Seeing Like a State REVIEW
Thanks to my son Skyler for recommending this one.
“They said . . . that he was so devoted to Pure Science . . . that he would rather have people die by the right therapy than be cured by the wrong.” — Sinclair Lewis, Arrowsmith
Distilling the argument of James Scott’s book, Seeing Like a State is not difficult but capturing the power of the argument will not be easy. The subject of the book is something that Scott calls “High Modernism.” The conclusion of the book is that Scott is not a fan of it. Indeed, He thinks it dangerous to human well-being. Scott writes:
“High modernism must not be confused with scientific practice. It was fundamentally, as the term “ideology” implies, a faith that borrowed, as it were, the legitimacy of science and technology. It was, accordingly, uncritical, unskeptical, and thus unscientifically optimistic about the possibilities for the comprehensive planning of human settlement and production. The carriers of high modernism tended to see rational order in remarkably visual aesthetic terms. For them, an efficient, rationally organized city, village, or farm was a city that looked regimented and orderly in a geometrical sense.”
And later:
“The fact that [their maps] look right becomes more important than whether they work.”
In short, Scott argues that States (and large institutions) will often try to condense and simplify information about the people and land they govern so as to better make decisions about it from a distance. Because the State or the management has a particular agenda or desired outcome, they prefer maps that give them information about those matters directly relevant to their interests. And because the management class is not inclined to get mosquito bit or boot-soiled by spending time in those places that it governs, it tends to not realize it when the map no longer actually represents the territory. When autocratic power is wed to a simplified map, systems will only work as long as those who live in “reality” are allowed to defy the state or the management by working in the unauthorized shadows of common sense.
Scott argues that administrators of the high modernist bent are satisfied when their realms look ordered and look like they conform to the map. Thus, they will use power to make reality conform to representation even when “reality objects.” The thesis of the book is not blurry.
“My case is that certain kinds of states, driven by utopian plans and an authoritarian disregard for the values, desires, and objections of their subjects, are indeed a mortal threat to human well-being.”
Scott carries his argument by organizing a phalanx of historical illustrations. These include but are not limited to the attempts of German forestry to micro-manage forests “scientifically”; the attempts of French city planners to redesign Paris and to build Brazillia; the attempts of the Socialist State to collectivize agriculture; and the attempts of the Tanzanian government to relocate its population to planned villages. Scores of other illustrations (including the attempt to control language itself) are also provided to make it clear that this tendency of the high modernist approach is not something isolated to specific cultures. It happens everywhere and all the time.
Let’s take some excerpts from these various illustrations. Scott begins by talking about scientific forestry in Germany. At one point in time, the German government decided to organize and harness its forests in the same way that it might its armies. The results were catastrophic. Scott writes the following of this short-sighted, state and “science” backed endeavor in “dollar-godded utilitariansm”:
“The best way to appreciate how heroic was this constriction of vision is to notice what fell outside its field of vision. Lurking behind the number indicating revenue yield were not so much forests as commercial wood, representing so many thousands of board feet of saleable timber and so many cords of firewood fetching a certain price. Missing, of course, were all those trees, bushes, and plants holding little or no potential for state revenue. Missing as well were all those parts of trees, even revenue-bearing trees, which might have been useful to the population but whose value could not be converted into fiscal receipts. Here I have in mind foliage and its uses as fodder and thatch; fruits, as food for people and domestic animals; twigs and branches, as bedding, fencing, hop poles, and kindling; bark and roots, for making medicines and for tanning; sap, for making resins; and so forth. Each species of tree—indeed, each part or growth stage of each species—had its unique properties and uses. A fragment of the entry under “elm” in a popular seventeenth-century encyclopedia on arboriculture conveys something of the vast range of practical uses to which the tree could be put.”
“Elm is a timber of most singular use, especially whereby it may be continually dry, or wet, in extremes; therefore proper for water works, mills, the ladles and soles of the wheel, pumps, aqueducts, ship planks below the water line, ... also for wheelwrights, handles for the single handsaw, rails and gates. Elm is not so apt to rive [split] ... and is used for chopping blocks, blocks for the hat maker, trunks and boxes to be covered with leather, coffins and dressers and shovelboard tables of great length; also for the carver and those curious workers of fruitage, foliage, shields, statues and most of the ornaments appertaining to the orders of architecture.... And finally ... the use of the very leaves of this tree, especially the female, is not to be despised, ... for they will prove of great relief to cattle in the winter and scorching summers when hay and fodder is dear.... The green leaf of the elms contused heals a green wound or cut, and boiled with the bark, consolidates bone fractures.”
“In state “fiscal forestry,” however, the actual tree with its vast number of possible uses was replaced by an abstract tree representing a volume of lumber or firewood. If the princely conception of the forest was still utilitarian, it was surely a utilitarianism confined to the direct needs of the state.”
“From a naturalist’s perspective, nearly everything was missing from the state’s narrow frame of reference. Gone was the vast majority of flora: grasses, flowers, lichens, ferns, mosses, shrubs, and vines. Gone, too, were reptiles, birds, amphibians, and innumerable species of insects. Gone were most species of fauna, except those that interested the crown’s gamekeepers.”
“From an anthropologist’s perspective, nearly everything touching on human interaction with the forest was also missing from the state’s tunnel vision. The state did pay attention to poaching, which impinged on its claim to revenue in wood or its claim to royal game, but otherwise it typically ignored the vast, complex, and negotiated social uses of the forest for hunting and gathering, pasturage, fishing, charcoal making, trapping, and collecting food and valuable minerals as well as the forest’s significance for magic, worship, refuge, and so on.”
“. . . If the utilitarian state could not see the real, existing forest for the (commercial) trees, if its view of its forests was abstract and partial, it was hardly unique in this respect. Some level of abstraction is necessary for virtually all forms of analysis, and it is not at all surprising that the abstractions of state officials should have reflected the paramount fiscal interests of their employer. The entry under “forest” in Diderot’s Encyclopédie is almost exclusively concerned with the utilité publique of forest products and the taxes, revenues, and profits that they can be made to yield. The forest as a habitat disappears and is replaced by the forest as an economic resource to be managed efficiently and profitably. Here, fiscal and commercial logics coincide; they are both resolutely fixed on the bottom line.”
Scott goes on to suggest that the German State’s attempt to simplify led to a veritable vocabulary that spelled doom for the plan it spoke of’s ultimate success:
“The vocabulary used to organize nature typically betrays the overriding interests of its human users. In fact, utilitarian discourse replaces the term “nature” with the term “natural resources,” focusing on those aspects of nature that can be appropriated for human use. A comparable logic extracts from a more generalized natural world those flora or fauna that are of utilitarian value (usually marketable commodities) and, in turn, reclassifies those species that compete with, prey on, or otherwise diminish the yields of the valued species. Thus, plants that are valued become “crops,” the species that compete with them are stigmatized as “weeds,” and the insects that ingest them are stigmatized as “pests.” Thus, trees that are valued become “timber,” while species that compete with them become “trash” trees or “underbrush.” The same logic applies to fauna. Highly valued animals become “game” or “livestock,” while those animals that compete with or prey upon them become “predators” or “varmints.”
Thus Scott concludes: “The German forest became the archetype for imposing on disorderly nature the neatly arranged constructs of science.”
Administrative officers who were well-read and well-educated in scientific forestry while being completely disconnected from anything but representations of forests went about destroying the actual forest in the hubristic belief that maps are territories.
“In the German case, the negative biological and ultimately commercial consequences of the stripped-down forest became painfully obvious only after the second rotation of conifers had been planted. “It took about one century for them [the negative consequences] to show up clearly.”
Scott quotes Herbert Simon in support of his conclusions, referring to something he calls “administrative man” [administrativus homo]:
“Administrative man recognizes that the world he perceives is a drastically simplified model of the buzzing, blooming confusion that constitutes the real world. He is content with the gross simplification because he believes that the real world is mostly empty—that most of the facts of the real world have no great relevance to any particular situation he is facing and that most significant chains of causes and consequences are short and simple.” — Herbert Simon
Scott notes that it is not simply that State and institutional maps are too simple to be useful in the long term, they are, he insists, too temporary. They assume somehow that nature is not evolving and changing and that the map, even the simplified map, is out of sync with reality by the time the ink is dry. Furthermore, the State’s simplification fails to take into consideration that the people who have a stake in the actual decisions will resist the enforcement of policies that are based on a State’s mythological representation. Scott includes a discussion of how high modernism intersects with French tax policy:
“The door-and-window tax established in France under the Directory and abolished only in 1917 is a striking case in point. Its originator must have reasoned that the number of windows and doors in a dwelling was proportional to the dwelling’s size. Thus a tax assessor need not enter the house or measure it but merely count the doors and windows. As a simple, workable formula, it was a brilliant stroke, but it was not without consequences. Peasant dwellings were subsequently designed or renovated with the formula in mind so as to have as few openings as possible. While the fiscal losses could be recouped by raising the tax per opening, the long-term effects on the health of the rural population lasted for more than a century.”
“We must keep in mind not only the capacity of state simplifications to transform the world but also the capacity of the society to modify, subvert, block, and even overturn the categories imposed upon it. Here it is useful to distinguish what might be called facts on paper from facts on the ground.”
Scott’s book contains dire warnings that we would do well to heed:
“I believe that many of the most tragic episodes of state development in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries originate in a particularly pernicious combination of three elements. The first is the aspiration to the administrative ordering of nature and society, an aspiration that we have already seen at work in scientific forestry, but one raised to a far more comprehensive and ambitious level. “High modernism” seems an appropriate term for this aspiration. . . . As a conviction, high modernism was not the exclusive property of any political tendency; it had both right- and left-wing variants, as we shall see. The second element is the unrestrained use of the power of the modern state as an instrument for achieving these designs. The third element is a weakened or prostrate civil society that lacks the capacity to resist these plans.”
In this sense, Scott’s book is a call to resist the imposition of the State and its “scientific” experts if those experts have constructed their beliefs about reality from reading and thinking alone. The author suggests that there will always be those who approach their administrative work with the spirit of “high modernism.” For some, their preference would be to tear the entire system down so that it can be rebuilt to their utopian vision. Scott’s chapter on the human destruction caused by some of these high modernist city planners is undeniable evidence:“Only those who have the scientific knowledge to discern and create this superior social order are fit to rule in the new age’ the high modernist insists:
“Further, those who through retrograde ignorance refuse to yield to the scientific plan need to be educated to its benefits or else swept aside. Strong versions of high modernism, such as those held by Lenin and Le Corbusier, cultivated an Olympian ruthlessness toward the subjects of their interventions. At its most radical, high modernism imagined wiping the slate utterly clean and beginning from zero.”
“Le Corbusier had no patience for the physical environment that centuries of urban living had created. . . . Le Corbusier set himself the task of inventing the ideal industrial city, in which the ‘general truths’ behind the machine age would be expressed with graphic simplicity. The rigor and unity of this ideal city required that it make as few concessions as possible to the history of existing cities. ‘We must refuse to afford even the slightest concession to what is: to the mess we are in now,’ he wrote. ‘There is no solution to be found there.’ Instead, his new city would preferably rise on a cleared site as a single, integrated urban composition. . . . People may complain, he noted, that in reality streets intersect at all sorts of angles and that the variations are infinite. ‘But,’ he replied, ‘that’s precisely the point. I eliminate all those things. That’s my starting point.... I insist on right-angled intersections.’”
I can only imagine how badly a city like this would serve people if built in Vermont with its rivers, mountains, quarries, swamps, glacial debris, lakes, soil and climate differences, and historical settlement patterns, etc. Scott spends a good deal of time on the French city planner Le Corbusier because he is such a caricature of the “high modernist” type and of that sort of administrator’s preference for a “dictatorship of ‘The PLAN.’”
“The centralization required by Le Corbusier’s doctrine of the Plan (always capitalized in his usage) is replicated by the centralization of the city itself. Functional segregation was joined to hierarchy. His city was a ‘monocephalic’ [only one head] city, its centrally located core performing the “higher” functions of the metropolitan area.”
“The business center issues commands; it does not suggest, much less consult,” Le Corbusier writes,
“The despot is not a man. It is the Plan. The correct, realistic, exact plan, the one that will provide your solution once the problem has been posited clearly, in its entirety, in its indispensable harmony. This plan has been drawn up well away from the frenzy in the mayor’s office or the town hall, from the cries of the electorate or the laments of society’s victims. It has been drawn up by serene and lucid minds. It has taken account of nothing but human truths. It has ignored all current regulations, all existing usages, and channels. It has not considered whether or not it could be carried out with the constitution now in force. It is a biological creation destined for human beings and capable of realization by modern techniques.”
Scott calls this “the dictatorship of the planner.” He then goes about showing just what an unlivable place a person like Le Corbusier creates when he designs a city like Brazillia,
“Although it was surely a rational, healthy, rather egalitarian, state-created city, its plans made not the slightest concession to the desires, history, and practices of its residents. In some important respects, Brasília is to São Paulo or Rio as scientific forestry is to the unplanned forest. Both plans are highly legible, planned simplifications devised to create an efficient order that can be monitored and directed from above.”
Scott calls Le Corbusier’s planned city, “authoritarian planning as urban taxidermy.” He contrasts Le Corbusier with one of his more vocal critics,
She [Jacobs] contrasts the “art” of the planner to the practical conduct of daily life”
“But when it comes to urban public policy, she thinks planning ought not to usurp this unplanned city: “The main responsibility of city planning and design should be to develop, insofar as public policy and action can do so, cities that are congenial places for this great range of unofficial plans, ideas, and opportunities to flourish.”
“For Jacobs, how a city develops is something like how a language evolves. A language is the joint historical creation of millions of speakers. Although all speakers have some effect on the trajectory of a language, the process is not particularly egalitarian. Linguists, grammarians, and educators, some of them backed by the power of the state, weigh in heavily. But the process is not particularly amenable to a dictatorship, either. Despite the efforts toward “central planning,” language (especially its everyday spoken form) stubbornly tends to go on its own rich, multivalent, colorful way. Similarly, despite the attempts by urban planners toward designing and stabilizing the city, it escapes their grasp; it is always being reinvented and inflected by its inhabitants. For both a large city and a rich language, this openness, plasticity, and diversity allow them to serve an endless variety of purposes—many of which have yet to be conceived.”
Scott again draws on other authors to make his point, in this case one who refers to cities planned by bookish elites as “thin cities” and cities created organically by the people living in them as “thick cities.”
“Only time and the work of millions of its residents can turn these thin cities into thick cities. The grave shortcoming of a planned city is that it not only fails to respect the autonomous purposes and subjectivity of those who live in it but also fails to allow sufficiently for the contingency of the interaction between its inhabitants and what that produces.”— Zygmunt Bauman, “Living Without an Alternative
The author moves on to a chapter in the ways that Soviet “high modernists” went about destroying the world that they hoped to “utopianize.”
“What the party has is the blueprint of the entire new structure, which its scientific insight has made possible. The role of the workers is to follow that part of the blueprint allotted to them in the confidence that the architects of revolution know what they are doing.” – Lenin
“For Lenin, the totality was exclusively in the hands of the vanguard party, which had a virtual monopoly of knowledge. He imagined an all-seeing center—an eye in the sky, as it were—which formed the basis for strictly hierarchical operations in which the proletariat became mere foot soldiers or pawns.”
Scott elaborates upon Lenin’s destructive high modernism and upon his dissenters [Kollontay and Luxemburg] who tried to oppose it. The following quote comes from Prudhon, and describes the ever autocratic “style” of the Soviet high modernists (one that Solzhenitsyn will later echo):
“To be ruled is to be kept an eye on, inspected, spied on, regulated, indoctrinated, sermonized, listed and checked off, estimated, appraised, censured, ordered about.... To be ruled is at every operation, transaction, movement, to be noted, registered, counted, priced, admonished, prevented, reformed, redressed, corrected.”
This is what high modernist states must do if they intend to squeeze the territory into the map.
I think my favorite example of the high modernist error comes from Scott’s discussion of the French education system under a high modernist administration:
“The most legible educational system would resemble Hippolyte Taine’s description of French education in the nineteenth century, when ‘the Minister of Education could pride himself, just by looking at his watch, which page of Virgil all schoolboys of the Empire were annotating at that exact moment.’”
The book moves on to a discussion of Nyerere’s decision in Tanzania to relocate everyone in the country to planned villages. Echoing the arguments he has made in previous contexts, Scott makes the case that high modernist ideals went about systematically destroying a culture that had its own logic, developed from hundreds of years of tradition.
“What is significant, however, is that the modern planned village in Tanzania was essentially a point-by-point negation of existing rural practice, which included shifting cultivation and pastoralism; polycropping; living well off the main roads; kinship and lineage authority; small, scattered settlements with houses built higgledy-piggledy; and production that was dispersed and opaque to the state. The logic of this negation seemed often to prevail over sound ecological or economic considerations.”
““In their perfect legibility and sameness, these villages would be ideal, substitutable bricks in an edifice of state planning,” Scott writes, “Whether they would function was another matter.”
Scott gives another lovely illustration of the problems created by “high modernist planning” when he speaks of the way that French taxi drivers sometime respond to regulations by something they call a “work-to-rule strike.” In one of these protests, all the taxi drivers agree to actually live by the regulations by the laws, and thereby bringing the city’s traffic flows to a grinding halt.
“The pretense of authoritarian high-modernist schemes to discipline virtually everything within their ambit is bound to encounter intractable resistance,” Scott writes. Things in high modernists state only work in so far as the people whose lives are actually impacted find ways to resist on the sly (what Scott calls “social inertia).
“One all-but-guaranteed consequence of such thin planning is that the planned institution generates an unofficial reality— a ‘dark twin’— that arises to perform m any of the various needs that the planned institution fails to fulfill. . . . Nearly every new, exemplary capital city has, as the inevitable accompaniment of its official structures, given rise to another, far more ‘disorderly’ and complex city that makes the official city work— that is virtually a condition of its existence. That is, the dark twin is not just an anomaly, an ‘outlaw reality’; it represents the activity and life without which the official city would cease to function. On a more speculative note, I imagine that the greater the pretense of and insistence on an officially decreed micro-order, the greater the volume of nonconforming practices necessary to sustain that fiction. The most rigidly planned economies tend to be accompanied by large ‘underground, ‘gray,’ informal,’ economies that supply, in a thousand ways, what the formal economy fails to supply. When this economy is ruthlessly suppressed, the cost has often been economic ruin and starvation.”
Scott wraps up his argument with an extended discussion of the Greek word metis. It is a word that describes the sort of knowledge that comes from local experimentation. What we might call, “street smarts.”
“Like language, the metis or local knowledge necessary to the successful practice of farming or pastoralism is probably best learned by daily practice and experience. Like serving a long apprenticeship, growing up in a household where that craft is continually practiced often represents the most satisfactory preparation for its exercise. This kind of socialization to a trade may favor the conservation of skills rather than daring innovation. But any formula that excludes or suppresses the experience, knowledge, and adaptability of metis risks incoherence and failure.”
Scott illustrates metis with the following interview excerpt with a machine operator who draws an analogy between running his machine and driving a car:
“Cars are basically the same but every car is different.. . . At first when you’re learning, you just learn rules about driving. But as you get to know how to drive, you get a feel for the car you're driving— you know, things like how it feels at different speeds, how well the brakes work, when it's going to overheat, how to start it when it’s cold. . . . Then if you think about old cars like these machines, been running three shifts for twenty years, some of them , like maybe you’ve got a car with no horn, that w ants to turn right when you hit the brake, that don’t start right unless you pump the gas in a certain way— then maybe you see what it's like trying to run these old machines they've got down here.””
The high modernist prefers the knowledge that comes out of tightly controlled scientific experience. They prefer reading the machine manual and assume that the manual is the machine. The proponent of metis argues that nowhere in this world we actually live in do we find controlled environments. We live and work in complex worlds, not laboratories. This is a “wicked world” where no two times and places are alike - not a “kind world” – where uniformity can lead to predictability. “What is perhaps most striking about high-modernist schemes, despite their quite genuine egalitarian and often socialist impulses,” Scott writes: “is how little confidence they repose in the skills, intelligence, and experience of ordinary people.”
In his concluding remarks, Scott puts his finger on the problem of high modernism:
“If I were asked to condense the reasons behind these failures into a single sentence, I would say that the progenitors of such plans regarded themselves as far smarter and farseeing than they really were and, at the same time, regarded their subjects as far more stupid and incompetent than they really were.”
No doubt, Scott will be accused of aiding and abetting the “anti-intellectualists” – the vaccine deniers – the Wuhan conspiracists, and the people who are not yet ready to buy electric cars.
We shall see.
Question for Comment: Have you ever experienced “high modernism” in the places where you have lived and worked?
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