FULL CITATION:
James Scott (1998):Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven: Yale University Press: 0300070160).
FWIW: Brad DeLong has a far better review than I could write here (even if his critique focuses on Hayek instead of Heidegger): http://econ161.berkeley.edu/Econ_Articles/Reviews/Seeing_Like_a_State.html
This book has been around for a while, and everybody seems still to have something to say about it. I was a bit surprised how much I like about it. Perhaps it’s because as one deeply influenced by Arendt, which is to say as one deeply affected by Heidegger, I was quite interested and surprised to see someone build a theory around thinking an alternative to technē, which may mean to technological thinking of a certain sort altogether. So Scott attempts to create an alternative, too.
A bit of history: recall that those in the room in Marburg in the winter of 1924-25 when Heidegger delivered his seminal lectures on Plato’s Sophist was a Who’s Who list of 20th Century intellectuals (to name a few, Arendt, Gadamer, Lowith, and Strauss). The lectures are noteworthy in that these students tended to become rather committed Platonists or Aristotelians (and ne’er the twain shall meet…). The lectures are also noteworthy in that these lectures, ostensibly on Plato, contained a vital excursus on Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics, focusing particularly on Book VI. It is in this section of the book, which deals in great detail with human virtues, that Aristotle explains that the chief intellectual virtue (which is to say, the most virtuous of virtues) is phronēsis, translated into English by way of Latin as prudence but perhaps better understood as practical wisdom. For those familiar with the Serenity Prayer, phronēsis might be thought of as “the wisdom to know the difference”.
In a nutshell, phronēsis is the sort of wisdom that comes from experience, the capacity to make good judgments in a pinch (i.e., precisely the capacity one would seek in leaders). Phronēsis, then, is taken by many to be the essential trait of democratic citizens (one hopes that wisdom guides the decisions of voters, jury peers, and elected officials). And phronēsis should always be understood in contradistinction to its practical counterpart, technē, which is technological knowledge (or in rough terms a kind of knowing and acting that bridges the gap between theoretical understanding and production, i.e., instrumental rationality. In a nutshell, the chief problem confronting modernity, from Heidegger’s perspective, was overcoming the provenance of technē. Why? Because human freedom is impinged when discretionary judgment (i.e., phronēsis) is eclipsed by the instrumental rationality of technē.
Why this excursus in a review of Scott’s book, you might fairly inquire? Well, when you get to the meat of Scott’s alternative, it will make some sense. So I offer some pithy quotations interspersed with comment. I’ll return to the foregoing treatment of technē in a moment.
SEEING LIKE JAMES SCOTT:
The modern gambit, as Scott describes, is the impressive march of modern science and technology. Yet, those techniques, when applied to the domain of human affairs, create problems. Scott opens with the quintessential example, 19th Century German forestry. As the Germans attempted to maximize yield using the techniques that leveraged the power of emergent science, they created large, mono- and duo-crop swaths of conifer forests with tremendous yield for a few generations. But focusing on only a couple crops while “cleaning” the complications of underbrush to reduce fire damage and ease access for lumberjacks, led to rapid exhaustion of the forests (from lack of biodiversity). The myopic focus on productivity, steered by bureaucratic scientists far from the actual field, lasered in on an aspect of the forest and optimized it with impressive near-term results, only to discover that forests are complex systems, each element of which sustains itself on the basis on symbioses and intricate interrelationships. No science can reveal and comprehend these intricacies in their entirety. Yet scientific forestry management attempted to do just that.
Thus Scott reveals his main point: several features of modernity combine to create massive failures of hubris akin to German forestry (Scott focuses on the economic, social, and natural devastation that occurred in the wake of statist interventions such as Stalin’s collectivization). Modern tragedies are the result of 4 things: a) administrative ordering of society; b) high modernist ideology; c) authoritarian state apparati; d) a “prostrate civil society”.
At first blush, Scott’s etiology of these tragedies is not unlike that provided by the Viennese School, especially Hayek. That is to say, the modern state’s myopia is the problem for Hayek, too. The solution for Hayek, of course, is to do away with central governments and allow the unfettered market to operate unto its own logic. As we will see below, Scott’s solution is to call for an alternative mode of framing the modern gambit (not unlike Heidegger’s effort above). Of course, this appeal comes across as a rather empty formalism (“oh wow look what I read in Plato!...). But I’m getting ahead of myself.
SCOTT’S ASSESSMENT: HIGH MODERNISM TENDS TOWARD MYOPIA
Scott opposes the “imperialism of high-modernist, planned social order” (p. 6).
In framing the problem in this way, Scott taps a rich legacy of thinkers who were suspicious of the “double-bind” of the Enlightenment: on one hand, modernity appears to be liberatory and progressive, yet it contains certain tendencies toward authoritarianism. Thinkers diverge on how exactly the modern condition (or postmodern one, whatever) constrains human freedom. For example, Strauss (again, Heidegger’s student) believed that a fundamental trap of modernity was the tension between liberty and equality (which de Tocqueville made note of). Liberal democratic institutions are, as Plato and Aristotle both noted, subject to the sway of demagogues and tyrants. Horkheimer and Adorno, exiled in Hollywood from Frankfurt, symptomatized the culture industry among other ideological organs of capitalism that limit human freedom. Arendt, following Heidegger, argued that the provenance of instrumental rationality limits the need for human judgment (and thereby human agency). What all these perspectives share is a depiction of a rear-guard action of a thinking public against the encroachment (Habermas calls it “colonization”) of those organs of instrumental rationality. Scott, in this sense, continues a rhetorical tradition that stresses the dire circumstances into which we moderns find ourselves thrown.
p. 26: states seek to render particularity legible, which requires disregarding local, historically-situated for universals.
The basic thrust of Scott’s particular adaptation of this skeptical trope is against the imperial inclinations of centralized authority. In its efforts to account for the vastness of their domains, states are forced constantly to simplify and generalize. This is quite similar in thrust and tenor to the critique raised by the Vienna School (i.e., Hayek and carried into the neoclassical tradition (i.e., Friedman) that the modern state is the primary cause of these ills. To be sure, Scott has a rogue’s gallery of villains, of which the state is one. He himself claims,
“Put bluntly, my bill of particulars against [the high-modernist centrally-planning social-engineering] state is by no means a case for politically unfettered market coordination as urged by Friedrich Hayek or Milton Friedman. “ (p.8
)
But sense his book casts particular blame on the state, the question of how Scott differentiates himself from the Vienna School. As DeLong puts it:
“Yet even as he makes his central points, Scott appears unable to make contact with his intellectual roots--thus he is unable to draw on pieces of the Austrian argument as it has been developed over the past seventy years. Just as seeing like a state means that you cannot see the local details of what is going on, so seeing like James Scott seems to me that you cannot see your intellectual predecessors.”
p. 30: Many things mark the increasing relevance of universality (CK’s observation: certainly reading from Kant forward, self-conscious reflection on universalism is a clarion of modernity). But several trends suggest a stepping toward the universal and abstract as opposed to the idiosyncratic and particular: a) increasing markets lead to increasing needs for standards, commonalities, consistencies….next stop is codes; b) popular sentiment, argues Scott, is a catalyst (as in the sense that growing centrality of rights to modern states leads to an increase in what Hegel called “abstract right” (again, my reference, not Scott’s)); c) the French Revolution made this general march of universalism ubiquitous.
p. 36: Modern states “aspire to measure, codify, and simplify”; systems of measurement and standards overcome the “Babel of measurement”
p. 39: cadastral map is the crowning achievement of modern states; provides “synoptic view of the state and supralocal market in land”
p. 44: “value of the cadastral map to the state lies in its abstraction and universality”
p. 45: “designed to make the local situation legible to an outsider”
p. 46: perhaps most importantly to seeing like a state: the cadastral map freezes social phenomena—more static, more schematic than reality”
Okay, so I think we get it. The modern state is a perpetrator of metaphysical as well as physical violence. It attempts (poorly) to shove the circular peg of local knowledge into the square hole of abstract reason. And this constrains freedom and results in large-scale tragedy and atrocity.
DeLong criticizes Scott for not being sufficiently attentive to his Viennese roots. His point is that Hayek and others have argued from the liberal economic position that state intervention inevitably causes more ills than it resolves. Hayek argued famously against planning (reacting specifically to planned economies in particular), claiming that central planners lack the perspective to see individuals, local networks, and specific contexts sufficiently to take decision-making power away from local actors. As DeLong quotes Hayek:
“...the fact that knowledge of the circumstances of which we must make use never exists in concentrated or integrated form, but solely as the dispersed bits of incomplete and frequently contradictory knowledge which all the separate individuals possess.... “ from “The Use of Knowledge in Society”
Although as DeLong rightly criticizes Hayek for being inattentive to the Viennese School, he pays little attention to the intellectual pedigree of mētis, which is Scott’s effort at redeeming the present.
SCOTT’S WAY OUT: REHABILITATING LOCAL WISDOM
Against this evil, Scott proposes mētis: “denotes the knowledge that can only come from personal experience” (pp. 6-7)
p. 7: “I am making a case for the resilience of both social and natural diversity and strong case for the limits, in principle, of what of what we are likely to know about complex, functioning order”
p. 346: the problem with high-modernist schemes: “little confidence they repose in skills, intelligence and experience of ordinary people”
p. 351: “…all socially engineered systems are formed and are in fact subsystems of a larger system on which they are dependent not to say parasitic” (CK: might we call this the lifeworld?)
p. 352: big problems occur: “fairly simple interventions into enormously complex natural and social systems”
p. 357: “Common law, as an institution, owes its longevity to the fact that it is not a codification of legal rules, but rather a set of procedures for continually adapting some broad principles to novel circumstances” (CK: sounds a lot like phronēsis”)
p. 311: “formal order, to be explicit, is always and to some considerable degree, parasitic on informal processes, which the formal scheme does not recognize”
p. 313: Scott explains mētis: “indigenous technical knowledge” “folk wisdom” “practical skill”
p. 316: mētis is knowing when and how to apply rules of thumb in concrete, specific situations. Example from Oakeshott: a ship pilot knows general rules of sailing (and has often actually authored many of those rules by dint of experience), but always applies those rules in particular circumstances. Twain’s Life of the Mississippi embodies this principle.
This is not technē, which has to do with rules of thumb and how they’re created, but necessarily in their application.
p. 323: Scott explains a story of Squanto in his encounter with first English settlers. When asked when it was safe to plant corn, the advice from a local expert was to plant when the silver maple leaves began to emerge. In other words, the time it was safe from frost was not determined by the date in an almanac (an abstraction from the way days are lived). Rather the advice given allows for all sorts of complexity. In different microclimates, safe date might vary. But generally the maple tree will tell you when it thinks winter is over.
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