Dicen que alguien con tan mala fama como Stalin dijo algo así: "Una única muerte es una tragedia, un millón de muertes es una estadística". Lo cual así en abstracto, suena tan abstracto como las grandes cifras. En el libro The Last Intellectuals de Russell Jacoby, hay una pequeña reflexión que me parece más ilustrativa:
In 1974 Fogel, with Stanley L. Engerman (1936 - ), published Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery, a two volume work, which boasted that its sceintific and quantitative approach put slave history on a new basis. Yet it's deficiencias index the ills that haunt the fetish of method: figures and methods mask the reality itslef. "Scientific" history turns into sciencie fiction.
At least in part, Time on the Cross sought to establish that slave labor was more productive than scholars previously thought and this productivity depended less on external punishments that on an inbred work ethic. Herbert G. Gutman, in his blistering attack, Slavery and the Numbers Game, found their evidence and approach woefully inadequate. For instance, Fogel and Engerman examine the records of one plantation owner who over several years kept track of when he whipped his slaves. They make the requisite computations and conclude, "The record shows that over the course of two years a total of 160 whippings were administered, an average of 0.7 whippings per hand per year".
For Fogel and Engerman, this was almost scientific proof that slaves were not driven to work by punishments, since the whippings were too infrequent to be effective.
Gutman demonstrates the Fogel and Engerman miscalculated the number of slaves on the plantation; but even within their terms, he questions the significance of the figures --"0.7 whippings per hand per year." What does it mean? In fact, retranslated it means that "a slave -on average- was whipped every 4.56 days. Three slave every two weeks." This suggests a more harrowing level of violence. Fogel and Engerman's flawed method, Gutman argues, risks obscuring the reality. "It is known, for example that 'on average' 127 blacks were lynched every year between 1889 and 1899. How does one assess that average? Assume that 6 million blacks lived in the Unites States in 1889...Is it useful to learn that 'the record shows an average of .0003 lynchings per black per year so that about 99.9997 percent of the blacks were not lynched in 1889?" For Gutman this significance of social violence cannot be deduced from averages.
Creo que no es mal momento para pensar así las cosas cuando lo que más se lee sobre "la guerra contra el narco" son cifras. ¿Quiénes se están preguntando?: "¿y esto de los muertos y descabezados qué siginifica?"
