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Seeing Like a State: Difference between revisions
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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. | 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. | 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 modernism|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 === | ===[[Legibility]]: the administrative ordering of nature and society === | ||
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There is a belief that the future is somehow solvable and certain: the [[high modernism|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. | There is a belief that the future is somehow solvable and certain: the [[high modernism|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=== | ||
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{{sa}} | {{sa}} | ||
*{{br|Models.Behaving.Badly: Why Confusing Illusion with Reality can be a Disaster, on Wall Street and in Life}} | *{{br|Models.Behaving.Badly: Why Confusing Illusion with Reality can be a Disaster, on Wall Street and in Life}} | ||
*[[Diversity]] | |||
{{ref}} | {{ref}} | ||