{"id":52374,"date":"2020-01-03T01:00:58","date_gmt":"2020-01-03T06:00:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=52374"},"modified":"2020-01-02T10:09:14","modified_gmt":"2020-01-02T15:09:14","slug":"qotd-against-the-grain","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2020\/01\/03\/qotd-against-the-grain\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: <em>Against The Grain<\/em>"},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote><p><a href=\"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/QotD-thumbnail-400x400.png\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" style=\"float:left; padding: 0px 15px 0px 0px\" src=\"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/QotD-thumbnail-400x400.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"400\" height=\"400\" class=\"alignleft size-full wp-image-48672\" srcset=\"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/QotD-thumbnail-400x400.png 400w, https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/QotD-thumbnail-400x400-150x150.png 150w, https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/QotD-thumbnail-400x400-50x50.png 50w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 400px) 100vw, 400px\" \/><\/a>Someone on <em>SSC<\/em> Discord summarized James Scott&#8217;s <em>Against The Grain<\/em> as &#8220;basically 300 pages of calling wheat a fascist&#8221;. I have only two qualms with this description. First, the book is more like 250 pages; the rest is just endnotes. Second, &#8220;fascist&#8221; isn&#8217;t quite the right aspersion to use here.<\/p>\n<p><em>Against The Grain<\/em> should be read as a prequel to Scott&#8217;s most famous work, <em>Seeing Like A State<\/em>. <em>SLaS<\/em> argued that much of what we think of as &#8220;progress&#8221; towards a more orderly world \u2013 like Prussian scientific forestry, or planned cities with wide streets \u2013 didn&#8217;t make anyone better off or grow the economy. It was &#8220;progress&#8221; only from a state&#8217;s-eye perspective of wanting everything to be legible to top-down control and taxation. He particularly criticizes the High Modernists, Le Corbusier-style architects who replaced flourishing organic cities with grandiose but sterile rectangular grids.<\/p>\n<p><em>Against the Grain<\/em> extends the analysis from the 19th century all the way back to the dawn of civilization. If, as Samuel Johnson claimed, &#8220;The Devil was the first Whig&#8221;, <em>Against the Grain<\/em> argues that wheat was the first High Modernist.<\/p>\n<p>Scott Alexander, <a href=\"https:\/\/slatestarcodex.com\/2019\/10\/14\/book-review-against-the-grain\/\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" target=\"_blank\">&#8220;Book Review: <em>Against The Grain<\/em>&#8220;, <em>Slate Star Codex<\/em><\/a>, 2019-10-15.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Someone on SSC Discord summarized James Scott&#8217;s Against The Grain as &#8220;basically 300 pages of calling wheat a fascist&#8221;. I have only two qualms with this description. First, the book is more like 250 pages; the rest is just endnotes. Second, &#8220;fascist&#8221; isn&#8217;t quite the right aspersion to use here. Against The Grain should be [&hellip;]<\/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":[32,74,84,7,41],"tags":[712,86,457,1317],"class_list":["post-52374","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-food","category-government","category-history","category-quotations","tag-centralplanning","tag-criticism","tag-fascism","tag-lecorbusier"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-dCK","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52374","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=52374"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52374\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":53925,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52374\/revisions\/53925"}],"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=52374"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=52374"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=52374"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}