Everyone, I expect, has had the experience of failing to reach an understanding with another person. I don’t mean the experience of the foreigner standing before the tax-office counter, nor of the tourist trying to order a coffee in a language they don’t command. I mean the experience of two interlocutors who share a language and, even so, cannot make sense of each other — as if the words had lost their adherence. The frustration is greater in these cases, precisely because the vocabulary alibi is gone. The noise is not phonetic: it is semantic. But I suspect it is not only semantic, and that is the path I want to trace.

Let me set aside, first, what I won’t pursue. The geographic and cultural variants of a language produce real and sometimes considerable differences. The Portuguese spoken in Portugal is not the same as the Portuguese of Brazil, nor what is spoken in any of the African countries the language reached through the violence of colonisation — and where, once imposed, it was appropriated, transformed, reinvented by those who inherited it without having asked for it. Nor is it what is spoken in Timor. There are differences in vocabulary, in syntax, in pronunciation, in rhythm. Even so, because the deep grammar remains common, any of these speakers will understand any other more easily than they will someone who does not speak Portuguese. Dialect distances wane with patience. They diminish, above all, because people — when they want to (and can) understand each other — do.

There is, however, another distance that does not yield to good will. It is independent of language, of culture, of geography. It cuts across families, dinner tables, offices, intimate relationships. I mean the distance that separates those who speak the language of numbers from those who speak the language of words. The first believe that only what is quantified matters, and that whatever escapes measurement is folklore. For the second, numbers exist and they count, but they are not what counts first.

These two tongues have been among us for a long time.¹ Everyone recognises them. Everyone speaks one or the other, or both at different moments of life — or even of the same day. What stops me on this idea is a simple, unpleasant observation: the problem this difference creates is not cognitive. It does not yield to intellect, nor to feelings. It is moral, ethical, aesthetic.

Among those who speak the language of numbers stand out the ones obsessed with measurement, the ones who confuse objectivity with transcendence, the ones who take growth to be the condition of health and health to be the proper name of growth. Among these there is a tendency — a temptation, even — toward a particular dialect. Its sound is made of coins jingling and the chime of cash registers. It is never quite audible, but it is also never quite silent; it modulates the rhythm of sentences, conditions the choice of verbs, decides which nouns get taken seriously.

Imagine two species that lived for ages on separate continents and that, by the work of tectonic forces, suddenly find themselves sharing a single territory. This is what happens when plates converge or when land bridges emerge between masses that had been apart — one need only think of the periods when Eurasia and North America were joined by Beringia, and of the migrations that followed. The organisms discover themselves neighbours without recognising each other. Some prosper, others dwindle, others disappear. They are forced to coexist, since the shared territory demands it. But on what terms?

The image applies to what I want to make visible. Those who speak numbers and those who speak words met long ago on the same continent. We live side by side. On what terms? There is no point sugaring the pill. The dominant tongue is, without doubt, that of money. There is no funding for the beauty of words, nor for the meaning of a story, nor for the nobility of intentions, nor for the beneficial effect of a particular project. Only the coldness and rigidity of numbers count — numbers that must, always, produce larger numbers. This is what matters to those who speak in numbers. For the ones who speak this language and have balances with more zeros, the only promises one believes in, the only ones one invests in, are those that seek more money.

For them, words are tolerated when they embellish reports; they serve a decorative function, invoked in campaigns, in purpose statements, in anniversary communiqués and in panegyrics. For a long time now, words have been concealing numerical logics. “Engagement” means the number of interactions; “attention” means the time spent looking at and using a given application.

There is yet another divergence, less discussed but no less revealing. It is aesthetic. For those who speak the language of numbers, beauty is conflated with increase: beautiful is the graph that rises, the balance that swells, the curve that tilts favourably. The beauty of things in themselves — that of a sentence that needs no ornament, that of a well-placed silence, that of a piece of craft no one measured — has no place in this grammar. It is not despised in bad faith (I believe); it is simply invisible. It lacks the unit of measure that would make it recognisable. What is counted has a name; what is not counted, for this tribe, does not exist — or, worse, exists only as ornament, of the pinchbeck variety.

The two tongues use the same syntax, the same grammar, the same vocabulary. This shared ground is what makes the matter pernicious. When the manager says “value” and the worker hears “value”, the word is the same. When the report speaks of “people” and the union speaks of “people”, the letters coincide. When “sustainability”, “transparency”, “respect”, “care” are promised, the vocabulary is shared, indistinguishable to the naked eye. It is the semantics that diverges. A word that for one names a human reality, for the other names a bookkeeping entry. A word that for one carries an ethical obligation, for the other describes a management variable. The distinction between value and cost, which I tried to clear elsewhere,² is played out, in large part, along this frontier.

Hence the appearance of agreement, which is the worst kind of disagreement. The interlocutors nod, write minutes, sign accords, repeat the same words in the same meetings — and discover, later, often too late, that the agreements did not mean the same to one side as to the other. The betrayal is not by language but by meanings, by moral, ethical, and aesthetic senses. They speak the same tongue and inhabit understandings that are strangers to each other.

What remains to be asked — and I have no clean answer — is whether translation between these two tongues is possible, or whether what is demanded is, rather, a decision. Not the decision of which to speak, since both have their uses and their proper domains. The decision is another: which of them, when the two enter into direct conflict, gets the last word. And they enter into conflict often, in things that matter. When that happens, the choice is not technical. It is moral, ethical, aesthetic. Almost always, it is being made for us without anyone asking what we think — and the tongue in which the choice is pronounced has the sound of coins falling onto a counter, or into pockets where so many others already lie.

1. In “The Right to Temporal Dignity” I described the hegemony of what I there called a “language of quantities”; in “relational sustainability: the footprint we leave in people” I engaged with the quantitative and mechanical understanding of growth, building on Timothée Parrique. This essay picks up that line and presses it further. ↩︎
2. See “On the Value of Conversation”, where I addressed the recurring confusion between value and cost — there at the level of the concepts, here at the level of the tribes that inhabit them. ↩︎