Perhaps we have become accustomed, as a matter of course, to knowing how much we are: how many human beings live in our country, in other countries and in the whole world. But the counting action of the human population was initially a far-reaching and ambitious idea of its kind, and remains to this day both a complex technical and logistical challenge, and an act with enormous political and social implications.
Our sages discussed many of the tastes of the census described in the Parashat Bamidbar (as well as other censuses in the Torah). Possible reasons included the need to raise funds for public purposes (for example for the construction of the Mishkan or public sacrifices), the need to appoint and mobilize the military force, but also other reasons related to the love of God for his people, respect for all people , Which the action of the commander emphasizes when it counts every detail.
These noble tastes were absent from the (few) commanders conducted by the rest of the nations of the world in antiquity. These commanders are designed to allow states to exploit their nationals and take away from them, whether in taxes or in military service. Only in more modern times did the rest of the world begin to visit their citizens not so that a question would serve the country, but so that the country could serve them. The spirit and character of the census in modern times have changed along with the growth of nationalism, democracy, humanism, equality and the welfare state. The nation-state defined its identity through its overall population, the democratic state recognized the importance and equal rights of every citizen, and the welfare state sought to recognize its population to support it: not only in numbers but also in basic and economic needs documented in the census. At the same time, in order to achieve these goals, from the 17th and 18th centuries the world’s commanders gradually became more accurate and reliable with the help of improved statistical technologies and methods.
The technical ability to conduct a credible and comprehensive census was from the beginning the domain of stronger and richer countries, but gradually it was transferred and spread around the world to poor and developing countries as well. The first modern census in England took place only in 1801, in the United States the first-level census was first conducted in 1850, in Canada and India in 1871, and in Egypt in 1897. After World War II there was a big leap and 150 countries held modern censuses that together encompassed 2 billion people. When China conducted its chief census in 1953 the absentee population in the world had already encompassed the bulk of humanity. Making an accurate census is a difficult challenge even in a developed country (to assess this, you should stop for a moment and think how complicated it is to count every person in the country accurately), but imagine what it entails in a poor country where a large part of the population is scattered in remote and uninstructed areas. Indeed, the spread of commanders in the developing world was then (and still is) with the support of the United Nations, and the ability to gradually measure the size and condition of the entire human population both reflected and enabled a more global frustration on the evolution of humanity.
Without the ability to measure the plight of the entire human population, the thought of “sustainable development” has no meaning. The very idea of sustainability is inherently related to the understanding of long-term trends. Without the ability to measure the state of humanity – its size, its activity, its socio-economic and health status – we would not have the ability to know in which direction we are heading, to what extent our well-being improves and to what extent our impact on nature diminishes or not. Without the ability to measure, we would not know for example that over the last 200 years the world population, and with it the pressure on natural resources, has grown eightfold (from one billion to eight!), But we would not know that this steep rise moderates as countries develop economically. The global will reach a peak of about 11 billion in 2100 and will not rise further.
The ability to measure not only its number but the state of the population both within the country and in the world through censuses is what allows countries to set development goals and monitor progress, and which has enabled the entire international community to jointly adopt the global development goals for 2030. These include, for example, universal access to safe drinking water (currently: accessible to only 70%) and electricity (currently accessible to 90%, in 2000 it was accessible to 78%). The commanders let us know how far we have progressed to date, how much work remains to be done to reach the goal, and most importantly: monitor progress and place the responsibility for achieving the goals on the government.