Seeing Like A State



As centuries passed, and the human herd swelled, the strains on society increased, often sparking friction.  In an effort to discourage chaos, many societies became more structured — codes of rules, conflict resolution systems, hierarchies of control and coercion.  Tribes formed alliances with others, and these confederations often merged into states.  In a shark pool of ongoing growth and overshoot, weak states were vulnerable sitting ducks.  The struggle for survival was a never-ending challenge.  It encouraged better defenses, stronger offences, technological innovation, and tough leaders.

To nourish their strength, states had to focus on maximizing tax revenues, conscripting fresh cannon fodder, and promptly smashing uprisings.  To do this effectively, they needed detailed censuses listing the names and residences of all citizens.  They needed maps that illustrated the boundaries and fields of landed property, the names of the owners, and the economic output generated on each estate.  They needed accurate street maps of cities.  The better a state understood the society it controlled and exploited, the richer and more powerful it could become.

James Scott is a political science professor at Yale.  In his book, Seeing Like A State, he presents a tragi-comical exposé of bloopers and blunders performed by a variety of ambitious states in their quest for greater efficiency, order, and prestige — modernization.

Chapter one takes readers on an illuminating visit to eighteenth century Germany.  Prior to the coal age, wood was the essential source of energy and building materials — no wood, no civilization.  Today, it’s impossible for anyone to know the actual amount of oil that remains underground, but in the forests of old Germany, the reserves of standing trees were perfectly visible to everyone, and they were getting smaller.  Yikes!  Folks having more than a few brain cells realized that if they wiped out the forests, they would wipe themselves out.

Unlike modern society, which is fatally addicted to nonrenewable energy, old Germany had better options, in theory.  Forests were renewable, in theory.  Forests were complex self-regulating ecosystems, and their long-term health was seriously harmed by persistent attacks from gangs of vicious ax murderers.  Unfortunately, the bureaucrats of the state didn’t understand this at all.  When they looked at a forest, they saw precious treasure to be taken, and they throbbed with giddy adolescent excitement.

Healthy, happy undisturbed forests included diverse communities of tree people, most of which were not valuable grade-A species, in the minds of greed-heads.  In a sparkling shower of light, a brilliant solution fell out of the sky — scientific forestry!  The treasure could be maximized by growing nothing but grade-A trees!  Simply erase the messy old forest, and replace it with plantations of Norway spruce.  These trees could be planted, evenly spaced, row after row, century after century.  Every year, the volume of wood grown would equal the volume of wood removed, in theory.  By 1900, scientific forestry had been adapted by cutting edge nations around the world.

Whoops!  Well, the first generation of plantation trees was awesome, having been planted in the fabulously fertile soil produced by thousands of years of old growth forests.  The second rotation was less than awesome, and went downhill from there.  Monocultures were always a magnet for pests and diseases.  Spruce trees become chronically depressed slackers when planted in abused and depleted soils.  Unhealthy root systems encouraged blow downs.  This inspired the birth of a new word — Waldsterben (forest death).

In other types of projects, growing states fooled around with strategies similar to scientific forestry.  Scott says that these strategies were the offspring of an accident-prone control freak mindset, which he called the high-modernist ideology.  It proclaimed that the path to utopia was lit by science, technology, and reason.  He takes readers on a breathtaking whitewater raft ride through a number of high-modernist catastrophes, designed by a mob of half-clever smarty-pants.

Vladimir Lenin, a leader in the Russian Revolution, was a devious super-ambitious control freak, determined to create a high-modernist utopia, by any means necessary.  In order to rapidly industrialize the new state, he needed to rapidly industrialize agriculture, to keep the heroic factory workers well fed.  The age of tractors had arrived, and many nations were becoming very excited about industrial agriculture.  In the twentieth century, the Industrial Revolution was having powerful orgasms, and the entire planet was ravaged by a highly contagious epidemic of drug-resistant get-rich-quick fever.

A fatal flaw in the high-modernist ideology was that it intensified civilization’s merciless war on ecological sustainability.  Yes, scientific forestry was foolish, but so was the traditional low-tech forest mining it replaced.  Scientific forestry just accelerated the wreckage.  Yes, industrial agriculture was foolish, but so was the organic low-tech soil mining it replaced.  The modernists could not comprehend the serious irreversible consequences of the well-intended mistakes they were making; they focused their full attention on utopian fantasies.

Joseph Stalin brutally collectivized Russian agriculture.  Millions of peasants were forced to work on huge mechanized farms.  They were like slaves, even more oppressed than during the bad old days of the czars.  Idiot bureaucrats, who knew almost nothing about the farms they managed, established impossible production quotas.  If factory workers didn’t meet their quotas, they were still fed.  The same was not true for farm workers.  They starved.  Folks who complained were deported or executed.  This adventure in high-modernism resulted in at least 20 million deaths.

The new Brazilian capital, Brasília, was a perfect city, in theory.  It was designed by notorious geniuses, and then built on a bulldozed forest.  It was the pinnacle of modernity, reminiscent of Albert Speer’s monumental designs for Hitler’s Berlin.  Comically, the city that dazzled the avant-garde intelligentsia was despised by the thousands of miserable government workers forced to live in it.  Life in Brasília was painfully bleak.  Eventually, they built an unplanned city around the edges of perfect hell, where they could roll their socks down and enjoy life.

Like a cat with nine lives, high-modernism refuses to die.  Today’s modernist buzzwords include sustainable agriculture, sustainable forestry, sustainable cities, sustainable development, and so on.  The ideology has thoroughly infected the cultures of the civilized world.  It’s taught in every school, so the kiddies are prepared for a soul-killing life of sustainable consuming.  In every facet of our lives, every minute of the day, the air is constantly buzzing with modernist memes.  They define the specifications for how normal, well-adjusted, planet-thrashing consumers think and behave.  Questioning is unacceptable.  Don’t!

Scott’s book is loaded with descriptions of quirky high-modernist escapades.  It’s powerful medicine for folks who are beginning to experience doubts about the sanity of our age of astonishing wonders.  No, you’re not crazy; you’re coming out of the trance.  Good job!  Welcome to reality!

A free PDF of the book can be downloaded HERE.  YouTube has an interesting 38-minute video of Scott HERE.

Scott, James C., Seeing Like A State — How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, Yale University Press, New Haven, 1998.

The Ostrich Factor

Garrett Hardin was a lad who not only thought a lot, but could also think well.  I recently discovered a Hardin book I had not heard of, The Ostrich Factor — Our Population Myopia (1998).  Hardin was an interesting blend of an ecological conservative, and a growth-hating political conservative who detested economists.  I hoped that this book would provide fresh insights on the huge and difficult problem of overpopulation.

After Living Within Limits was published in 1993, critics noted that Hardin complained about overpopulation, but failed to provide a remedy.  Hardin admitted that he had been intimidated by the explosive taboo on the subject, which incinerates every dreamer who blunders into it, foolishly preaching common sense.  Hence, the ostrich factor — never touch 800-volt issues that are surrounded by large piles of scorched skeletons.  You can’t win, so bury your head in the sand, and have a nice day!

There is a widespread fantasy, drilled into us by cultural myths, that our society is guided by reason and elevated moral principles.  It’s silly nonsense, but we have a hard time seeing this.  Many people waste their entire lives, sad victims of the tragedy of the consumers — powerful myths that compel us to spend our lives working, in order to move as much stuff as possible from nature to landfills, in order to gain the respect of our peer group, which suffers from the same mass hysteria.  Well-trained consumers never question 800-volt myths.

Modern society is focused on the individual, not the community or ecosystem.  I am all that matters.  If I can gain status and respect by wiping out forests or fisheries, or throwing the planet’s climate out of balance, I will.  I don’t care that I’m leaving behind a wasteland for future generations.  Of course, if future generations were able to vote today, or if we were raised in a sane culture, our world would be radically different and far healthier.

Hardin was fascinated by the poisonous power of taboos, and he invited an imaginary Martian into his book, to observe our society as an objective outsider.  (I wish he had used humans from the future.)  The two of them explored uncomfortable notions that will make some readers squirm and snarl.  They provide us with intense lessons about the powerful headlock that taboos have on our ability to think.  Taboos push many commonsense ideas off limits, severely handicapping our freedom to think, forcing many to live like two-year olds, ecological psychopaths, or chronically depressed shoppers.

Taboos vary from place to place and time to time.  I was surprised to see that Hardin only mentioned abortion once, with regard to a quote from 1886, describing a situation where abortion was legal, but contraception was not.  In that scenario, many physicians chose to break the law against providing contraception.

It is important to understand that many wild cultures had customs that encouraged population stability.  Their ongoing survival depended entirely on food from the surrounding wild ecosystem, and too many mouths led to painful problems.  Their utmost concern was the health and stability of the community, not the whims of individuals.  They shared and cooperated.  It was obvious to them that the carrying capacity of their ecosystem had genuine limits.  For us, living in a temporary wonderland of supermarkets, limits are hard to imagine — until we crash into them.

The emergence of agriculture redefined carrying capacity, which varied from year to year, depending on the harvest.  Limits on breeding weakened or vanished.  Hardin quoted Tertullian, a third century Christian thinker from Tunisia, who was spooked by the misery of overpopulation (when the global population was 150 million).

Tertullian wrote, “As our demands grow greater, our complaints against nature’s inadequacy are heard by all.  The scourges of pestilence, famine, wars, and earthquakes have come to be regarded as a blessing to overcrowded nations, since they serve to prune away the luxuriant growth of the human race.”

Like Tertullian, Reverend Malthus (1766-1834) also lived in an era of turbulent growth, and he became a notorious heretic for reminding society about the existence of carrying capacity.  Two hundred years later, he remains fiercely detested, mostly by people who have never read him, because he pointed out a serious 800-volt issue, a super-taboo.  Never, never, never suggest that there are limits to growth!

Perpetual growth on a finite planet is obviously impossible, obviously insane, and insanely destructive.  Sustainable growth is an oxymoron.  But few goofy myths are more powerful.  We are constantly reminded that perpetual growth is the purpose of life.  Grow or die!  Our official religion is Growth Forever.  Fanatical believers are called optimistic, and optimism is “good.”  Hardin disagreed, “At the present rate of population growth, it’s difficult to be optimistic about the future.”

With regard to population, our culture asserts two rights simultaneously.  (1) Right to life.  The UN decrees that “every man, woman, and child has the inalienable right to be free from hunger and malnutrition.”  (2) Right to limitless reproductive freedom.  “Every woman has the right — perhaps with the agreement of her mate(s) — to determine how many children she shall produce.”

There are no natural rights; rights are legal inventions.  Note that these two sacred rights are not accompanied by sacred responsibilities.  Hardin concluded that overpopulation would not be resolved by the voluntary choices of individual families.  In a finite world, unrestricted freedom is intolerable.  Survival is mandatory; freedom is not.  Effective solutions should be based on community-sensitive rules, ideally produced by a policy of “mutual coercion, mutually agreed upon.”  Our wild ancestors generally succeeded in doing this, because their cultures saw limits as being perfectly normal, not draconian.

Hardin knew that “coercion” is an obscene word in a culture that worships individualism, but he noted that we submit to coercion when we stop for red lights, or when we bike on the right side of the road.  Coercion is often reciprocal.  Money is coercion.  There are many things we will eagerly do for money that we would never do for free.  We are often coerced by nothing more than a sweet “pretty please.”

Hardin thought that one world government was impossible, because there is not a single world culture.  Trying to get different cultures to agree on anything is a challenge for advocates of multiculturalism.  Because of this, Hardin offered no silver bullet solution for the world.  Each culture will have to design its own method for limiting population.

Predicaments have no solutions, but problems do.  Overpopulation is merely a temporary problem, and there are two solutions.  (1) We can make a commonsense effort to live below carrying capacity.  (2) We can bury our heads in the sand, make no effort to influence the future, and let Big Mama Nature mercilessly do the dirty work.  The commonsense approach saves a lot of wear and tear on the ecosystem, and makes life far less hellish.  It is enthusiastically endorsed by the spirits of future generations.

Hardin, Garrett, The Ostrich Factor — Our Population Myopia, Oxford University Press, New York, 1998.