The Seeing Like a State Edition

On bureaucracy, models, and métis

Buzz Andersen (BA) is an interesting builder on the internet (and has been for some time, with stints at Apple, Square, Tumblr, and more) but has also emerged as an important and moral voice in technology’s evolution. He’s an incredible twitter follow and I always feel smarter for having interacted with him. - Colin (CJN)

Buzz here. If I told you one of the best books I’ve read in years begins with an extended discussion of 18th-century European forestry, you would be forgiven for thinking that didn’t sound like a very promising endorsement. I felt the same way when a friend recommended James C. Scott’s Seeing Like A State to me, but I’m glad I stuck with it because I now consider the book a personal touchstone.

Scott is a political science professor at Yale, but his work is deeply informed by anthropological research (he has done ethnographic fieldwork in Southeast Asia) and a keen interest in the history of agriculture (he and his wife raise sheep in rural Connecticut). He opens Seeing Like A State not with a heady review of Hobbes, Locke, or Kant, but rather with scholarly disquisitions on scientific forestry in 18th Century Prussia and cadastral mapping in 17th Century France. While the approach feels academic initially, the outlines of a compelling thesis soon emerge from the profusion of detail. In order to manage resources, run large bureaucracies, and effectively tax their citizens, states must develop ways of making their domains “legible” to central managers. This inevitably involves creating simplified models from which to operate—lest state administrators end up like Borges’s fabled geographers, whose obsession with exactitude led them to create maps the size of whole territories. Such abstractions, however, not only inevitably fail to convey the complex nuances of reality on the ground, they actually tend to reshape the very social processes they intend to model. “We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us,” if you will.

Thus, Prussian foresters seeking to maximize wood yield and ease bureaucratic accounting planted neatly ordered row after neatly ordered row of uniform tree species—a technique that produced banner results for one generation, and then devastation later as the unexpectedly complex forest ecosystem collapsed. Similarly, 17th Century French surveyors, seeking to simplify the process of royal taxation, disrupted complex local customs and created entirely new classes of winners and losers by forcing land usage into a mapping scheme that ignored nuances of place and failed to accurately reflect agricultural practice. In making society more “legible” to centralized managers, Scott asserts in example after example, the state frequently obliterates local knowledge and practice, ignores critical context, and imposes harmful monocultures.

Why is this interesting?

It is when this tendency is coupled with modern scientific hubris that it reaches its most dangerous form. At its core, Seeing Like A State is an assault on “authoritarian high modernism”—a faith whose patron saints, as identified by Scott, include “Henri Comte de Saint-Simon, Le Corbusier, Walter Rathenau, Robert McNamara, Robert Moses, Jean Monnet, the Shah of Iran, David Lilienthal, Vladimir I. Lenin, Leon Trotsky, and Julius Nyerere.” The German foresters and French surveyors were, at the end of the day, simply looking for ways to make the chores of bureaucracy easier. Their 20th Century counterparts, by contrast, tended to be of a less pragmatic cast—rationalist ideologues driven by a messianic desire to remake society from first principles and to impose upon it an aesthetic order. In this respect, it’s easy to draw parallels to the sort of Silicon Valley utopianism exemplified by deeply flawed CEOs like Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk, whose unquestioning belief in the technopoly has produced powerful products that are reshaping the world in decidedly un-utopian ways.

I would argue that Seeing Like A State belongs to a tradition of modern political philosophy that emphasizes pragmatism, pluralism, and real-world observation over ivory tower ideology—“the political, not the metaphysical,” to paraphrase philosopher, John Rawls. Another notable exponent of this approach is philosopher Elizabeth Anderson, whose thinking, as described in a recent New Yorker profile, holds that:

...we shouldn’t commit ourselves to an ideal system of any sort, whether socialist or libertarian, because a model set in motion like a Swiss watch will become a trap as soon as circumstances change. Instead, we must be flexible. We must remain alert. We must solve problems collaboratively, in the moment, using society’s ears and eyes and the best tools that we can find.

In a similar vein, Scott concludes Seeing Like A State with an argument for what he calls “métis”—a mode of knowledge that respects intuition, experience, local practice, and case-by-case reasoning in contrast to the scientific imperiousness of high modernism. As a counterpoint to Prussian forestry, for example, Scott offers the Japanese approach to erosion management—a complex ongoing dialog between forester and forest in which “no more is attempted than Nature has already done in the region.” Japanese forestry, Scott explains, is always about “the art of one valley”—about engaging with the specifics and changing dynamics of individual situations rather than dealing in broad generalizations based on reductionist models, grand theories, or ideological visions. Such humility may not be the stuff of stirring manifestos, but lasting progress, as Scott shows, requires us to confront the world as it is—not merely as we wish it to be. (BA)

Quick Links:

• The new silent majority: People who don't tweet (NRB)

• Ukraine authorities say seized Russian tanks don’t need to be declared on tax form (NRB)

• Nice follow-up to the recent Media Probe Edition from WITI contributor Matt Locke: The New Patterns of Culture: Slow, Fast & Spiky (NRB)

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Thanks for reading,

Noah (NRB) & Colin (CJN) & Buzz (BA)

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