The Origins of the Anti-Democratic Expert Mentality
A brief overview of 'Authoritarian High-Modernism' from James C Scott's 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.
This is part 2 in a series exploring ideas in James C. Scott’s Seeing Like a State. You can find Part 1 here. For those of you who were following my Permaculture essays, I have to put that on pause for now since I currently don’t have Mollison’s book. When I get it back, I’ll wrap up the essays for sure.
But I’m excited to get back to Seeing Like a State! It’s so meaty. It has such explanatory power. The topic of this weeks essay I found particularly interesting. If you feel the same feel free to leave a note or a question in the comments. Thanks for reading.
The benevolent technocrat
“It was possible to conceive of an artificial, engineered society designed, not by custom and historical accident, but according to conscious, rational, scientific criteria.”
Today I’m going to write about one of the most impactful theories of government I’ve come across in all my studies.
Every once in a while you discover a theory that makes something big click into place - it answers a question that’s been gnawing at you, maybe for years. That question, addressed in this paper, is something like:
How do you explain why so many democratic governments are full of people who want to conceal things from their population and make decisions for them, rather than informing them and involving them in decision-making? If they don’t believe in the people, how can they even believe in democracy?
There’s a personality type - usually an “expert” or politician, who believes that due to credentials, or intelligence or legacy they are entitled to rule the population for its own good. They say words like freedom, transparency and choice, but show no proof that they actually believe in them. They deny being pro-censorship but favor heavy “moderation” to protect their constituents from wrong ideas, or right ideas which come out at the wrong time.
Their vision of democracy isn’t an active and informed citizenry coming to its own conclusions through debate. It’s a centralized, legible society that can be measured and controlled to conform to the ideals of the rulers.
Scott calls this idea “authoritarian high-modernism” and explains its rise in governments over the last 200 years.
“They lacked the consistent coercive power, the fine-grained administrative grid, or the detailed knowledge that would have permitted them to undertake more intrusive experiments in social engineering… By the mid-nineteenth century in the West and by the early twentieth century elsewhere, these conditions were being met.”
Data revolutions enable previously impossible systems. Mass literacy enabled the protestant reformation. Having (1) your own bible (thanks to mass production of books) and (2) the ability to read, generated the possibility of a mass, direct (disintermediated) relationship with God. This then led to the disruption of one of the oldest and most powerful institutions on the planet, and redistributed power to the people. New data collection and processing techniques did a similar thing for governance but in the opposite direction. They allowed for the rise of a class of social engineers to approach society as a big, centralized machine, the people merely gears, waiting to be fine tuned.
“They envisioned a sweeping, rational engineering of all aspects of social life in order to improve the human condition” [and they also believed in] “Unrestrained use of power of the modern state as an instrument for achieving these designs.”
Perhaps as a rule of thumb, the more unnatural and coercive an ideology, the more obsessed it must with power, and vice versa.
It appears Authoritarian High-Modernism began with good intentions. Engineering human society can benefit both it and the government who reaps their taxes.
“This new conception of the state's role represented a fundamental transformation… The idea that one of the central purposes of the state was the improvement of all the members of society -- their health, skills and education, longevity, productivity, morals, and family life--was quite novel.”
But buried in the mentality of this social tinkerer is a fatal conceit.
“The troubling features of high modernism derive, for the most part, from its claim to speak about the improvement of the human condition with the authority of scientific knowledge and its tendency to disallow other competing sources of judgment.”
Science is the new dogma. And like religious dogmas throughout history, when used to coerce and control, it becomes just another cudgel of the powerful, detached from from its original purpose.
“The sources of this view are deeply authoritarian. If a planned social order is better than the accidental, irrational deposit of historical practice, two conclusions follow. Only those who have the scientific knowledge to discern and create this superior social order are fit to rule in the new age. Further, those who through retrograde ignorance refuse to yield to the scientific plan need to be educated to its benefits or else swept aside. Strong versions of high modernism, such as those held by Lenin and Le Corbusier, cultivated an Olympian ruthlessness toward the subjects of their interventions.”
Scott is careful not to characterize High Modernist thinking as purely bad.
“Virtually every high-modernist intervention was undertaken in the name of and with the support of citizens seeking help and protection, and .. we are all beneficiaries, in countless ways, of these various high-modernist schemes.”
And he means it. It required some degree of High Modernism thinking to get us to the moon. It’s why we have government health and environmental regulations and standardized government-funded education. But the centralization of power to achieve these ends is a double edged sword. It invariably attracts people who simply enjoy controlling others.
“It is hardly surprising that so many postcolonial elites have marched under [high-modernism's] banner.”
It goes without saying that the most ‘successful’ High-Modernist experiments were the Communist states. They are where the engineers got full control. They are where nothing stood in the way of creating the new man, the new state, and the perfect society. That this often lead to fanaticism and government mass-democide (100 million murdered by their own communist governments by some estimates) suggests that despite its obsession with perfection, there’s something imperfect in the Authoritarian High-Modernist world view. Or perhaps its their focus on perfection and refusal to accept the inherent messiness of society that leads them astray.
Scott suggests three ways that Authoritarian High-Modernism is resisted:
“The first is the existence and belief in a private sphere of activity in which the state and its agencies may not legitimately interfere.”
This is simply a belief in the legitimacy of the privacy of the individual for its own sake. It is the opposite of the disturbingly prevalent view “I have nothing to hide, therefore the government can spy till its heart’s content.” Privacy, shielding one’s personal life from the government, becomes an ethic unto itself. So using encryption, or turning electronic tracking off on your phone, or not covering your house with audio spyware and cameras, are ethical decisions.
“The second, closely related factor is the private sector in liberal political economy.”
Mussolini defined fascism as “the merger or state and corporate power.” Therefore the opposite of fascism contains a bright line separating the private sector and the state. The private sector must remain free of state domination, although lawful regulations are of course helpful in many cases. Our current state leadership is giving us ample proof that they do not believe in this separation, as evidenced through mass-censorship apparatus exposed with the Twitter Files or the push for state domination of finance with FedNow.
“The third and by far most important barrier to thoroughgoing high-modernist schemes has been the existence of working, representative institutions through which a resistant society could make it's influence felt”
The development of institutions of representation is a key theme in the evolution of advanced, free, Western societies. It is what pulled us out of Monarchy, and justified the enfranchisement first of landowners, then of all men (occasionally beginning with a certain race, sadly), then women. Unfortunately, this too is backsliding, as studies show that voter preference has zero influence on policy as they’ve been crowded out completely by political donors and advocacy groups. These “representative institutions” are quite possibly the bedrock of citizen power within a democracy and as citizens, we should all find ourselves a member of at least one.
In conclusion, Authoritarian High-Modernism isn’t a type of government, it’s a type of personality that functions in all governments and at least in the West should be resisted.
For those who like to take orders, it’s common to run to the defense of authoritarians: “but they’re doing what they think is right!” Fair enough. Certain personalities believe that its “right” to coerce people into doing what’s best for them. Only one key element is required to justify the exercise of such power: the belief that you control people for their own good. Such justifications are easy and anyone with an inflated self-image is capable of them.
It’s not about whether High Modernists trying to do the right thing. I frankly don’t care. It’s just about if they are doing the right thing.
My rule of thumb? If they’re lying or hiding information from us, then no.
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.