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

No battle — Tarutino, Borodino, or Austerlitz — takes place as those who planned it anticipated. That is an essential condition.

—Tolstoy, War and Peace

In sum, the legibility of a society provides the capacity for large-scale social engineering, high-modernist ideology provides the desire, the authoritarian state provides the determination to act on that de­sire, and an incapacitated civil society provides the leveled social ter­rain on which to build.

—James C. Scott

This one goes to the top of JC’s 2020 lockdown re-reads. It was published in 1998, so it’s a bit late to get excited — but while it addresses the “high modernism” of 20th Century government, the read-across to the capitalist market economy, and beyond that into the interior workings of any large corporation — are you reading, boss? — shrieks from every page. These are profound ideas we all should recognise, and which could transform the effectiveness of what we all do, but — being, well, citizens of a “prostrate civil society” — either we can’t or we won’t.

Exactly why there is this collective affliction of wilful blindness to our administrative compulsion is a great, unexplored topic of our age. That so many, great and small, have so much to lose by exploring it may explain the mystery.

Seeing Like a State takes as its thesis how well-intended patrician government can, in some circumstances, lead to utter disaster. While Scott’s examples are legion, one could — and some do — criticise him for his anecdotal approach: he has curated examples that best fit his thesis, and it therefore suffers from insoluble confirmation bias. That may be true, but I don’t think it matters, for Scott’s thesis is so familiar, so plausible and its exhortations so consistent with other theories in adjacent fields, that it is hard to be bothered by a lack of empirical rigour. This stuff all stands to reason. Data is not its value: Scott’s narrative is its value, as a counter-narrative to modern statist (and corporate) orthodoxy — that some gilded superman, sitting at the top of the heap magically pulls levers for the betterment of all — and that, in itself, is valuable and enlightening.

In any case, Scott does not say that top-down bureaucratic disaster is inevitable, but notes the same four conditions are present wherever we find it: a will to bend nature — and the polity — to the administrator’s agenda; a “high modernist” ideology that holds that that all problems can be anticipated and solved in time with the necessary organisation, application and empirical rigour; an authoritarian state, with machinery to impose its ideological modernist vision; and a subjugated citizenry (or staff) without the means (or inclination) to resist the machinations of the administrator.

These qualities, of course, pertain in any autocratic polity. Stalinist Russia, Maoist China and latter-day North Korea fit the pattern exactly. But so do most modern multinational corporations. If you are interested in how not to run one, Seeing Like a State is worth a close read.

Legibility: the administrative ordering of nature and society

Any government must be able to “read” and thus “get a handle on” — hence, “make legible” — and so administrate the vast sprawling detail and myriad of interconnections between its citizens, lands and resources. It does this by, in its “statey” way, narratising a bafflingly complex system into a thin, idealistic model: it assigns its citizens permanent identities (in the middle ages, literally, by giving them surnames: now, identity cards and the, er, chips that are shortly to be implanted in our foreheads); it decrees standard weights and measures for all times and places (we may have proceeded by local customs and conventions; commissions cadastral surveys of the land so it can collect taxes; it records land holdings, registers births, deaths and marriages, imposes conventions of language and legal discourse designs cities and transport networks: in effect, to create a standard grid that could be measured, monitored and understood from the bird’s eye view of city hall. A population that legible is manipulable.

This cost of this legibility is abridgement: it represents only the slice of society that interests the administrator, which would be harmless enough those measures did not in turn impact how citizens interact with each other and their environment. But, as we know they do. Citizens account for their income to optimise their tax position. When adminstrators levied a window tax — reasoning that the number of windows is proportionate to the size of a building, and therefore a fair proxy — citizens redesign houses to have as few windows as possible, notwithstanding adverse consequences to the general health of the population. Modern society is shot through with similar arbitrary rules wherever government interacts with its citizenry. Through their combined effect society comes to be remade to suit the administrator, but not always in ways the administrator might have had in mind. Society is the archetypal system: arbitrarily diverting its natural stocks and flows only creates other feedback loops.

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 the subtlety and scope for micro-adjustments that these customs, if left to themselves, continually experience.

In other words, you lose something special when you atomise a complex system. Emergent properties vanish. It is a poorer, less productive thing.

High modernist ideology

This yen to regularise often comes with a “muscle-bound” self-confidence that the state can expand production, better satisfy human needs and master nature (including human nature) and centrally configure social order “commensurate with the scientific understanding of natural laws”. This is the “high-modernist” view. It translates to a rational, ordered, geometric (hence “legible”) view of a world which depends on the benign guiding vision of the state to bring about big projects.

Now those infinitesimal interconnections and illegible relations are not just “invisible” to the state programme but inimical to it. Natural forests are replaced with grid-planted Norfolk pines: swathes of the unwanted ecosystem — which provide a richness and benefit to participants in that ecosystem which the state cannot “see” — are rejected because they don’t fit the model. But they can play valuable and vital roles in the ecosystem — even for the Norfolk pines. The deterministic belief that they are not necessary will eventually come back to haunt you. “Nature,” as Dr. Ian Malcolm put it in Jurassic Park, “finds a way”.

The high modernist believes the future is somehow solvable and certain, and the certainty of that better future justifies the disruption and short-term adverse side-effects of putting in place a grand plan to get there. The alternative to this approach is an iterative, ground-up, organic interaction of people on the ground, using their judgment and experience to best solve their own problems and improve the general lot as they personally perceive it. Their read of the landscape will be necessarily far richer and more detailed than the state’s. If you have the right people on the ground, this is both far more effective for society, and far scarier for administrators: they have less control over progress, less sight of it, (therefore) less to do, and a harder job justifying the rent they extract (in a government, this is called a “tax”; in a corporation, it is executive compensation) for providing their “vital” administration.

Once the desire for comprehensive urban planning is established, the logic of uniformity and regimentation is well nigh inexorable. Cost effectiveness contributes to this tendency. Every concession to diversity is likely to entail an increase in time and budgetary cost.

Another cost of the high modernist ideology that seeks to regularise and unitise is diversity in the things so regularised.

That diversity and inclusion is the cause célèbre du jour, in the public and private sectors, hardly falsifies this observation. It just sharpens the irony, since the typical approach to delivering diversity chimes with this desire for narratising legibility and high-modernism.

Diversity ought, you’d think, to be hard to pin down, its manifestations being naturally — well — diverse. But to get a handle on diversity in their populations, organisations must make diversity legible. They do this by defining it in a strikingly limited, and curiously homogenous, way. They seeking to gather data from their staff on that limited metric — to make it more legible, so that the organisation can propagate statistics about its “improving” diversity. Thus, “diversity” as the administration knows it is a formalised, homogenised, parameterised and regularised second-order derivative, and no attention is paid to the outcome of this diversity (compared with the illegible diversity it replaced) at all. As long as the firm looks diverse, and talks like it’s diverse, and everyone fits neatly, in the mandated proportions, into one of the five boxes it has prescribed for them, it has achieved its goal.

Sounds a bit like an Aldous Huxley novel, doesn’t it? Feels a bit like one too.

An authoritarian state and prostrate civil society

Scott’s last two criteria are probably opposite sides of the same coin: an authoritarian state, able and willing to coerce the society it manages to bring its high modernist ideals into being, and a subjugated population lacking the capacity to resist the implementation of these plans.

Scott was writing in 1998, a few years after the collapse of communism and in an era when Francis Fukuyama and others were declaring the end of history, all battles won and so forth, so was a little shoe-shuffly about this. He needn’t have been! Not only have we since seen the return of authoritarian governments and prostrate populations — for posterity, I write from the ninth month of a government-mandated nationwide lockdown — but it has always been true of the corporate sector, which is resolutely organised to be maximally authoritarian and hierarchical and where you, dear employee, are administrated and ordered like no other participant on Earth.

Every “meaningful” aspect of your performance and your role is, at some level, reduced to a parameterised data point: ID, location, salary, rank, position, performance, reporting line, holiday entitlement, sick-leave, service catalog, objectives — let me know when you want me to stop. As for the high modernist ideal, well, this entire site is a paean to that, but “strategy” as we mutely receive it, seems entirely predicated on a reductionist ideology that we can solve all conundrums in our landscape and then proceed sedately and without the need to be troubled by turbulent subject matter experts thereafter.

Given our recent history you would think our overlords ought to know better than that.

Metis

Speaking of subject matter experts brings us nicely to Scott’s closing, where he ruminates on the concept, missing from high modernist canon, of metis. This is hard to describe — folk wisdom, knowhow, Odyssean cunning — but in the corporate world it struck me as most resembling expertise. Ingenuity, problem-solving, lateral thinking; smarts for figuring out what to do on the fly if you are in a jam. This is something that the high modernist programme seeks abolish — the theory being that loose cannon employees wandering around making snap decisions is potentially catastrophic, and jams of this sort can and should be avoided by appropriate planning: thus, subject matter experts aren’t needed.

There are two interesting observations here. The first is that metis is much more efficient. You could — if you accept the reductionist stance — solve any problem with the right calculations, but the necessary data and processing power would be huge: but practical knowledge — metis — is “as economical and accurate as it needs to be, no more and no less, for addressing the problem at hand.”

This is the difference, says Scott, between Red Adair and an articled clerk. There are some skills you cannot acquire except through experience. Likewise, learning to sail, ride a bike, or play a musical instrument. You could spend as much time as you like with textbooks, but you will never master riding a bike until you have done enough practical rehearsal.

Which brings us to the last connection: that to complexity theory, systems analysis and normal accidents theory. All of these come to the same conclusion: if you are dealing with complex systems, especially tightly-coupled ones with non-linear interactions, you cannot solve these with algorithms, no matter how much data and no matter how sophisticated is your conceptual scheme. The only way to manage these risks is with experts on the ground, who are empowered to exercise their judgment and make provisional decisions, and to adjust them as a situation unfolds. That is, with metis. If your conceptual scheme has systematically eliminated metis from your operation, you may carry on in times of peace and equability, but should a crisis come, you are stuffed.

See also

• Models.Behaving.Badly: Why Confusing Illusion with Reality can be a Disaster, on Wall Street and in Life
• Normal Accidents: Living with High-Risk Technologies
• Diversity