To start this discussion, I ought first to highlight a book I am currently reading that brings into sharp focus many ideas and observations I have been trying to move forward here. Seeing Like a State by James C Scott is an examination of how the world actually looks through the emergent perspective of the modern state, and how the body of the state behind this point of view changes the world it observes to make it more legible from this perspective. I believe it is helpful to fully understand and inhabit the perspective of the state, and to fully appreciate its evolution and its slow, but cumulative, influence on the physical contours of society, from the mindsets of the individuals to the manufactured landscapes of cities, towns, and country side that they inhabit.
Many constructs of our modern world that many of us mistake for objective reality are memes that have been ruthlessly and relentlessly built by the state. The problem with these points of view, or memes, is that they are, by definition, simplifying for cohesive and reductive purposes. A more important insight is that It is an executive summary point of view that wants to be able to compare apples in one region to oranges in another reliably illegibly, and reliably legibly for correct pairings, and where local economies were illegible to the executive summary, they were colonized by the state’s legibility. What this meant in practice were things like standardizations of languages, currencies, and economies. Where this got very messy was in the matter of land holdings. Local economies did not have property in the sense that we have it today, land was shared and allocated with yearly modifications and changes based on social issues owing to family size or contingencies (a handicapped dependant’s family might get some local charity) and local knowledge about the quality of soils, specific field deficiencies, and other factors that also change over time. These economies were inscrutable to a state perspective, and there was no way to be able to create an administrative system that could tie them together and give any meaningful information about the economic utility of these economies to the state. As part of its legibility program, the state created a definition of property that was static and affixed to individuals. This made taxation an easier task, and taxation based on property calculations a simple matter to know what to tax them, and some idea of larger scale productive capacities. Back of the envelope calculations on generalities multiplied by acres were easy. All the marginal and exceptional stuff at the local level would even out with enough scale owing to statistical probability. A particularly fertile field that is undervalued would compensate for swamp land that is overvalued if all acres are valuated evenly for productive purposes, so long as that average assumption was about right.
The premodern Nation State began with scientific forestry and monoculture farming. The next step in legibility was to create static maps with units of land attached to individual tax payers. This process of creating Cadastral maps systematically remade how land resources were commonly shared and used in functioning communities. It froze in place a particular arrangement in time, when in practice that arrangement was constantly shifting owing to changing local conditions. This gave rise to justifiable property claim disputes as families currently giving up the most relative to their local communities, that is the ones currently being the most altruistic relative to their neighbors, were frozen permanently in place of altruists with a stroke of the state’s pen. A mindset of individual ownership on things that normally seem nonsensical to own, like a river, or a bunch of land, also arose. That is, the state’s perspective, with its simplifying and unifying assumptions that allow it calculate national economies statistics, has at its root the simplification of land into mostly uniform measurements with tax payers potentially attached to each parcel. For this perspective to take hold, it required the systematic elimination of all other prior arrangements on the issue of property and land holding, and these were all equally illegible precisely because there were no unifying legal or economic principles for the state to generalize on, they all functioned according to differing rules, customs, and social and local contingencies at each local economy’s level, and these rules were enforced and modified at the local level according to whatever social custom required there. I am describing a system often called anarchism. It was what existed where the peoples the state claimed rule over were illegible owing to their local culture, customs, economies and value systems. Prior to making them legibile, the state would throw a dart and guess on a tax number, collected and enforced by a local police force. However, since they were illegibile, the state really had no understanding of them other than as rabble, and disaster would strike when the dart was too far off the mark and the people couldn’t pay. The other worse disaster was the opposite that the state wasn’t extorting as much as it could. It needed, in economic terms, to find a way to determine an equilibrium point between the supply of submissive tax payers and the demand of revolting dissidents. The only way to do that was to understand the local economic conditions, and the only way to understand those conditions was to destroy the ones that were hopelessly tangled and complex arising from generations of arrangements and culture, and create ones that were stationary enough and by the book to become comparable to others.
A more ambitious management of living arrangements were the literal restructuring of existing communities. Old world cities were tangled skeins of living and working arrangements that had to be lived in locally to be scrutable, and more importantly, their scrutability was entirely dependent on local social and economic contexts, so one administrator could not go learn the city and give any meaningful information to a General, or economic advisor. Often the restructuring projects were not entirely successful owing to financial constraints, but in several notable cases, such as Napolean’s surgery on Paris, states did manage to remake cities into straight edged, grid like designs. Just as crucial, they could control all new development going forward with standards, codes and zoning ordinances. Nowadays, all modern cities are exceptionally grid like, unlike anything that occurred in naturally growing human communities, even those that were cities before the state intervened and uniformed their growth and design. I should pause here to reiterate the meaning of the last point because I think it is interesting, the existence of the cities predates the modern nation state in Scott’s analysis. The nation state first began by tithing the cities for taxes, and to better understand those cities, had to remake them economically, so they fit within a universal economic value system, and by redefining land as property by fiat, and to remake their physical structure into a grid pattern of distinct areas (commerce, living, industry, etc.) so the state could understand them and calculate various statistical measures by looking at a map with desired statistics in hand, and multiplying by grids. From this perspective, the chicken and egg question over what constitutes a state and when it begins to resolve; the city and local economy comes before the nation state. As a boundary condition, this means that a state is 2 or more local economies that are completely scrutable to one another in some described context. A Nation State is the specific economic and military contexts.
The next question is what is meant by local economy. With the observation that states literally erase and remake cities to render them legible for incorporation in order to fit them into context with a unifying and simplifying set of assumptions comparing their expected economic or military utility with other territories, then it seems that a city and local economy supporting that city would be the largest meaning of local economy that does not become a Nation State even with the existence of justice, morality, social customs, taboos and sharing of the commons. The colonization of a local economy is what a Nation State does. Obviously, defining local economy down to the size of the individual family unit, or as far up as aggregates of Nation States, for purposes of comparison is valid depending on the resolution desired. I would argue that a line can be drawn at least at the city level on the ruins of prior arrangements that were largely destroyed in the process of physical and ontological colonization that rendered them legible for a larger system. This is also at about the point that maps become more legible, rather than less, if local details are ignored and rendered in homogenous grids with parcels of static ownership of land.
The legibility of the current system of global order is rendered in a Nation State perspective, which is to say, in a comparable, integrated economic and military perspective that must, in order for the perspective to render any meaningful narrative or coherence, make simplifications and generalizations that intentionally overlook irregularities as statistical aberrations that can be ignored for the purposes of large scale calculations and analysis. Part of rendering local economies legible is by retrofitting whatever currently exists into a coherent economic system, this is done at the local level by eliminating the local arrangement and establishing a new one by fiat, this is perpetuated to the degree that the people at the local level accept the imposed order.
Here is where it gets interesting and brings me around to why I believe we are living in potentially revolutionary times, despite the abundance of evidence of social change or unrest that we expect to see in turbulent or revolutionary times. Scott argues that the intellectual colonization of the subjects of the state was driven by the deterministic, scientific approach to human affairs, what he calls high modernists. High modernists are often ideologues that believe in a universal objectivity of truth underlying their designs and ideas, and in that arrogance felt no qualms about crushing local objections rooted in subjective local conditions. They exist on the right and left, and numerous examples are easy to conjure. The high modernist strain of thought that has driven the economics of consumer capitalism and the systems of democratic governments like ours is rooted in the conceit that with a perfect enough system, such as a deist taking inspiration from his uninvolved, watchmaker God, we could achieve a utopia. This is a Cartesian mindset. A perfectly designed system that was built on principles of objective truth would, if built correctly, correct itself of human error by a built in gravitational pull toward objective truth; we call these checks and balances and three branches of government. In practice, the systems and institutions of government have grown irreducibly more complex and cruel, rigged, and unjust, and in a related note, has grown at the same pace their supposed benefits have shrunk. At the same time, the consumer capitalist high modernist economies are slowly and now more rapidly immiserating the planet for human life. People are long beginning to wonder what the hell it even means to work in this economy, in shows like The Office and elsewhere in pop culture, we are increasingly acknowledging the naked truth, that the existential emptiness of going to a job every day with a bunch of other people and everyone seems to be in on the joke, even management and ownership at times, that the job and the company is a meaningless, perfunctory exercise, but they still show up on time anyway and adhere to the dress code. Once this stuff shows up in pop culture, its assumptions have already permeated throughout the potential audience in order for there to be an audience to receive it. It’s one thing to think these things in private, another to realize your co-worker is on the same page, quite another to catch management letting in, and another for it to be the generally understood context of the workplace that much of what you do is fill time, even if you manage to find yourself filling time with things you find somewhat more interesting than others in a work environment, but it’s not quite couth to bring it up except within the context of generalized chit chat about pop culture so as to maintain a plausibly deniable distance. It’s becoming more thinkable that the only thing worse than not having a job is having one, when you get to questions like that, then you start questioning things like what exactly the economy is going to return to, or what economic growth in the context of rapidly destabilizing global environment whose velocity of entropy appears to be directly related to growth, and you also begin questioning the mechanics of capitalism itself.
In both spheres, economics and politics, we are seeing the questioning of assumptions down to the basics of current high modernist, deterministic, Cartesian based views of how to organize society. Capitalism is a system of interchangeable actors by design; the mathematical logic and order of its theoretical system are where it vests its authority, regardless of the individual properties of the people playing out the various roles. Our political system of universal justice and vested authority in the office and system itself over individual players is similarly premised on the enduring mechanisms of a self correcting system. What is becoming more apparent, however, is that there never was complete legibility. It’s an imposed mindset that is out of sync with localized experience. As the disparity between what the universally legible perspective says and the locally understood one as experienced by individuals in a social context says grows, the questioning of the legible perspectives premises grows. The math starts looking less and less right. If you live in a community wracked with unemployment, and you and everyone you know is struggling like hell to get by, and the headline in the paper says that the nation’s economy is recovering, you start beginning to question what formulas and ideologies would lead to such a backwards conclusion. I think the confluence of questioning the assumptions that lead to the positive and negative value analysis of capitalist democracy, a more comprehensive critique than arguing on specific value analyses could lead to sweeping changes in an age of rapidly changing economic conditions. The assumptions of these systems both rest squarely on High Modernist, deterministic, Cartesian designs. To question them opens the mind to rethinking everything; such as admitting that human social contexts are usually so convoluted and specific to individuals and cultural conditions, that there are no universal standards of justice, or morality, and so on that make the authority of the state appear legitimate. That a greater level of utility, in total, would be achieved if local economies managed their affairs without an overlay of Nation State legibility zeroing out local contingencies in the equation becomes more thinkable in the decolonized mind.
When the mind ceases to cooperate as people become disillusioned with the system, the Nation State begins to work the body.
The Nation State is, by definition, a hierarchical system. Status and wealth seep up, decision making and violence flows down. A hierarchical system works on the threat of or act of coercion. Sometimes this is direct and indirect, our system mostly uses loss of income, an indirect threat by proxy through deprivation of food and secure shelter.
The Nation State cannot threaten everyone because it ultimately serves someone. It is a perspective lens designed for scale, coordination, uniformity and administration. That lens is a lens through which specific interest groups or constituencies wish to be able to see things. A local fruit merchant doesn’t care what the local fruit economy is like a few hundred miles over, only a capitalist who wished to have operations in both economies would need to be able to understand them both on similar terms. It is easier to convince the fruit merchant that all would be better off if he could trade with that other town by adopting universal standards of language or weight, like the metric system than to threaten him into complying. The way to convince him is simple, his experience as an inter city fruit trader is more fulfilling to him than working solely in his local economy. To be able to control that, the state must instill assumptions that frame general beliefs about personal fulfillment that validate the premises of the Nation State perspective; this is done through national education and religion. If everyone agrees that the greatest thing a human can do, no matter how he does it, is be the richest guy in town. That if they are the poorest guy in town, they accept their circumstances because they had a chance and failed, then it takes less physical coercion to get people to accept being the poorest guy in town unwillingly. Fair and universal systems have objective truths that are the basis of their fairness and universality. As more people begin to see that the Nation State lens is not their view of the world, that the systems are not fair or rooted in any kind of objective truth, but in the same assumptions of the Nation State lens, that there is a lens, then they will fall out of a Nation State identity in unrecoverable form from a Nation State perspective. I don’t know that we will get to that level of questioning in actionable form, but it’s there.
Another sign of the growing disillusionment is the rise in nakedly coercive implements of surveillance and police action in the wars on drugs and terror.
The more coercion built into the system, the greater the threat that is needed to sustain its dynamics of material hierarchy because the willing are increasingly becoming unwilling, and they are becoming unwilling as a consequence of going from unquestioning to questioning the system that seems to be against them by design. (“I am just doing my job.”) The level of coercive threat needed does not go up because of a low bottom, but is directly related to the distance between the bottom and the top; in other words, the poor are acting under pressure by the accumulated coercive mechanisms in the system, such as mandated health insurance policies purchased from private corporations, into giving up a lot more as the ceiling gets higher above them because that ceiling is rising on the material they are giving up; generally people understand that no one, no matter how talented they are, is actually worth, in whatever way or function you personally define human worth, that much more than the least valuable person. If person A and person B were your sibling, and they fit any number of descriptors of humanity, you would agree that in spite of minor differences that only make sense as value judgment in very limited contexts, such as economic utility, they were inherently worth about as much as one another as people to you. Even in specific contexts, such as economic utility, it is still hard to see how much any of us actually contributes to society, but the spread does not seem like it could be very large as several million to one; a perspective could conclude that a guy in a suit is who does some banking management type stuff contributes infinitely more to humanity than a day laborer is warped, whatever the level of consistency of that perspectives internal logic and adherence to its own rules. Capitalists (and bankers) say that economic worth is whatever the market will bear, and although the models of the system are mostly coherent, the system still says things that seem patently absurd, such as that some people make hundreds of millions of wealth all by themselves every year, and the vast majority make a piddling few thousand, fractions of a percent of someone else. Even a context specific lens, like economic utility, must pass a sanity check.
The Nation State is a relatively recent imposition on all of humanity. Our historical perspective is warped because the historical institutions of the Nation State write history through its lens. For a time, Nation States claimed dominion over territories, economies, and peoples that it found inscrutable. There were no Frenchmen or Englishmen, there were people who lived on territories the premodern French and English states claimed as resource bases. It was through a long term effort to colonize and remake their local arrangements in order to make administering and tithing resources in a relatively uniform system easier to calculate and more predictable in effect. They were so thoroughly colonized, and so coherently remade according to a set of uniform and coherent administrative language as today to appear coherent as nations. Many people existed as citizens in a historical sense only; their lives were specifically colored by and understood through the heterogeneous local social and material economies. In our historical accounts of pre-modern states, very little is often known or said about the vast majority of people who are mostly faceless, vague categorizations of economic status. Occasionally, there are riots or revolts and a bit more is known about those. If the premodern nation states found their subjects inscrutable, it is because they did not know much about them, if they did not know much about them, that means the economies and subjects were illegible to them and this also means that the subjects found the Nation State mostly illegible and alien.
In order to make a legible system, nation states had to freeze in place social and legal arrangements at local levels, these arrangements were often fluid, changing over time owing to changes in the social, political and economic circumstances. The next thing the state did was to displace the localized mechanics of these arrangements with the states ordering and classification system in order to make them legible. Nation States that impose universal systems of justice or consideration in effect freeze in place a particular social arrangement, and it takes a long time to update any changes that take place even after the people have long moved past whatever it was that was frozen in place. The state did not end slavery, it universalized it as law and maintained it long past people had begun disavowing its practice. They did not end Jim Crow either, the created and maintained legal disenfranchisement long after people had rejected its premises. A similar observations holds with the war on drugs. Nation States codify injustices as a matter of turning a dynamic and heterogeneous collection of local economies, social contexts, customs and traditions into a static and homogenous economic system. Without the Nation State overlay and imposition of legibility, local economies would sort out their social and economic arrangements according to local conditions, and they did this before colonization. The process of legibility was only recently completed in the last few centuries and we only have vestigial traces of prior ways of life in some older cities that still have remnants of pre nation state ordering that Nation States have not yet had the resources to remake.
It is important to keep in mind that legibility is a physical process, it requires the destruction of local communities and in cases where the Nation State remade the physical geography to read better on a map, such as Napolean's project in Paris, the people were displaced and repressed. They were colonized, it makes no sense to refer to displaced people whose way of life has been remade from above as citizens in the same way their descendants are.
The legibility of a Nation State does have some qualities from an administrative angle. Principles of engineering that generalize and can be applied to specific circumstances at the local level improve municipal services. Where the Nation State goes dreadfully wrong is with the coupling of this administrative capability to the High Modernist desire to socially engineer people and society. Analyzing a sewer system and finding a solution that maximizes sanitation and service is a largely deterministic process; there are a few solutions that will be the best and a few that will be the worst, and they can all be analyzed with an engineering framework, no matter what city or town in study. Social arrangements are wholly different, they are context dependent upon local conditions and circumstances and change over time as local circumstances change. The Nation State operates on the assumption that all of this can be universalized with a system that is designed with the right degree of complexity. This long term project has failed and is increasingly seen as a failure. Complex systems of social ordering are probabilistic rather than deterministic. Outcomes exist in a range of probabilities, similar or duplicate sets of circumstances can lead to a wide range of outcomes, some more likely than others. To freeze one in place and standardize it is to freeze and impede social evolution in place by legal regime.
Can the value of the Nation State as an administrative tool for physical infrastructure be salvaged, that is decoupled, from the desire to political and socially engineer?
The high modernist basis for political and social engineering comes within the context of Cartesian, deterministic ideology. All zealots believe they have the master plan for re-ordering society, and their plans are all different. But what is common among them is the belief in a universal and objective answer. As they fail in time, the faith in any universal or objective solution existing is undermined in its entirety. I identify with anarchism, in my understanding of anarchism, the only universal principle is that of subjectivity. Anarchism is the absence of a master plan. That is the point of anarchist reform, to eliminate the artificial and extremely limited perspective of the nation state and return decision making to local economies. It is not a utopia that eliminates injustices and inequities, those are part of the human condition, but it is an arrangement that offers greater individual liberty. An arrangement that has been destroyed for the sake of being able to have legible pop culture and the capacity for nationalist fervor. In its universalizing and static imposition of human society, the Nation State makes it almost impossible to improve or dismantle outdated standards once frozen into place as law. To change a federal law requires massive mobilization and resources. If these matters were left at the local level, the effort of an individual would extend as far as their community, a far easier and more fruitful impact. (The challenge of changing the minds of a few hundred people in a local economy to change an existing social custom is less work than changing the minds of a few hundred million people in a Nation State, and subsequently getting the laws changed to reflect the mindset change.) The Nation State comes after and predates on trade, organization, and society. Functioning anarchist societies can and did exist in order for Nation States to arise.
An anarchist project could begin at rejecting the universal standards that superficially impose a narrative order across all local conditions and exigencies and return this decision making to local levels to be determined and constructed by the people living and working together there. That is not to say that in the absence of universal rules, all rules are equal. The point is that rules, or laws, only make sense in context. I am not a universalist, I have my own beliefs about how things should be to maximize fairness and utility. I am sure I would find some local arrangements that arose from a reform along these lines abhorrent, but the individual does not have to worry about the customs of the next community, only his or her own, which they have far more influence and say over. Accepting these pockets of backward custom and order is a better tradeoff than what the Nation State offers, which wages wars and has criminalized an entire race of people. Anarchists are often asked for a plan, but the answer is simple; there is no plan that can be given for the issues that arise from social context. You have to figure it out based on the circumstances you know best. A significant impediment to an anarchist change is the physical and psychological successes and legacies of the Nation State in remaking human culture. Functioning communities are anathema to coherent Nation States and have been designed against with urban arrangements that have placed people living cheek to jowl who do not know each other’s names. The pacification and legibility project of local communities has zeroed out the institutions and properties of localities that enable them to exist independent of the Nation State, this was the explicit goal and work of making them transparent in the process of colonization.
I believe the materialist culture of the ideas and principles underlying the desire for a Nation State are becoming maladaptive to physical reality and this more than any other factor will lead to their demise. The deterministic conception of human social context rooted in scientific enlightenment has repeatedly failed and led to some of the greatest horrors in recent history. Just as importantly, the economic and military framework of the colonial project are adaptive for a world whose resources outstrip by great margins humanity’s capacity for utilizing them. Local shortages can be made up for by taking from local abundance. In a world with more local abundance than shortages, the ever expanding economies and administration of Nation States are possible. In one where there are more local shortages, the premises of the Nation State begin to fail. Local contingencies begin to outstrip the administrative efficiencies and gains of a legible perspective. The economic and military lenses through which humanity at scale is currently seen for purposes of governance will fall out of favor as their depictions of reality becomes further removed from reality as experienced locally and individually. The system becomes more illegible at the local level. Other primary lenses could return into favor. One that I believe has promise is a lens of philosophy, that is to say that in a world of dwindling resources and increasing hardships in our daily lives owing to the exhaustion of natural resources and widespread ecological breakdown, philosophical, non-deterministic consciousness will be more adaptive for that environment than what is currently in favor and breaking down rapidly. Tragedy is starvation and deprivation; criminality is starvation and deprivation in the context of a material culture that has an excess abundance of food and other material goods. To begin to make that distinction is to relinquish delusions of absolute scientific control, to accept that sometimes life is hard and hardship unavoidable owing to forces beyond one’s control, but adapting to and finding meaning regardless of material culture.
