Seeing Like a State

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Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed — James C. Scott
This one goes to the top of JC’s 2020 lockdown re-reads. Okay, it was published in 1998, so we’re cottoning on a bit late — and while it addresses only the “high modernism” of modern government, the read-across to the capitalist market economy, and beyond that into the modern large corporate shrieks from every page. These are all ideas we should all stop and recognise, but — being citizens of a “prostrate civil society” — either can’t or won’t.

• Legibility: the need for a central government to be able to “read” (hence “make legible”) and therefore effectively “get a handle on” and therefore administrate the vast wealth of detail of its population, which it does through techniques like permanently naming people (then, literally, assigning them surnames: now, identity cards and the chip that is shortly to be implanted in all of our foreheads), standard weights and measures, cadastral surveys of land holdings and population registers; systems of freehold ownership, conventions of language and legal discourse and the design of cities and transport networks — to create a standard grid that could be measured and monitored. All seems calculated to make the population more legible and thus manipulable. This allowed taxation, conscription, and enhanced state. these state simplifications were like an “abridged map”, representing only the slice of society that interested the administrator. But they were not just maps: they enabled the society to be remade in a way that suited the administrator. Thus, a reflexive feedback loop.

There is a belief that the future is somehow solvable and certain: the high modernist disposition therefore is that the certainty of a better future justifies the disruption and short-term adverse side-effects of putting in place a grand plan to get there. The alternative is the iterative, ground-up organic adjustment of people on the ground. This is both far more effective — assuming you have teh right people on the ground — and far scarier for the administrators: they have less control over progress, less of a line of sight over it, less therefore to do, and a harder time justifying the rent they extract (in a government, this is called a “tax”; in a corporate, it is executive compensation) for providing their administration.

Scott sees four elements necessary for a full-fledged disaster:

• The administrative ordering of nature and society: as per above. Scott is persuasive that we lose something critical when we simplify in our yen for clear description, which state officials cannot but do. Trying to covert local customs — “a living, negotiated tissue of practices which are continually being adapted to new ecological and social circumstances — including, of course, power relations” — to unalterable laws loses subtlety and micro=adjustments that these customs are continually experiencing.
• A “high-modernist” ideology: a muscle-bound self-confidence in expansion of production; our growing ability to satisfy human needs and master nature (including human nature) “and above all the rational design of social order commensurate with the scientific understanding of natural laws”. It translates to a rational, ordered, geometric (hence “legible”) view of the word and depends on central state vision to bring about big projects (dams, agricultural progress
• Authoritarian state: An authoritarian state able and willing to use coercive power to bring high modernist ideals into being.
• Prostrate civil society: A subjugated population that lacks capacity to resist authoritarian implementation of high-modernist plans

• Metis