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 — are you reading, boss? — shrieks from every page. These are profound ideas we should all stop and recognise, but — being, well, citizens of a “prostrate civil society” — either we can’t or we won’t.

Seeing Like a State is a tour de force — I can’t believe I actually said that in a book review, but there it is — against the will to bureaucracy, and takes as its thesis how well-intended patrician governorship can, in specific circumstances, lead to utter disaster. The examples Scott cites in his book are legion including many that are familiar (the Soviet Five Year Plan for example). One could, and some have, criticised Scott for being anecdotal in his approach: there is no question he has selected the best examples to illustrate its thesis, and it must therefore suffer from confirmation bias.

But that said, Scott’s thesis, when set out, is so familiar, so plausible and its exhortations so wise, that it is hard to be bothered by his lack of empirical rigour. Scott is providing a counter-narrative, and it is useful in itself.

Disaster from State administration is not inevitable, but the same four conditions are present whenever disaster occurs. Those four conditions are a will to the legible, a high modernist ideology, an authoritarian state with the means to impose it, and a subjugated population without the means (or inclination) to resist.

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, land and resources. It does this by, in its “statey” way, narratising a bafflingly complex system as a model: it assigns its citizens permanent identities (in the middle ages, literally, by giving them surnames: now, identity cards and the chips that are shortly to be implanted in our foreheads; it decrees standard weights and measures for all times and places; 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 abridgment: it represents only the slice of society that interests the administrator, which would be harmless enough those measures did not in turn permanently impact how citizens interact with each other and their environment. So, society came to be remade to suit the administrator. Thus, a reflexive feedback loop.

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.

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

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.

Of course the cost of an ideology that seeks to regularise and unitise is diversity. 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.

That diversity and inclusion is the cause célèbre du jour hardly falsifies this observation, especially given the current institutional approach to delivering it, which chimes with this desire for narratising legibility and high-modernism: firstly, diversity inherently ought, you would think, to be difficult to pin down, its manifestations being naturally — well — diverse. Yet, to get a handle on it, organisations must make it legible. This they do by defining it in a strikingly limited way (by reference to religious, ethnic, sexual and gender identification, but not, say, to education-level, socio-economic background, nationality, political identification, pastime, or life skill). Then they seek to gather ethnic, sexual and gender data from their staff, so that they can present statistics about their changing diversity. Thus, diversity is homogenised, parameterised and regularised. Sounds a bit like an Aldous Huxley novel, doesn’t it? Feels a bit like one too.

An authoritarian state

An authoritarian state able and willing to use coercive power to bring high modernist ideals into being.

A prostrate civil society

A subjugated population that lacks capacity to resist authoritarian implementation of high-modernist plans

• Metis

See also

• Models.Behaving.Badly: Why Confusing Illusion with Reality can be a Disaster, on Wall Street and in Life
• Diversity