I don’t often review non-fiction books, let alone books that touch on that dread menace “current events.” I figure very few people, after a long day at the outrage factory, want to pull up my book review blog and read yet more kvetching about politics.

And don’t worry! This book was published in 1998, so perforce it doesn’t say anything about the 2000 election, 9/11, the Global War on Terror, the 2008 recession, Benghazi, the 2016 election, Covid-19, the invasion of Ukraine, or anything else that we millennials can remember being traumatized by. Gen Xers and older, I can’t vouch for you, but I understand you’re made of sterner stuff than we snowflakes. You drank from garden hoses, after all. As for Gen Z? I’m pretty sure they can’t read, so we’re safe unless one of you makes a TikTok about this. Onward!

So what is this book about? Well, to begin with, it’s about legibility.

A State, defined broadly as an entity which governs some group or territory, needs to know what is contained within that territory. Every sovereign State needs to have its equivalent of a Domesday Book. After all, how can you claim to govern a place if you don’t know what’s in it?

However, any administrator will tell you that it’s much easier to administer something when it is well-defined, clear cut, and uniform. In Scott’s word, legible. So, for instance, when the German Forestry Department was trying to get a handle on their stock of trees in the 1700s, they found it was expedient to chop down all those untidy, irregular bunches of plants that had grown up over the centuries and replace them with nice, regimented, evenly-spaced spruces. Much simpler to know how many trees per acre, right?

Except… it turns out a forest is actually a complex ecosystem, with many different elements that all affect each other. So trying to make it a neatly-organized farm for growing wood destroys the network of organisms which make it a healthy forest. Something the German administrators discovered the hard way.

Scott goes on to demonstrate how this mindset leads to the same mistake in a variety of circumstances; whether it’s planning a forest, a city, a farm, or even a nation. In each case, people whom Scott calls “high modernists” believe they can make a primitive and backward system run along modern, scientific lines; only to find that in fact the organic systems that evolved over generations, while on the surface appearing messy and chaotic, actually run according to a highly-developed order.

As a result, technocratic efforts at reform often don’t go as planned. But this doesn’t stop technocrats from trying! Their faith is the faith of Ulysses Everett McGill. I know I just referenced this scene a few weeks ago, but really, it cannot be quoted too often:

(It’s worth pointing out that the Age of Reason they had in France was shortly followed, not coincidentally, by a period known as “The Reign of Terror.”)

That speech is just too perfect for the mindset Scott describes, right down to the bit about electricity, regarding which Scott observes:

Electricity had for [Lenin] and most other high modernists an almost mythical appeal. That appeal had to do, I think, with the unique qualities of electricity as a form of power. Unlike the mechanisms of steam power, direct waterpower, and the internal combustion engine, electricity was silent, precise, and well-nigh invisible. For Lenin and many others, electricity was magical.

And as he explains, despite their professions of science and rationality, it sometimes seems to be the planners who are the zealous adherents of dogma:

If the proverbial man from Mars were to stumble on the facts here, he could be forgiven if he were confused about exactly who was the empiricist and who was the true believer. Tanzanian peasants had, for example, been readjusting their settlement patterns and  and farming practices in accordance with climate changes, new crops, and new markets with notable success in the two decades before villagization… By contrast, specialists and politicians seemed to be in the unshakable grip of a quasi-religious enthusiasm made even more potent in being backed by the state. 

So, what are all these planners, administrators, designers, technocrats, politicians, and bureaucrats failing to do? While Scott (and I) poke a great deal of fun at them, there can be no doubt they are very smart people, and often well-intentioned. So what are they getting wrong?

Scott’s answer is metis, which is a Greek word that means something like “skill,” “cunning,” or “wisdom,” although according to him, none of these quite perfectly capture the meaning. It is essentially the expert knowledge of a craft which can be gained only through experience, and not easily transferred through words. Scott uses the analogy of riding a bicycle. It’s virtually impossible to learn on the first try only by reading instructions. You just have to practice it.

Complex systems evolve patterns of operation which grow naturally over time, and which are often more efficient than they at first appear. Attempts to modernize or streamline such systems destroy these intricate patterns, leaving a cold, sterile form intended to make its function follow it, in an inversion of Sullivan’s maxim. 

I feel pretty confident that anyone who has ever been involved with some large organization has seen this pattern play out. I myself have, more than a few times. In that sense, nothing in Seeing Like a State is truly a revelation. It’s something everyone has observed at one time or another. But Scott articulates the problem so eloquently that it feels like a breath of fresh air.

Not, of course, that it has done much good. Some of the worst examples of the kind of errors he describes have happened since this book was published. Some of them are ongoing. The financialization and commercialization of the world economy have, if anything, accelerated the destruction of metis, and replaced the organic flourishing of generationally accrued wisdom with bureaucracy, AI, and cryptocurrency. One cannot help but think of Treebeard’s description of Saruman in Lord of the Rings: “He has a mind of metal and wheels; and he does not care for growing things, except as far as they serve him for the moment.”

There are three books I’ve read that I’ve put down, staring into space with slack-jawed amazement, saying to myself, “Whoa, now I understand!” One is The Seasons of a Man’s Life, the second is The Meme Machine, and this is the third. I highly recommend it to anyone who has to deal with complex systems on a daily basis, which is pretty much all of us. Unfortunately.