romans, Arabs, Europeans—imagined a society in which counting would be used to measure excellence. Today, when we define success by sales figures and view the world much as race-track habitués, we would be appalled to be invited to see this state of affairs as a degradation, a cheapening, of the idea of counting.

There are probably more people still splitting hairs about the theological implications of King David’s census than there are worrying about a society that confuses sales with merit. I like to think King David would sling a shot at this philistinism.