(2024-09-05) Crawford Two Minireviews Seeing Like A State The Unabomber Manifesto

Jason Crawford: Two mini-reviews: Seeing Like a State; the Unabomber manifesto.

The Cosmos Institute launches

The new Cosmos Institute is working towards a future where “AI becomes a tool for consistently expanding human freedom and excellence.” I’m proud to be a Founding Fellow.

Seeing Like a State

James C. Scott says that “tragic episodes” of social engineering have four elements: the administrative ordering of society (“legibility”), “high-modernist” ideology, an authoritarian state, and a society that lacks the capacity to resist.

The book reads as a critique of “high modernism” and of “legibility” (and the former’s attempt to create the latter). And there is a grain of truth in this critique. But it should be a critique first and foremost of authoritarianism.

But Scott is an anarchist, not only politically but metaphysically. So he doesn’t just criticize authoritarianism. He criticizes the very attempt to find, or to create, order and system. All such attempts are misguided, all order is false, all “legibility” is fake.

He goes on at length about how farmers know their land and crops so much better than any Western outsider with their “science” ever could! He ignores cases like Norman Borlaug’s Green Revolution.

Worth reading for the stuff about Le Corbusier alone.

To be clear, there are more lessons to take away from Seeing Like a State than just “authoritarianism is bad.” At its best, the book is a critique of technocracy

See also this critique of the same book by Paul Seabright. (1999-05-31-SeabrightTheAestheticisingViceSystematicKnowledgeContraScott)

The Unabomber manifesto

I expected his 35,000-word manifesto, “Industrial Society and its Future,” to read like the delirious ravings of a lunatic.

I was wrong. His prose is quite readable, and the manifesto has a clear inner logic. This is a virtue, because it’s plain to see where he is actually right, and where he goes disastrously wrong.