I've never read a book like this, designed to rethink the way you think about the world. I thought that the world was meant to be organized and fit into neat best practices. But while there are so many ways we are better off as humanity, we often turn a blind eye to the costs of our neat and tidy representations and reformations of our world. We take what we want and turn complex ecosystems into mono-culture farms with sole optimization of productivity, decreasing resilience and efficiency while ignoring the effects of climate change. This pattern repeats itself with failed cities, such as the precisely Brasilia, designating a single purpose for each building. But the consequence is a dull failure that is only livable because people broke the rules and created the sort of multi-use ecosystem needed for a city to work. We must retain our modesty, to run proper tests and admit when our hypothesis our wrong. We must look more broadly than the few metrics we can easily measure to our broader ecosystem impact. In the course of writing this book, the author themselves were taken on a fantastic world of realization and you're holding on with them as the reader, acknowledging their imperfect organization and insufficient editing. But grateful to see such an alternative, helpful perspective.
*The earth is a set of "resources"*
The vocabulary used to organize nature typically betrays the overriding interests of its human users. In fact, utilitarian discourse replaces the term “nature” with the term “natural resources,” focusing on those aspects of nature that can be appropriated for human use.
A comparable logic extracts from a more generalized natural world those flora or fauna that are of utilitarian value (usually marketable commodities) and, in turn, reclassifies those species that compete with, prey on, or otherwise diminish the yields of the valued species. Thus, plants that are valued become “crops,” the species that compete with them are stigmatized as “weeds,” and the insects that ingest them are stigmatized as “pests.” Thus, trees that are valued become “timber,” while species that compete with them become “trash” trees or “underbrush.” The same logic applies to fauna. Highly valued animals become “game” or “livestock,” while those animals that compete with or prey upon them become “predators” or “varmints.”
*Societies as forests*
State agents have no interest—nor should they—in describing an entire social reality, any more than the scientific forester has an interest in describing the ecology of a forest in detail. Their abstractions and simplifications are disciplined by a small number of objectives, and until the nineteenth century the most prominent of these were typically taxation, political control, and conscription.
Foresters attempt to create, through careful seeding, planting, and cutting, a forest that was easier for state foresters to count, manipulate, measure, and assess. The controlled environment of the redesigned, scientific forest promised many striking advantages. It could be synoptically surveyed by the chief forester; it could be more easily supervised and harvested according to centralized, long-range plans; it provided a steady, uniform commodity. A condition of its rigor was that it severely bracketed, or assumed to be constant, all variables except those bearing directly on the yield of the selected species and on the cost of growing and extracting them.
The negative biological and ultimately commercial consequences of the stripped-down forest became painfully obvious only after the second rotation of conifers had been planted. “It took about one century for them [the negative consequences] to show up clearly. Many of the pure stands grew excellently in the first generation but already showed an amazing retrogression in the second generation. The reason for this is a very complex one and only a simplified explanation can be given…. Then the whole nutrient cycle got out of order and eventually was nearly stopped…."
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. A diverse, complex forest, however, with its many species of trees, its full complement of birds, insects, and mammals, is far more resilient—far more able to withstand and recover from such injuries—than pure stands.
*Metrics*
Nonstate forms of measurement grew from the logic of local practice. if one were to ask “How far is it to the next village?” a likely response would be “Three rice-cookings.” What most farmers near the subsistence margin want to know above all is whether a particular farm will meet their basic needs reliably. For many purposes, an apparently vague measurement may communicate more valuable information than a statistically exact figure. The cultivator who reports that his rice yield from a plot is anywhere between four and seven baskets is conveying more accurate information, when the focus of attention is on the variability of the yield, than if he reported a ten-year statistical average of 5.6 baskets. Thus small farms in Ireland were described as a “farm of one cow” or a “farm of two cows” to indicate their grazing capacity to those who lived largely by milk products and potatoes. The physical area a farm might comprise was of little interest. Terms like "a handful" literally came from the amount that fit in a hand.
The illegibility of local measurement practices was more than an administrative headache for the monarchy. It compromised the most vital and sensitive aspects of state security. Food supply was the Achilles heel of the early modern state; short of religious war, nothing so menaced the state as food shortages and the resulting social upheavals. Without comparable units of measurement, it was difficult if not impossible to monitor markets, to compare regional prices for basic commodities, or to regulate food supplies effectively.
No effective central monitoring or controlled comparisons were possible without standard, fixed units of measurement. Large-scale commercial exchange and long-distance trade tend to promote common standards of measurement; as the volume of commerce grew and the goods exchanged became increasingly standardized (a ton of wheat, a dozen plow tips, twenty cart wheels), there was a growing tendency to accept widely agreed upon units of measurement.
Society that is relatively opaque to the state is thereby insulated from some forms of finely tuned state interventions, both welcomed (universal vaccinations) and resented (personal income taxes). The interventions it does experience will typically be mediated by local trackers who know the society from inside and who are likely to interpose their own particular interests. Without this mediation—and often with it—state action is likely to be inept, greatly overshooting or undershooting its objective.
States generally worked to homogenize their populations and break down their segmentation by imposing common languages, religions, currencies, and legal systems, as well as promoting the construction of connected systems of trade, transportation, and communication.”
*Surnames*
Tax and tithe rolls, property rolls, conscription lists, censuses, and property deeds recognized in law were inconceivable without some means of fixing an individual’s identity.
Until at least the fourteenth century, the great majority of Europeans did not have permanent patronymics. An individual’s name was typically his given name, which might well suffice for local identification. If something more were required, a second designation could be added, indicating his occupation (in the English case, smith, baker), his geographical location (hill, edge wood), his father’s given name, or a personal characteristic (short, strong). These secondary designations were not permanent surnames; they did not survive their bearers. As in Tuscany, in England only wealthy aristocratic families tended to have fixed surnames.
Imagine the dilemma of a tithe or capitation-tax collector faced with a male population, 90 percent of whom bore just six Christian names (John, William, Thomas, Robert, Richard, and Henry). Some second designation was absolutely essential for the records, and, if the subject suggested none, it was invented for him by the recording clerk. For the great majority, the surnames had no social existence whatever outside the document.
Nowhere is this better illustrated than in the Philippines under the Spanish. Filipinos were instructed by the decree of November 21, 1849, to take on permanent Hispanic surnames. The remedy was the catalogo, a compendium not only of personal names but also of nouns and adjectives drawn from flora, fauna, minerals, geography, and the arts and intended to be used by the authorities in assigning permanent, inherited surnames. By the twentieth century, the vast majority of Filipinos bore the surnames that Claveria had dreamed up for them.
*Diverse Cities*
The city relies on the density of people who are on sidewalk terms with one another to maintain a modicum of public order. The web of familiarity and acquaintanceship enabled a host of crucial but often invisible public amenities. A person didn’t think twice about asking someone to hold one’s seat at the theater, to watch a child while one goes to the restroom, or to keep an eye on a bike while one ducks into a deli to buy a sandwich. Diversity, cross-use, and complexity (both social and architectural), or the mingling of residences with shopping areas and workplaces, makes a neighborhood more interesting, more convenient, and more desirable—qualities that draw the foot traffic that in turn makes the streets relatively safe.
How a city develops is something like how a language evolves. A language is the joint historical creation of millions of speakers. Although all speakers have some effect on the trajectory of a language, the process is not particularly egalitarian. Linguists, grammarians, and educators, some of them backed by the power of the state, weigh in heavily. But the process is not particularly amenable to a dictatorship, either. Despite the efforts toward “central planning,” language (especially its everyday spoken form) stubbornly tends to go on its own rich, multivalent, colorful way.
*Scaled Agriculture*
For almost any crop one can name, with the possible exception of sugarcane, smallholders have been able historically to out-compete larger units of production. Time and time again, the colonial states found, small producers, owing to their low fixed costs and flexible use of family labor, could consistently undersell state-managed or private-sector plantations. But you may wonder then why most of our agriculture today is large scale. The paradox is largely resolved, if we consider the “efficiencies” of the plantation as a unit of taxation (both taxes on profits and various export levies), of labor discipline and surveillance, and of political control rather than merely production.
High-modernist plans tend to “travel” as an abbreviated visual image of efficiency that is less a scientific proposition to be tested than a quasi-religious faith in a visual sign or representation of order. 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 farming practices in accordance with climate changes, new crops, and new markets with notable success in the two decades before villagization. They seemed to have an eminently empirical, albeit cautious, outlook on their own practices. 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.
The necessarily simple abstractions of large bureaucratic institutions, as we have seen, can never adequately represent the actual complexity of natural or social processes. The categories that they employ are too coarse, too static, and too stylized to do justice to the world that they purport to describe.
The cultivator begins with the plot, its soil, and its ecology and then selects or develops varieties that will likely thrive in this setting. In scientific potato growing, by contrast, the point of departure is the new cultivar or genotype, in service of which every effort is made to transform and homogenize field conditions so that the field meets the genotype’s specific requirements.
*The imperfection of precise planning*
Formal order, to be more explicit, is always and to some considerable degree parasitic on informal processes, which the formal scheme does not recognize, without which it could not exist, and which it alone cannot create or maintain.
For example, compare Native American advise with the science of the time. Plant corn when the oak leaves were the size of a squirrel’s ear. Embedded in this advice, however folkloric its ring today, is a finely observed knowledge of the succession of natural events in the New England spring. A typical local edition of The Farmer’s Almanac suggests planting corn after the first full moon in May or after a specified date. But a date that would serve for southern Connecticut would not suit Vermont; a date that worked in the valleys would not be right for the hills (especially the north-facing slopes); a date that worked near the coast would not work inland. The Native American maxim, by contrast, is vernacular and local, keyed to common features of the local ecosystem; it inquires about oak leaves in this place, and not oak leaves in general. Despite its specificity, it travels remarkably well. It can be deployed successfully anywhere in temperate North America where there are oak trees and squirrels.
*The contrast to precise planning: Metis*
Mētis represents a wide array of practical skills and acquired intelligence in responding to a constantly changing natural and human environment.
The acquired knowledge of how to sail, fly a kite, fish, shear sheep, drive a car, or ride a bicycle relies on the capacity for mētis. Each of these skills requires hand-eye coordination that comes with practice and a capacity to “read” the waves, the wind, or the road and to make the appropriate adjustments. 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.
Although there are rules of thumb that can be and are taught, each fire or accident is unique, and half the battle is knowing which rules of thumb to apply in which order and when to throw the book away and improvise.
In seamanship, the difference between the more general knowledge of navigation and the more particular knowledge of piloting is instructive. When a large freighter or passenger liner approaches a major port, the captain typically turns the control of his vessel over to a local pilot, who brings it into the harbor and to its berth. The same procedure is followed when the ship leaves its berth until it is safely out into the sealanes. This sensible procedure, designed to avoid accidents, reflects the fact that navigation on the open sea (a more “abstract” space) is the more general skill, while piloting a ship through traffic in a particular port is a highly contextual skill.
A certain understanding of science, modernity, and development has so successfully structured the dominant discourse that all other kinds of knowledge are regarded as backward, static traditions, as old wives’ tales and superstitions.
A story of Metis: A sacred tree in a village had become infested with large red ants, which destroyed most of the fruit before it could ripen. An old man knew that small black ants, which had a number of colonies at the rear of the compound, were the enemies of large red ants. He also knew that the thin, lancelike leaves of the nipah palm curled into long, tight tubes when they fell from the tree and died. Such tubes would also, he knew, be ideal places for the queens of the black ant colonies to lay their eggs. Over several weeks he placed dried nipah fronds in strategic places until he had masses of black-ant eggs beginning to hatch. He then placed the egg-infested fronds against the mango tree and observed the ensuing week-long Armageddon. As the black ants were not interested in the mango leaves or fruits while the fruits were still on the tree, the crop was saved.
The production of standardized knowledge has made certain skills more broadly—more democratically—available, as they are no longer the preserve of a guild that may refuse admission or insist on a long apprenticeship. Much of the world of mētis that we have lost is the all but inevitable result of industrialization and the division of labor. And much of this loss was experienced as a liberation from toil and drudgery.
Democracy itself is based on the assumption that the mētis of its citizenry should, in mediated form, continually modify the laws and policies of the land.
*Closing advice*
Take small steps. In an experimental approach to social change, presume that we cannot know the consequences of our interventions in advance.
Favor reversibility. Prefer interventions that can easily be undone if they turn out to be mistakes.
Plan on surprises. Choose plans that allow the largest accommodation to the unforeseen. In agricultural schemes this may mean choosing and preparing land so that it can grow any of several crops.
Plan on human inventiveness. Always plan under the assumption that those who become involved in the project later will have or will develop the experience and insight to improve on the design.
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Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (Veritas Paperbacks)
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