Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. - book review

Public Interest, Wntr, 1999 by Brian C. Anderson

Scott's first case study, drawn from nineteenth-century Germany, anticipates much of the folly of the next 100 years. Under state direction, scientific forest managers sought to increase timber yield by replacing the jumbled profusion of old-growth forests with perfectly planned, single-tree forests, arranged in straight lines. These rationally designed forests, their planners thought, would be easier to survey, manage, and manipulate; what they didn't realize was that single-tree forests would be more susceptible to bad weather and pests and would soon destroy the soil's fertility. After short-term gains, timber production fell precipitously, and forest managers had to reintroduce the very insects, trees, and weeds they had removed in the first place.

The nineteenth-century example is relatively benign when compared to what loomed ahead. Scott's gallery of villains includes Le Corbusier, whose desiccated high-modern urbanism led to the creation of the totally planned cities of Brasilia in Brazil and Chandigahr in India's Punjab - dystopias both, with a striking visual regimentation that corresponded to no need or want of either cities' alienated residents. It includes also Julius Nyerere, the despotic ruler of postcolonial Tanzania, whose high-modernist faith in gigantic mechanized farms led to the forced relocation during the 1970s of five million Tanzanian peasants to makeshift villages that they did not know how to farm. It includes, worst of all, the murderous Lenin and Stalin, architects of a perverse political regime that killed more of its own citizens than any other government in human history, save Mao's China.

In each example Scott presents, the goal of rationally improving the human world pulverized what the late Isaiah Berlin termed the "darker levels" - the area of life that exists outside the optic of state planners but that we ignore only at our own peril. For Scott, the Greek word, metis, often translated as "cunning intelligence" - and more broadly meaning a wide array of practical skills and somewhat inchoate, local, knowledge - sums up what the state planners lack. A modern illustration of metis, discussed by Scott, is the disaster specialist Red Adair, whose team extinguishes wellhead fires in trouble spots across the globe. Adair can draw on his experience, but every new fire presents unanticipated, and potentially life-threatening, challenges. Only his metis gets him through. A more prosaic example would be a veteran farmer's ability to adapt his crop to ever-changing soil and weather conditions. High modernism, however, pretends that metis doesn't exist, just as it ignores the complexity of nature. The result, when high modernism "succeeded," was the obliteration of much local knowledge, even as residual metis survived, as with the metis-laden black marketers who furnished enough essential goods to keep the industrial museums of East and Central Europe and the Soviet Union open, at least for a time.

Despite his opposition to state planning, Scott does not consider himself a conservative. At numerous points, he tries, somewhat unsuccessfully, to distance himself from conservative thinkers like Oakeshott to whom he clearly owes much. He often favorably cites the writings of various radical theorists, including the philosopher Michel Foucault. But Scott's practical advice is essentially conservative: defend representative democracy as the least worst political alternative; celebrate the common law as "a set of procedures for continually adapting some broad principles to novel circumstances"; pursue reform incrementally, always aware of how unintended consequences can leave the best-laid plans in ashes. Above all, respect practical wisdom wherever and whenever possible. Since many contemporary liberals still look to the state to engineer human equality, Scott's book, which clearly aims at reaching a liberal audience, provides a salutary warning: To see like a state is to miss a lot, and to act blindly can visit ruin on man and nature.