(1999-05-31) Seabright The Aestheticising Vice Systematic Knowledge Contra Scott

Paul Seabright: The · Aestheticising Vice: systematic knowledge. In the Languedoc there is a vineyard that teaches us an important lesson about textbook learning and its application to the world. In the early Seventies it was bought by a wealthy couple, who consulted professors Emile Peynaud and Henri Enjalbert, the world’s leading academic oenologist and oenological geologist respectively. Between them these men convinced the couple that their new vineyard had a theoretically ideal microclimate for wine-making...If life were reliably like novels, their experiment would have been a disaster. In fact Aimé and Véronique Guibert have met with a success so unsullied that it would make a stupefying novel.

No one to whom I have begun recounting the story believes it will end well. Most people are extremely unwilling to grant that faith in textbook knowledge should ever be crowned with success. We have a very strong narrative bias against such stories

so long as we are in storytelling mode we simply deny that systematic textbook reasoning can make headway against whimsy and serendipity

In Seeing like a State, James Scott is definitely in storytelling mode, though he seems unaware of the narrative biases that result

He has two kinds of story to tell in this book

The first kind of story is the more faithful to his subtitle, since it tells us that the reason certain schemes to improve the human condition have failed (my emphasis) has been a fixation with aesthetic (and specifically visual) simplicity. It is a compelling account.

The best of the case studies document the aestheticising vice in telling ways.

Scott’s collection of case studys forms a rich and learned compendium of Modernist hubris, but he wants to create more than a commonplace book: the studies are meant to illustrate a general case. After all, the particular case has been documented by others: his work on cities owes much to Jane Jacobs, the story of scientific forestry to Henry Lowood, and so on.

But it is in making the general case that Scott comes unstuck, for the studies do not illustrate a common theme

His second, more ambitious story is that all systematic plans for human improvement based on simplification and generalisation are bound to fail.

That scientific agriculture has faced unforeseen problems is undeniable, as is the fact that some of these problems (the environmental ones, for instance) are serious. But the achievements of scientific agriculture to be set against them are remarkable. The proportion of the world’s population in grinding poverty is almost certainly lower than it has ever been, though in absolute numbers it is still unacceptably high. Where there have been important areas of systematic failure, such as in sub-Saharan Africa, these owe more to social and institutional disasters that have hurt all farmers alike than to the science of agriculture itself.

Here are two examples of the rhetoric at work

First, the book’s concluding chapter is a hymn to metis, the Greek for uncodifiable, practical knowledge. That this kind of knowledge is valuable no sane person would dispute, but Scott wants to convince us not only that modern science is committed to erasing metis, but that the loss will be enough to outweigh any likely gain

Perhaps Scott, as a professional anthropologist, feels the need to speak up for traditional knowledge systems as counter-currents to the tidal wave of accountants and bankers shaping the rest of modern culture. Or perhaps he simply thinks it makes a better story

second example. Early in the book Scott worries that some may think him a conservative, since he has it in for the Modernist state, and conservatives are now triumphant about the discrediting of that vision of the state. So he hastens to assure us that he has it in for the market, too: ‘A market necessarily reduces quality to quantity via the price mechanism and promotes standardisation; in markets, money talks, not people.

Of course global capitalism has made the goods available in one country more like the goods available in another country. But this seems deplorable only to that privileged minority who spend more time in aeroplanes than buses, and who regret the fact that the exotic goods they used to bring back from their travels are now available at their local corner shop

A defence of metis (and Scott is right that it needs defending) must be mounted with great care, since otherwise it looks like an attack on education itself, which does more than anything else to help people discard those aspects of their local traditions that do them harm

What doesn’t horrify him, but ought to, is his keeping the company of the ‘something-precious-is-lost-to-modern-life-once-mothers-no-longer-circumcise-their-daughters-and-you-can-buy-rambutan-in-Sainsbury’s’ school. There is no feebler pretext for conservatism than the anxiety that progress is somehow inimical to charm.

Understanding the merits, the vices and the limits of systematic knowledge is no less valuable now that organised Marxism has collapsed.

what we need is some way to use the strengths of systematic knowledge – incorporating evidence, learning from others – rather than a generalised lament about the impossibility of the task. Equivocations on the ambiguity of ‘failure’ are the last things we need.

at the moment the voices calling on us to respect metis in these countries are not those of the defenders of autonomy, pluralism and local tradition. They are the voices of those who would urge their fellow citizens to resist learning anything from the world outside. Paradoxically, the Modernist ideology that dominated their lives for so many decades was one that sought to protect them from outside knowledge, too.