In Defense of Local Culture in the face of Hostile Central Governments

Examining the concept of "legibility" in Seeing like a State

How to Change the World is a weekly blog about reversing American decline. I will (1) study successful models of governance throughout history, primarily in the West, (2) highlight what’s going wrong leading to institutional decline or ‘political decay’, and (3) present models of democratic innovation that could lead us into a prosperous, peaceful and abundant 21st century.

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In this edition of How to Change the World I’ll be discussing my first foray into James C. Scott’s Seeing like a State. Balaji Srinivasan used to talk about it often in our Network State meetings, and then when Pete Peterson, the Dean of the School of Public Policy at Pepperdine recommended it to me I knew it was time to order it. The book’s subtitle is “How certain schemes to improve the human condition have failed.” Government hubris? Right up my alley. There’s a sentence in the introduction that let’s you know what you can expect: “Much of this book can be read as a case against the imperialism of high-modernist, planned social order.” 

Also in his introduction he describes four elements that lead to “full-fledged disaster” if combined within the same society. “In sum, the legibility (1) of a society provides the capacity for large-scale social engineering, high-modernist ideology (2) provides the desire, the authoritarian state (3) provides the determination to act on that desire, and an incapacitated civil society (4) provides the leveled social terrain on which to build.” Apparently if these four ingredients are combined and allowed to ferment they produce despotic catastrophes like Soviet Russia, Communist China. ‘Legibility,’ the focus of his first section and this paper, is the ability of the government to read and interpret aspects of the society so as to be able to measure and alter them. Examples include “tax proceeds, lists of tax payers, land records, average incomes, unemployment numbers, mortality rates, trade and productivity figures, the certain number of cases of cholera in a certain district.”

Making something legible, Scott tells us, requires the collapsing of something complex into something that can be represented in a single metric. Unsurprisingly, this simplification leads to unintended consequences. Scott illustrates the concept of legibility with the story of the creation of scientific forestry in 18th century Prussia. When the local villagers looked at the forest they saw a source of kaleidoscopic resources required for subsistence. They saw firewood, medicine, clothing, food and more. The state saw timber, and just timber. So the state chose to transform the ‘disorderly’ natural forest into meticulously uniformed plantations with the trees in straight rows like little soldiers and the ground regularly cleared of litter to enable inspection. All this work led to phenomenal results, in the beginning. The first harvest was a bumper crop, producing abundant and uniformed timber that was easier to harvest than ever before. But problems quickly set in with the second planting. The trees grew slowly due to low soil fertility. Turns out the worthless shrubs that to the state looked like weeds, to the animals were food. And the animal’s manure was required for fertility And the forest floor covered with detritus is actually healthy - that’s where soil comes from. And having diverse flora makes it harder for pests to find their favorite meal, whereas in a monocrop they can proliferate in catastrophic amounts due to the endless food supply. 

The state, in its desire to make its pursuit legible, overlooked that it was dealing with a web of relationships. In its goal to produce and extract one thing, it not only overlooked the complex and interrelated system of plant, animal and fungal life that produces timber - it actively killed most of that system off. In their attempt to impose legibility the government decimated the local flora and fauna. And they didn’t want to learn to understand the local flora so as to work with it in it’s local context. That would require adaptation to local conditions everywhere. Too much work, too much variability. Instead they attempted to transform the multitudinous floras and faunas across their land into a single system which they could understand and control from afar. 

I find the concept of legibility helpful in describing why centralized systems often produce such poor results in local contexts. Think about communism in Russia and China, and how they prioritized killing off local customs and cultures to increase the dominance of the centralized state. They saw it as a prerequisite for command and control. The corrective of this issue is also one of the reasons the United States is the most prosperous large country in history. We started with decentralized power by design. We allowed more decisions to be made in local contexts than most other nations, hence allowing them to be adaptive, relevant and more efficient. This served us well for centuries, but money and power are now centralizing in DC at a faster and faster rate. As the federal government continues to usurp strength and power from cities and states, don’t be surprised if the cost is a declining local vitality, culture, and diversity.

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Matt Harder runs the public engagement firm Civic Trust, where he helps cities strengthen their civic environment by helping residents, civic organizations, and local government work together to create public projects. Follow him on Twitter.