Scott, J. C. (1998). Seeing like a state: How certain schemes to improve the human condition have failed. Yale University Press.
Introduction
- The state made society more legible by taking complex social practices, such as naming customs or land tenure customs, and created a standard format to easily record and monitor these social practices.
- Example from nature: Natural honeycombs form intricate patterns that don’t make it easy for the honey to be extracted. Artificial bee hives, on the other hand, are designed to solve the problem of the beekeeper, not the bees.
- The most tragic instances of state-initiated social engineering had the following elements: (a) administrative ordering of nature and society; (b) high modernist ideology characterized by hubris about scientific progress and the expectation that scientific order underpins social order; (c) an authoritarian state able to use its full power to execute high-modernist ideology; (d) a passive/weak society unable to resist the authoritarian state
- Any production process depends on informal practices and improvisations that cannot be captured in manuals. In fact, wholehearted adherence to the letter of the book is often one way to produce inefficiently
- Métis = The idea that true knowledge comes from practical experience, as opposed to formal deductive theory
Part 1 – State Projects of Legibility and Simplification
Chapter 1 – Nature and Space
- In fiscal forestry, the state replaces an actual tree and its myriad of possible uses with an abstract idea of a tree which can only be used as lumber or firewood.
- Early agents of the state reduced the subjects into data points for the state, without taking their local context, practices and interests into account.
- The state is incapable of knowing all that is going on at the local level.
- As long as nature was perceived as abundant, it had no monetary value, and the illegibility of its ownership was not a problem. However, the moment nature was seen as ‘natural resources’, it became scarce and there was need to establish property rights.
- Maps are designed to make the local context more legible to an outsider. For the locals, information on a map is already common knowledge.
- Simplifications conducted by state agents are static and schematic – often only capturing information from the moment that simplification was made. This is a far cry from the more fluid social phenomenon state agents are trying to model.
- Example from France in the 18th – 19th century: When state agents used the number of doors and windows on a building as a heuristic for estimating tax due from a residence, the locals started building houses with fewer doors and windows.
Chapter 2 – Cities, People and Language
- The aerial view of a town built during the Middle Ages would not have had any discernable geometric form. This, however, did not mean it was confusing to the inhabitants.
- Illegibility of the local context provides a measure of safety from outsiders – who typically would need a guide to navigate the locality.
- Order seen from the ‘grand plan’ bears no resemblance to the order of life as experienced by the locals.
- Legibility isn’t all bad. The legibility of 19th century Paris, for instance, was vital to the work of public health hygienists in preventing the spread of communicable diseases. But bad state actors can also take advantage of this, e.g., Nazi Germany took advantage of legibility to round up Jews.
- The invention of permanent, inherited surnames was a state measure for making the local context more legible for the purpose of collecting tax and drafting people into the army.
- The imposition of a singular official language is often the first step that makes the rest possible. When the state mandates an official language, the local context is devalued and those who are quick to master the official language benefit from the shift in power (e.g., English speakers in colonial Nigeria)
- Even the creation of roads was for the benefit of the state agents, rather than the needs or movements of the locals.
Part 2 – Transforming Visions
Chapter 3 – Authoritarian High Modernism
- Much of state-enforced social engineering efforts of the 19th and 20th century were due to progressive and often reactionary elites.
- One precondition for high modernism was the reframing of society as a separate object that could be studied by the state.
- The Polish sociologist, Zygmunt Bauman’s useful metaphor of the garden: The garden is man’s attempt to impose his vision of order, utility and beauty on nature. What grows in a garden is a subset of what can potentially grow there.
- High modernist beliefs are heavily future-oriented. The past is considered an impediment to the present and the present is the launching pad to the high modernist ideals. In practice, however, high-modernist plans are often abandoned which suggests that they are founded on poor assumptions.
- High modernist beliefs are inspired by ‘productivism’ which is the idea that human labor is a mechanical system that can be broken down into energy transfers, motion and the physics of work.
- Productivism appeals to the right and center of the political spectrum because it promises an increase in worker output. It also appeals to the political left because it promises to replace the capitalist with technical expertise or the state official.
- Three factors resisting high modernist ideals: (a) belief that there is a sphere of private human activity where state agents should not interfere; (b) the private sector is too complex to be managed by state actors; (c) the presence of working institutions.
Chapter 4 – The High-Modernist City: An Experiment and a Critique
- No one…knows better than you that the city must never be confused with the words that describe it – Italo Calvino (Invisible Cities)
- It is easy to plan an urban zone if it had just one function. This works for roads, not homes. For instance, a kitchen cannot be reduced to ‘a place for food preparation’ because someone can decide to hang out with friends/family while they are cooking.
- In high modernism, the wisdom of the ‘master plan’ is elevated above all other social institutions. The danger of this is that human problems of urban design do not have a singular solution. The solution often depends on the local context.
- By designing Brasilia the way they did, the planners were also assuming that the elimination of disorder would lead to less disease, crime and pollution. Inadvertently, the designed the city to be inhabited by an ‘abstract’ man who did not exist in reality.
- In her book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs argued that the tidy, geometric look of a city does not mean that it will meet the needs of the residents. Visual order is very different from functional order. The order of a thing should be determined from the purpose it serves.
- Another excellent metaphor: An army on the parade ground is visually orderly but almost useless in the thick of a battle.
- Social order is not the result of architectural order, or technical expertise. Rather, it is a function of an almost unconscious network of controls initiated by the people in the local context.
- Jane Jacobs tells the story of an older man trying to abduct/seduce an 8- or 9-year-old girl. The crime couldn’t take place because there were many onlookers who could potentially intervene. No state agent was necessary.
- Jane Jacobs also argued that formal public institutions of order function successfully when these informal avenues of social order are in place.
- Intricate mingling of different uses are not a form of chaos. On the contrary, they represent a complex and highly developed form of order – Jane Jacobs.
- “…we are now so prone to confuse great building projects with great social achievements. We will have to admit that it is beyond the scope of anyone’s imagination to create community. We must learn to cherish the communities we have, they are hard to come by. ‘Fix the buildings, but leave the people…” – Stanley Tankel (1957)
- Flaws of high modernism: (a) planners cannot predict the future; (b) a satisfactory neighborhood cannot be created without input from the people living in that context.
Chapter 5 – The Revolutionary Party: A Plan and a Diagnosis
- The words ‘mass’ or ‘masses’ also connotes the idea of mere quantity without order, cohesion or identity.
- Once the term ‘masses’ is used to describe people, any differences in their history, political experience, ideology, ethnicity, religion and language are ignored.
- Sometimes, Lenin used the contamination metaphor more literally and referred to the ‘masses’ with words borrowed from hygiene and the germ theory of disease.
- Both the Communist and the Capitalist see the ‘masses’ as vital means for productions. The Capitalist wants the masses for efficient production of goods, while Communist wants to deploy them for efficient revolution. The Communist and Capitalist are more similar than they are willing to admit!
- An assumption forming the foundation of Lenin’s text ‘State and Revolution’ was that the social life of the masses can be organized either by the business owners (bourgeoise) or the Party – but with no input from the masses themselves
- Lenin explicitly called for a ‘unity of will’ enforced through diabolic means: ‘But how can strict unity of will be ensured? By thousands subordinating their will to the will of one…’
- The data that informed Lenin’s high modernist ideals for agriculture did not originate from Russia. Rather, they came from Austria and Germany which were more technologically developed than Russia at the time.
- Lenin strived to have empirical evidence fit with his theory. For instance, when small-scale Russian farmers were producing at high levels, Lenin claimed that this could only be because the farmers were overworking and starving themselves
- Unlike Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg used metaphors that were complex and organic, where the whole cannot survive if a part dies.
- Aleksandra Kollontay, another Luxemburg-esque Communist, proposed that state officials who had no practical factory experience should not hold leadership positions until they had some manual experience, i.e., skin in game.
Part 3 – The Social Engineering of Rural Settlement and Production
- States are often younger than the societies they want to administer.
- At the beginning of the 20th century Rubber boom, British officials kept favoring rubber produced from estates with better scientific management – even though the rubber produced by the smallholders were more efficient and profitable.
Chapter 6 – Soviet Collectivization, Capitalist Dreams
- Ernst Gellner argued that there were 2 facets of the Enlightenment – one asserting the sovereignty of the individual and the other, emphasizing the rational authority of experts.
- Soviet Russia wasn’t merely interested in the physical transformation of society. They were also after a cultural transformation of the individual.
- The advantage of large industrial farms over the smaller ones wasn’t efficiency and profitability, but political and economic clout. For their part, the small farms also had the advantage of being more flexible and adaptable to changing economic situations, as opposed to the larger farms
- Soviet Russia leaders invited 3 Americans (Wilson, Ware and Riggin) to plan a 500000-acre wheat farm. The Americans did this from Chicago without ever setting foot on the actual farm in Russia. The project eventually failed (although it had high production in the first few years)
- In practice, local collectivized farms in Soviet Russia often appealed their state-mandated quotas because they know if they met it, the state would raise the quotas in the next round of procurement
- Soviet collectivization failed at attaining its high modernist ideals – despite high investments in research and infrastructure. This was due to: (a) unmotivated workers forced to work without incentives; (b) central state planning oblivious to local context; (c) political system didn’t give state agents the incentive to negotiate or adapt to the local population.
Chapter 7 – Compulsory Villagization in Tanzania: Aesthetics and Miniaturization
- Social engineering is only possible when it considers the responses and cooperation of real humans.
- Local Tanzanian farmers used polycropping/relay cropping techniques where they interplanted annual crops (e.g., coffee) with perennial crops (e.g., bananna). Despite empirical evidence demonstrating polycropping was more productive than monocropping, administrators and technical experts still had a preference for monocropping.
- Tanzanian state agents were often rewarded based on how many ujammas (forced resettlement schemes) they formed. Hence, the people affected by the forced relocation were not as important as the number of ujamma villages formed.
- The ujamma scheme was not as destructive as Soviet Russia because the Tanzanian state was relatively weak in comparison, and state agents were more reluctant to use force on the peasant farmers.
- ‘Ideas cannot digest reality’ – Jean-Paul Sartre
- It is easier to change an organizational chart (formal structure) than to change how an organization operates (its practices). That is why handbooks and guidelines cannot fully explain how an institution operates. That is also why it is possible for workers to go on strike by following the ‘letter of the law’ rather than its spirit.
- A planned institution often generates a ‘dark twin’ that fulfils the needs not satisfied by the planned institution. For instance, slums tend to provide services personnel (e.g., cleaners, cooks) who cater to the needs of the elite who do administrative work in the planned city.
Chapter 8 – Taming Nature: An Agriculture of Legibility and Simplicity
- In his 1985 book, ‘Indigenous Agricultural Revolution’, Paul Richards argued that the results of modernized farming in Africa has been so poor that the slower, traditional approach needs to be reconsidered.
- Traditional farmers are often knowledgeable about the variety of crops that can be grown in their local context. This knowledge is important for improving their chances of survival in a hostile, unpredictable environment.
- Modernist agriculture increased the selection of only plant species that were responsive to fertilizers, which had the consequence of reducing the variety of crops planted.
- Variety was further reduced by selectively breeding crops that were easier to plant and harvest mechanically. Taste and nutrient quality were treated as qualities secondary to machine compatibility.
- Genetic uniformity makes crops susceptible to epidemics. Diversity, on the other hand, constrains the likelihood of such epidemics.
- West African colonialists saw agricultural practices of the locals as sloppy and visually disorderly.
- Increased use of pesticides is due to the rise of pests as genetic uniformity of mechanized farms increased.
- Polyculture is likely to lead to Hicksian income (i.e., income that allows the same level of utility – even though price increases). It is also antifragile – it can absorb environmental stress without being damaged or devastated.
- The proper test for any agricultural practice is whether or not it worked in the environment concerned.
- The NPK fertilizer, while a great scientific discovery, could have iatrogenic effects. For instance, it can increase soil alkalization which ironically leads to soil infertility.
- Robert Chambers (1983): “Indigenous agricultural knowledge, despite being ignored or overridden by consultant experts, is the single largest knowledge resource not yet mobilized in the development enterprise”
- The logic of actual farming involves an innovative, practice-grounded response to variability in the environment, while the logic of scientific agriculture adapts the environment to centralizing models and formulas
- “Instead of learning what the local conditions were and then making agricultural practice fit these conditions better, he had been trying to ‘improve’ local practice so that it would conform to abstract standards” – George Yaney (The Urge to Mobilize, 1982)
- Those who simplify the environment to the point where rules can explain a lot – have a lot of power in that environment
- Traditional farmers are open to learning from the work of science, while researchers tend to be unwilling to learn from the informal experiments of traditional practices.
- Traditional farmers are not merely experimenting with different farming practices. They have skin in game – their livelihood depends on the results of those experiments.
- Practical knowledge is not codified according to the scientific method.
Part 4 – The Missing Link
Chapter 9 – Thin Simplifications and Practical Knowledge: Métis
- Formal order is dependent on informal processes.
- Métis: The wide array of practical skills and acquired intelligence in responding to a constantly changing natural and human environment.
- A firefighter’s job cannot be reduced to a routine, like what plays out with a clerk. A firefighter begins with the unpredictable and then devises the techniques for addressing the issues.
- Local knowledge is partisan. This is because the holder of such knowledge will be directly affected by outcomes related to that knowledge. In other words, they have skin in game. Métis is typically exhibited by those with skin in game
- Aristotle recognized that some domains cannot be reduced into a system of rational rules, e.g., navigation and medicine, where experience is more important than logical deductions.
- The litmus test for Métis is practical success
- Innovations of Métis often involve a recombination of existing elements.
- Ingredients of practical knowledge: (a) pressing need; (b) promising leads that worked in another context; (c) army of freelance experimenters willing to try anything; (d) time to see experiments’ results; (e) sharing experimental results.
- Downsides of Métis: (a) not democratically distributed and access to experience may be restricted (often due to social status); (b) can lead to inequalities because communities will disproportionately depend on those with Métis.
- Ironically, standardized knowledge addresses the downsides of depending sole on Métis.
Conclusion
- Rules of thumb for development planning: (a) Take small steps; (b) Favor interventions that can be easily reversed; (c) Choose plans that give room for unforeseen second-order effects; (d) Plan with the assumption that those with involved/affected will develop insight to improve the design.
- High modernism isn’t all bad because: (a) it replaced some unjust/oppressive local practices; (b) it brought new egalitarian ideas, e.g., equality before the law, rights
- When we replace natural capital with cultivated natural capital, we gain immediate productivity, as well as maintenance expenses and less redundancy, resilience and stability.