{"id":14439,"date":"2012-04-04T08:37:24","date_gmt":"2012-04-04T12:37:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=14439"},"modified":"2023-06-14T10:53:42","modified_gmt":"2023-06-14T14:53:42","slug":"the-authoritarian-high-modernist-recipe-for-failure","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2012\/04\/04\/the-authoritarian-high-modernist-recipe-for-failure\/","title":{"rendered":"The authoritarian High-Modernist recipe for failure"},"content":{"rendered":"

Charles Stross linked to this older post at Ribbonfarm<\/em><\/a> discussing “how to think like a state”:<\/p>\n

\n

James C. Scott\u2019s fascinating and seminal book, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed<\/em>, examines how, across dozens of domains, ranging from agriculture and forestry, to urban planning and census-taking, a very predictable failure pattern keeps recurring. <\/p>\n

[. . .]<\/p>\n

Scott calls the thinking style behind the failure mode \u201cauthoritarian high modernism,\u201d but as we\u2019ll see, the failure mode is not limited to the brief intellectual reign of high modernism (roughly, the first half of the twentieth century).<\/p>\n

Here is the recipe:<\/p>\n

    \n
  • Look at a complex and confusing reality, such as the social dynamics of an old city<\/li>\n
  • Fail to understand all the subtleties of how the complex reality works<\/li>\n
  • Attribute that failure to the irrationality of what you are looking at, rather than your own limitations<\/li>\n
  • Come up with an idealized blank-slate vision of what that reality ought<\/em> to look like<\/li>\n
  • Argue that the relative simplicity and platonic orderliness<\/em> of the vision represents rationality<\/li>\n
  • Use authoritarian power to impose that vision, by demolishing the old reality if necessary<\/li>\n
  • Watch your rational Utopia fail horribly<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n

    The big mistake in this pattern of failure is projecting your subjective lack of comprehension onto the object you are looking at, as \u201cirrationality.\u201d We make this mistake because we are tempted by a desire for legibility<\/em>.<\/p>\n

    [. . .]<\/p>\n

    Central to Scott\u2019s thesis is the idea of legibility. He explains how he stumbled across the idea while researching efforts by nation states to settle or \u201csedentarize\u201d nomads, pastoralists, gypsies and other peoples living non-mainstream lives:<\/p>\n

      \n

      The more I examined these efforts at sedentarization, the more I came to see them as a state\u2019s attempt to make a society legible, to arrange the population in ways that simplified the classic state functions of taxation, conscription, and prevention of rebellion. Having begun to think in these terms, I began to see legibility as a central problem in statecraft. The pre-modern state was, in many crucial respects, particularly blind; it knew precious little about its subjects, their wealth, their landholdings and yields, their location, their very identity. It lacked anything like a detailed \u201cmap\u201d of its terrain and its people.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/ul>\n

      The book is about the 2-3 century long process by which modern states reorganized the societies they governed, to make them more legible to the apparatus of governance. The state is not actually interested in the rich functional structure and complex behavior of the very organic entities that it governs (and indeed, is part of, rather than \u201cabove\u201d). It merely views them as resources that must be organized in order to yield optimal returns according to a centralized, narrow, and strictly utilitarian logic.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

      It’s a long post, but it is well worth reading. In a couple of throwaway examples, it rather cleverly ties the Indian caste system (as made “legible” by the Raj) and the entire Roman empire to Scott’s failure model.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

      Charles Stross linked to this older post at Ribbonfarm discussing “how to think like a state”: James C. Scott\u2019s fascinating and seminal book, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, examines how, across dozens of domains, ranging from agriculture and forestry, to urban planning and census-taking, a very […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,84,7,10],"tags":[712,622,1515,322],"class_list":["post-14439","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bureaucracy","category-government","category-history","category-liberty","tag-centralplanning","tag-ideology","tag-modernism","tag-nannystate"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-3KT","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14439","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14439"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14439\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":82878,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14439\/revisions\/82878"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14439"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14439"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14439"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}