Seeing Like a State by James C. Scott | Trails

Seeing Like a State

Seeing Like a State

How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed

James C. Scott

Expert Intuition

Expertise defies formalization; conscious effort defeats itself.

Mētis knowledge is often so implicit and automatic that its bearer is at a loss to explain it. ... A staple of early medical training, I have been told, is the story of a physician who, at the turn of the century, had a spectacularly high success rate in diagnosing syphilis in its early stages. Laboratory tests confirmed his diagnoses, but he himself did not know precisely what it was that he detected in the physical exams that led him to his conclusions. Intrigued by his success, hospital administrators asked two other doctors to closely observe his examination of patients over several weeks and to see if they could spot what he was picking up. At long last, they and the doctor realized that he was unconsciously registering the patients slight eye tremor.

Collective Brain

Why isolated groups lose knowledge and capabilities.

Mētis knowledge is often so implicit and automatic that its bearer is at a loss to explain it. ... Any experienced practitioner of a skill or craft will develop a large repertoire of moves, visual judgments, a sense of touch, or a discriminating gestalt for assessing the work as well as a range of accurate intuitions born of experience that defy being communicated apart from practice.

Polite Conspiracy

Silent agreements to avoid uncomfortable truths.

Anyone who has worked in a formal organization—even a small one strictly governed by detailed rules—knows that handbooks and written guidelines fail utterly in explaining how the institution goes successfully about its work. Accounting for its smooth operation are nearly endless and shifting sets of implicit understandings, tacit coordinations,and practical mutualities that could never be successfully captured in a written code.

Mastery means bypassing conscious thought entirely.

Mētis knowledge is often so implicit and automatic that its bearer is at a loss to explain it. ... In Indonesia, older Bugis sea captains, sound asleep below decks, will awaken the moment there is a change in direction, weather, current, or some combination of the three. As the ocean’s waves change amplitude or begin striking the ship from a different direction, a captain immediately senses the change through the resulting slight alterations in the roll and pitch of the ship.

Hidden Structure

Copying forms without understanding structure guarantees failure.

The premise behind what are tellingly called work-to-rule strikes is a case in point. When Parisian taxi drivers want to press a point on the municipal authorities about regulations or fees, they sometimes launch a work-to-rule strike. It consists merely in following meticulously all the regulations in the Code routier and thereby bringing traffic throughout central Paris to a grinding halt. The drivers thus take tactical advantage of the fact that the circulation of traffic is possible only because drivers have mastered a set of practices that have evolved outside, and often in contravention, of the formal rules.

Standardization enables scale but destroys local knowledge.

The logic animating the project, however, is one of control and appropriation. Local knowledge, because it is dispersed and relatively autonomous, is all but unappropriable. The reduction or, more utopian still, the elimination of mētis and the local control it entails are preconditions, in the case of the state, of administrative order and fiscal appropriation and, in the case of the large capitalist firm, of worker discipline and profit.

Building observability changes what you see.

They were, moreover, not just maps. Rather, they were maps that, when allied with state power, would enable much of the reality they depicted to be remade. Thus a state cadastral map created to designate taxable property-holders does not merely describe a system of land tenure; it creates such a system through its ability to give its categories the force of law.

Illegibility Premium

Practical knowledge defeats rationalized systems.

One powerful indication that they all require mētis is that they are exceptionally difficult to teach apart from engaging in the activity itself. One might imagine trying to write down explicit instructions on how to ride a bicycle, but one can scarcely imagine that such instructions would enable a novice to ride a bicycle on the first try. ... If your life depended on your ship coming through rough weather, you would surely prefer a successful captain with long experience to, say, a brilliant physicist who had analyzed the natural laws of sailing but who had never actually sailed a vessel.

Simplification Trap

Simplification enables breakthroughs or destroys value.

The metaphorical value of this brief account of scientific production forestry is that it illustrates the dangers of dismembering an exceptionally complex and poorly understood set of relations and processes in order to isolate a single element of instrumental value. The instrument, the knife, that carved out the new, rudimentary forest was the razorsharp interest in the production of a single commodity. Everything that interfered with the efficient production of the key commodity was implacably eliminated.

Measuring Trust

Precise measurement creates infrastructure for distant trust.

Large-scale commercial exchange and long-distance trade tend to promote common standards of measurement. ... Beyond a certain point, however, much of commerce is composed of long chains of transactions, often over great distances, between anonymous buyers and sellers. Such trade is greatly simplified and made legible by standard weights and measures.

Simplified models systematically fail in complex reality.

Suddenly, processes as disparate as the creation of permanent last names, the standardization of weights and measures, the establishment of cadastral surveys and population registers, the invention of freehold tenure, the standardization of language and legal discourse, the design of cities, and the organization of transportation seemed comprehensible as attempts at legibility and simplification. In each case, officials took exceptionally complex, illegible, and local social practices, such as land tenure customs or naming customs, and created a standard grid whereby it could be centrally recorded and monitored.