Seeing Like A State
Robin:
Hello, Agnes
Agnes:
Hi, Robin
Robin:
Today we're gonna talk about Scott's book, Seeing Like a State, which is, came
out in '98, so it's, I guess, um, 28 years old
Agnes:
I guess so I'll trust you. I'll trust your math
Robin:
Right. Um, but it's popular, and it's a nice jumping-off point for lots of
people to talk about lots of different things. Uh, but it's closest in my mind
to, uh, Peasants into Frenchmen-
Agnes:
Mm-hmm
Robin:
... which we discussed a bit before. And so it's a-
Agnes:
And he talks about Peasants into Frenchmen, uh-
Robin:
But he has a, some, a very different take than Peasants into Frenchmen.
Peasants into Frenchmen is basically about here's the modern world, and this
is how it started, as if the modern world was a fine thing to have. And, uh,
you know, you wanna understand where it came from. Scott instead is saying,
uh, well, this whole modern thing you're doing has some real problems
Agnes:
Right. So I think he wants to pull together a feature of the modern world that
is going to be common to good and bad instances of it with a bunch of features
that are gonna point bad, and then use that to critique the modern world. So
the feature that's gonna be common to good and bad is something like
legibility, um, or standardization, um, uh, where, um, there's more sort of
similarity, unification, standardization. It's more, um, it's more
intelligible from afar or by a stranger. Um, and an example that he likes to
use is, you know, think of a wild forest versus a forest where the trees have
been planted in such a way as to optimize for, um, getting wood. And so
they're all planted in rows, and there's nothing but that kind of tree. And
that second kind of forest is, like, easy to survey. It would be easy to map,
for instance. Um, it would be easy to calculate how much wood you could get
out of it, et cetera. So that's the legibility, um, uh, condition. And the
modern world is just more legible in very, very many ways. And one of the
things that's interesting about the book is just seeing all the different
ways, um, you know, uh, the, um, uh, homogenization of languages. Like, we've
just lost a ton of languages, and then more people speak a few languages, and
many, many people speak... He doesn't talk about this, but, like, a language,
uh, that I've learned is, uh, like, uh, what English is referred to outside
of, uh, uh, places where people speak it natively, namely Globish, a kind of
degenerate version of English that has a small subset of the words of English
but that many, many people can speak. Um, that's, uh, you know, that's a form
of legibility. Um, uh, so yeah, that's just the legibility one. I'll say that
much, and then I can bring in the other features, the bad, evil features
Robin:
Right. So, um, Peasants into Frenchmen and even legibility as a concept seems
like it's sort of, yes, obviously you'd have to do a fair bit of that. Uh, his
critique seems to be more about overconfidence or neglect of local knowledge,
local considerations, local practices. That is, he's emphasizing what you're
losing when you impose these large-scale structures. So in the case of the
farm, you might say, well, the, the land might not support these rows very
well, or different places s- should have different trees, or the different
other plants you might have had there would have helped make this ecosystem
more robust. Uh, and he, he has many things about, say, traditional farming
practices being, trying to be replaced by sort of modern farming practices and
how the traditional farmers may have known in different places what different
things to plant at d- different times, and maybe even have a bunch of
different plants all in the same place that played off of each other at
different times of the year and gave different interactions. And he's pointing
us to the loss of all that sort of detailed knowledge and practice when you
impose these larger legible systems
Agnes:
Right. So, um, but I think that, uh, you know, any simplification is going to,
there's going to be a loss because you're not getting everything, and there's
going to be a gain from simplification. And the question is whether the
trade-off is worth it, right? So, um, a map is a simplification. Um, you could
just, you could have a one-to-one map. I think there's something like that in
Borges
Robin:
Right
Agnes:
Um, uh, and, and, you know, um, you would be gaining a lot with the one-to-one
map. You'd be con- preserving a lot of information, but it would not be that
useful for getting around a place, right? So we're okay with the fact that the
map leaves out a lot of information. Um, and, um, what, what Scott wants to do
is focus on the cases where the information left out is actually crucial or
important. And the way that he focuses on that sim- systematically is, uh, I-
I'll, I'll put it this way, by way of two simplifications. One is, um, the
idea of high modernist ideology, which is something like just an
overconfidence about the ability to do this thing of making everybody legible.
So it's kinda like saying just doing that in a bad way. Um, uh, but he thinks
that, you know, he associates high modernist ideology with Le Corbusier, um,
with, um, uh, Lenin and Stalin Uh, top-down planners of every stripe. Um, he
thinks they were overconfident in their ability to assess what kinds of
information you could leave out. That's part one. Um, and then part two is
the, um, authoritarian state. Um, so the idea that, um, uh, you know, there's,
um, you know, the seizure of emergency powers or just, like, some kind of
tyrannical power that allows these high modernist ideology villains to sort
of, um, uh, run rampant over this fine-grained reality and not do a good
selection of what needs to be preserved, and that's connected to... He- maybe
he puts this as a separate element, but I think it's connected to, um, the
idea that the, the people, um, to whom this is done are in a position where
they can't resist it. So he thinks the bad cases, the bad cases of legibility
are going to be cases where the high modernist ideology and the authoritarian
state are also present.
Robin:
He also mixes in an aesthetic style.
Agnes:
Mm-hmm.
Robin:
Which is somewhat interesting. It's not just this, I would call it confidence
in abstractions. That is-
Agnes:
Mm-hmm
Robin:
... the leader has a set of, an abstract view of these worlds, and these, this
view includes important abstractions that they've learned in the school from,
you know, various consultants, et cetera. And then they're neglecting many
concrete details via confidence in their abstractions, that they, they feel
like these abstractions are close to reality. But a part of that confidence is
in an aesthetic judgment that is just the nice, neat rows-
Agnes:
Yeah
Robin:
... in the forest, or even the nice, neat houses in the village plan or a
farming plan. That neatness feels like a affirmation or, or support for your
abstractions. If your abstractions can produce a elegant image that somehow
makes them believable. Uh, so my, my main complaint about Scott is just he's
highlighting this trade-off, but he isn't helping us very much know how to
make the trade-off. That is, in where is the right point in the difference?
But I think we can think about that with his, his examples. We might start to
look into the details of what goes wrong to get some clues about when you
might have gone too far.
Agnes:
Right. Well, let me just say something about that aesthetic for a minute, too.
Um, um, 'cause I think he's quite unfair about that. That is, I think that he
uses the idea that, oh, somebody is making their city this way because they
want it to look a certain way, as, like, a totally illegitimate consideration
in terms of how to create the abstraction. That is, abstractions that have an
aesthetic element, he thinks are, uh, he, he implies are therefore
illegitimate, therefore they are, they are fated to ignore important details
because the aesthetic ground can't possibly be the right ground. But I think
that, in fact, um, often aesthetics serve as a heuristic for sim- for how to
do simplification, like a mathematician.
Robin:
Mm-hmm.
Agnes:
Um, ma- mathematicians that I know say that they use aesthetic considerations,
um, to-
Robin:
Right
Agnes:
... uh, orient themselves in, uh, their simplifications. And, um, it, it
definitely can go wrong, but it doesn't seem crazy to me to, um, um, that that
sort of modernism would come packaged in with, um, an aesthetics of simplicity
that would guide people, um, so that they could themselves do this modernist
stuff more simply. Like, it's a way of making modernism itself more legible.
Um-
Robin:
Right
Agnes:
... and, you know, on the other side, where you have the Jane Jacobs and the
Rachel Carsons and, the, who are the heroes of this book, right? The people
who insist on the messy complexity. That is an aesthetic, too. Um, and they
also, like, like the delightful, you know, um, plaza, like, uh, uh, of a small
European city where people, like, use the space in different ways over
different times of day and, like, people es- are aesthetically attracted to
that, and people like Jane Jacobs are, you know, her significance is partly
leveraged off of that aesthetic response, and I don't think that's crazy or
wrong either. So, uh, anyway, I wanted to defend-
Robin:
I think you're absolutely right about that. The cases he shows of aesthetics
did seem to be heuristically appropriate to those c- cases, like the lines of
trees in the forest, that, you know, if you didn't have other obstacles, that
would... He points out specifically why those simplest things made sense. That
is, you had the same spacing between trees. You could go down the rows to cut
them down and monitor them and, and take out the woods. There were lots of
practical advantages. A, a, a grid shape of a city, as we know, living in
cities with grids has many advantages in helping people get around and find
themselves in the city. Uh, you know, whatever disadvantage they may have,
there are definitely clear advantages from these various aesthetically dr- you
know, m- no- mo- you know, uh, identifiable designs that have many advantages
that you can tie to those particular simple choices.
Agnes:
Right. But I wasn't just claiming the things that we're attracted to, um,
like, that, that there are these, um, you know, conceptual justifications. My
thought is that the aesthetic appeal of them may allow you to be attracted to
them without having to think through-
Robin:
Sure
Agnes:
... all of the reasons, right? So that the-
Robin:
Right
Agnes:
... aesthetic is a heuristic, um-
Robin:
And a valid one
Agnes:
... uh, for, a- a- right, and, and it does track the things that you care
about. Not perfectly. Um, but, um, uh- But, right, but, like, that is the
ideology itself has to be legible, and one way that it can be legible is
aesthetically. Um-
Robin:
So he doesn't talk much about timing here, but I'd like to. So his book was
published in '98, but few of his examples go close to '98. They are from much
earlier in the 20th century, and they're all from post, um, Peasants into
Frenchmen. So there was this particular era where the nation state arose, and
then many modernist projects happened, and then there was a decline. I think
by the time he writes this book, this thing isn't happening very much anymore.
At least he doesn't, he isn't able to draw from examples close to his time. So
I think it's worth noting that there was this peak of modernism, peak of
confidence and abstraction. That was an important thing that happened in our
world over the last few centuries. And plausibly, you know, the harm from
overconfidence and abstraction peaked with the peak of confidence and
abstraction, but I wanna lament the loss of that peak because our modern world
is built on so many abstractions developed during that period where we
experimented with a great many structures that hadn't existed in the ancient
world before, and we are now benefiting from all the experimentation that
happened in all these abstractions that we have, in many ways, worked out and
made work for us.
Agnes:
I'm not confident that, um, we are less confident in abstraction now than they
were in this period. I think, um-
Robin:
We're ex- we're thus ex- taking abstractions that we've recently developed and
then trying them out in ways we haven't had much experience with. That's, that
was a peak of, say, Stalin and how many of these era-
Agnes:
I don't know. It's, like, um, I, I, I think that large language models are a
kind of triumph of abstraction, and we are trying them out in a lot of ways
that we haven't had prior experience with. I think the internet and-
Robin:
He, he would have a really hard time telling the stories he told about the
internet or AI in terms of-
Agnes:
I, I agree. So what-
Robin:
... like vast harms caused by-
Agnes:
Right. Well, well, what there isn't is the authoritarian state. So I think
that's what has gone down, um, is the, um, state implementation of, um, these
ide- these, these, uh, forms of modernism. And even in the, you know, the
examples that he gives, I mean, Le Corbusier is somebody who, it's his...
Mostly it didn't get realized. He came up with these plans for a city that
didn't happen. And then we have Brasilia, which is not designed by Le
Corbusier, so it's kind of, um, like-
Robin:
Right
Agnes:
... some of these figures are just people who were into this but didn't
actually achieve it, right? Um-
Robin:
Right
Agnes:
... so I think what, um, what the period that he's looking at, what's sort of
characteristic is that there's a kind of top-down enforcement of the
abstraction. And I think that what we have seen since then is, um, no, it, um,
uh, things work better if the legibility, if people run themselves into the
arms of legibility and standardization, which is just what we do when we go on
Facebook and give them all our data, right? Um, now all of a sudden Facebook,
uh, we're legible, right, to Facebook because of what we have freely chosen to
give them. We then lament that and complain that we're being oppressed by them
and et cetera, but that is really very different than the Tanzanian farmers
that were being, like, forcibly uprooted u- under threats of violence to have
to live in these, um, you know, settlements that had been made for them. That
was really, um, political power being directly exercised or, you know, Stalin,
right? So, so, um, um, we may claim, okay, the, these AI companies or these
tech companies are stealing our data, but, um, and in that sense, right, we...
that, that's parallel to the authoritarian state. Um, but what, um, what I
think we've learned is that this whole process works better if the people
themselves are clamoring for legibility, standardization, being made uniform,
et cetera, and people will start clamoring for it. You don't have to impose it
on them. And that's the world that we live in, but it is very much, I think,
an, a world of abstraction.
Robin:
So I'm, of course, familiar with this book because many of my associates are
libertarian, and many libertarians have liked this book because they read it
as, as you say, criticizing government more than capitalism for its, uh,
trying to make things legible and, and abstract, im- imposing abstractions.
Scott himself resists that interpretation.
Agnes:
But he has no re- he offers no re- he basically is like, "I hate capitalism
too." But his arguments, um, don't apply.
Robin:
Right.
Agnes:
'Cause his argument says that in order for this to be pernicious, you don't
just need the legibility, you need the authoritarian state and, um, the high
modernist ideology. And, um, it's not clear that markets require either the
authoritarian state or the high modernist ide- ideology. And so markets are an
example of a way to create legibility, standardization, et cetera, you know,
transforming quality to quantity via the price mechanism. That's some sentence
he has in there. To do- does, to do all of that without these, um, top-down
villains that he, his framework blames, um, the problems on. So yeah, he wants
to object to capitalism, to neoliberalism, all of that as, like, he wants to
disaffiliate himself with libertarians. But I see why libertarians like it
because his actual argument I don't think applies. It, it doesn't create
reasons for thinking that, uh, uh, unfettered capitalism would be any kind of
problem.
Robin:
So if you think about cities in the United States over the last century, um,
a, a story is that roughly a century ago, large changes were happening in
cities driven in part by city machines, political machines-
Agnes:
Mm-hmm
Robin:
... who, being very centralized, could approve and often did approve large
changes to cities, such as, say, building the subways in New York. Um, and
sometimes it went badly, but then many big changes happened, like all the
subways in New York, uh, happening because of these political machines
allowing big changes. And then people like Jane Jacobs lamenting about people
like Mo- Moses, um, shut that down, and we've prevented a lot of big changes
in cities, and then cities have accumulated higher housing prices 'cause less
has been built, and that we have, through zoning, et cetera, have frozen a lot
of big change. So-
Agnes:
Mm-hmm
Robin:
... there's this way in which government has done a lot less in terms of even
the United States, uh-
Agnes:
Libertaria- that, your friends should love that, right?
Robin:
Well, they lament that, in fact, capitalism isn't being allowed to change
cities because we've over-regulated capitalists. But that's in part via a
rejection of this old-style liberalism of embracing big idea- big ideas and
trying to make big changes, and instead, you know, having a new idea of just
let's protect all the little guys against, you know, encroaching on their
space. So, you know, once upon a time, the left was eager to make public
housing, and that, something Scott criticizes is that goes badly sometimes.
But now they're not making much public housing, but we're not m- allowing much
housing to be built at all, and we're protecting each person against neighbors
building stuff that might block their views or something they might like. And
so there's a sense in which regulation, as been noticed by, say, the ab-
abundance agenda people, that, uh, government has no longer pursuing these
large, grand projects in- powered by an abstract vision, and that's a- another
big change over this time. And that's partly what I might say, we had a peak
of abstraction. And it's not just about totalitarian governments, it's also
about even in the United States government not being any more totalitarian
than it used to be, a loss of appetite for big, grand projects.
Agnes:
So, um, I think it might be something like, um, I don't think it has much to
do with abstraction. I think it has to do with the sort of top-down
implementation. I think we have had some big, grand changes. I think large
language models are a big, grand change. I think the internet is a big, grand
change. I think social media is a big, grand change. They are big changes, but
the way that these big changes work is that they are somehow, like, emergent
phenomena in some way from a bunch of small choices. Like, even large language
models couldn't exist without the internet, right, and without all that data.
Um, and so what they really contrast with starkly is, um, a sort of, um, uh,
yeah, concentration of power and top-down administration of power that
arguably is there even in capitalism, uh, and that we have developed a
distaste for. And, um, uh, so, um, there's still a lot of abstraction. There's
still a lot of big changes, but, um, I think that there's this thing that you
had for most of human history, which was, like, the great man who has an idea
and then he makes it happen and it affects, like, thousands or millions of
people. We don't like that anymore. We don't want that to happen. Um, we want
those, the idea has to come from the thousands of, or millions of people. And
a big idea can come from them, and the, and the, the great men can have, like,
a place in the story. They can sort of be channeling it. Um, but, you know,
uh, so what we, what we have, we, we, that, so that i- is the change as I see
it. And, you know, maybe part of the issue is that, um, um, these top-down
projects sometimes work out really well and sometimes work out really badly,
and maybe we feel like we don't have a good ability to tell from the outset
which way it's gonna work out. And so we're just gonna, like, not do that, and
we're gonna have it go the other way. Which that could also work out really
badly, to be clear.
Robin:
So it's, seems to me worth categorizing areas of life and say that an area of
life that had existed for a long time, what happened is people tried big
projects, and then they put a lot of regulation to prevent them, like with h-
buildings and zoning.
Agnes:
Yeah.
Robin:
But then what happened in the last few decades is some areas that just didn't
exist before, and so there wasn't much regulation about them, all of a sudden
technologists invented them and then had the space to do big things because-
Agnes:
Yeah
Robin:
... we hadn't expected that and hadn't had a history-
Agnes:
Yeah
Robin:
... of preventing it.
Agnes:
Uh-huh. Makes sense.
Robin:
Uh, and so-
Agnes:
So they'll just have to find more spaces where things haven't been done.
Robin:
Right, but that is at least, you know-
Agnes:
That's what the Wild West is. It does stop being the Wild West once you settle
it, and you gotta find a new Wild West.
Robin:
But, I mean, I'd say there's, there was a peak of modernism, and it's worth
noting that, that it was a, you know, there was a period of rising modernism
and then a period of declining modernism. And, um, I want to highlight that
that happened. And therefore, we are less open to modernist projects like we
were at the peak of modernism, also maybe more like well before the peak. So,
you know, I, I don't think in, say, 1700, there wasn't much appetite for big,
grand projects to remake large areas of society. Uh, and then maybe 1900 to
1950 was a peak of appetite and willingness to do those things, even in areas
that had l- existed for a long time. We were willing to change things that had
been around for a long time then. And then after that we locked down on
regulation and many of the old things and said, "Those things aren't allowed
to change anymore," but we were allowing change in things that had never
existed before, like the internet and AI.
Agnes:
I guess I think that, um, if there's a thing that Scott uses the phrase high
modernist ideology to refer to, I wouldn't equate that with modernism. Um, uh,
high modernist ideology includes the thought that, um, uh, sort of, um, um, we
can rationally design the social world. Um, and-
Robin:
And the physical world. It had many worlds
Agnes:
And the physical world, yes. The, that's, uh, the, the, the, the, the, the
physical world, I mean the social world partly by way of the physical world.
Um, so, so, um, uh, that, um, these were, um, things that could be subjected
to rationalism and science, the social world and the physical world. So let's
call that high modernist ideology. And it, and that somehow, like
unproblematically and immediately, and as long as you were smart enough you
could, you could immediately improve things and you could immediately see, see
how everything would become more rational.
Robin:
And that was part of modernism, wasn't it?
Agnes:
I, I, I'm just not equating that with modernism.
Robin:
Okay
Agnes:
Because, like, uh, like I'm reading a bunch of-
Robin:
It was correlated
Agnes:
I, I, I'm reading, like right now, a bunch of, and teaching a class on
modernism, and that's like one strand, and there's another strand in modernism
that's super skeptical of that. Um, and, and a backlash against it that I
think is equally modernist. Um, so, uh, it, like part of, part of what you're
noticing is that Scott has picked out the people who are, um, you know, poster
children for this ideology. But not, uh, not all important modernists were in
that position.
Robin:
Okay, but if-
Agnes:
Most were not
Robin:
... take these two kinds of modernists you see, that is still different than
the world 300 years ago. Those two camps didn't exist so much 300 years before
then, right?
Agnes:
Yeah.
Robin:
So modernism was the rise of a diverse set of camps, none of which-
Agnes:
Yeah
Robin:
... had existed before.
Agnes:
I agree.
Robin:
And that's the key distinctive, what I'll say was driven by abstraction. It's
abstract reasoning that allowed people to embrace these different dramatic
views of things.
Agnes:
Uh, right. I think it was also abstract reasoning that allowed people to
criticize the high modernist ideology.
Robin:
Right. But-
Agnes:
They both, so that's what I'm saying
Robin:
... right, so I'm, exactly.
Agnes:
Yeah.
Robin:
I'm saying-
Agnes:
So, and, and, but that-
Robin:
... abstraction is a key part of moderns.
Agnes:
Right. But, but in that sense, right, um, so, so one way that I would put, um,
what modernism is, um, I don't think you can learn what modernism is that well
from reading Scott's book. I just don't think-
Robin:
I agree
Agnes:
... he focused on that. Uh-
Robin:
But it, it's part of modernism
Agnes:
Yes, it is part of it. But you, but you can get a very distorted picture of
something by-
Robin:
I-
Agnes:
... only learning about what is part-
Robin:
Sure
Agnes:
... part of it. So let me just say the other part. I think modernism is
characterized, in part, e- even this is not the whole thing, by a certain
split, um, that Musil calls the split between precision and soul, or that has
n- you know, um, C.P. Snow calls the two cultures, or that we now say
humanities versus tech. Um, um, that is, it is the time period in which the
people who, um, believed in, um, progress and innovation started to split off
from the people who believed in, um, like culture and the soul and-
Robin:
Right
Agnes:
... et cetera. And it's that split that characterizes modernism. And in that
sense, we are still modernism. Modernism hasn't declined. I don't think we're
in a post-modern period. I think we're just in modernism. It's just continued.
That, that, that, that battle is continuing today.
Robin:
I would say that battle is weakening and declining today. That is, it's not as
strong as it used to be. But I don't know that, you know, I'm not sure
pursuing that helps us understand Scott here per se, but there, there's, that
is a question. It rose, we agree that it rose, and then it reached a high
level compared to previously, and then the question is did it decline again
from there, or did it stay at the same hi- high level from, say, 1900 to
today?
Agnes:
Yeah, I think it is just as high today. At least, and this might be my v- you
know, well, you're in the same vantage point of being at a university, but it
feels like the core battle of the university is, like humanities versus STEM.
It feels like that's the fundamental split. To the, to the extent that I don't
think people realize that that didn't used to be a cut inside the university.
It didn't used to be like you had to make a choice.
Robin:
Right.
Agnes:
Do you read novels or do you know math? Um-
Robin:
So, look-
Agnes:
That, that's not some eternal thing about thinking.
Robin:
But-
Agnes:
That's-
Robin:
I think we agree that something has changed since 1900, and part of that is,
say, the less, fewer totalitarian versions of-
Agnes:
Mm-hmm
Robin:
... these ex- ver- experiments that Scott presents.
Agnes:
Yeah, we got a real distaste for totalitarianism, uh, I think as a result of
our world wars.
Robin:
We also, you know, for example, with the rise of, uh, regulation and zoning
and, say, squashing nuclear power, we squashed many what would've been high
modern projects. So say nuclear power, it isn't a totalitarian thing. In 1900
people might have just gone wild with it. Uh, like they went wild with oil,
say, in Standard Oil-
Agnes:
Mm
Robin:
... or something, uh, or cars. So in the late 1800s, early 1900s, we had many
new techs that were plausibly quite disruptive that people just embraced and
went wild with. And then, you know, starting 1970-
Agnes:
Yeah
Robin:
... or so we shut a lot of that down. It wasn't just-
Agnes:
Yeah
Robin:
... shutting down totalitarianism, it was shutting down a lot of modernist
visions of change.
Agnes:
Right. Right. So I think that's right. Like, so I think that, um, you know,
what's... I would say that that kind of humanity STEM divide, that
understanding of modernism, it's, the conflict has risen and escalated over
time. That is, the people who really noticed it in 1910 were like, like, a,
you know, handful of intellectuals and novelists and whatever. Um, um, but,
uh, it then becomes like the commonplace at some later time. And one way to
think about that, one way to think about regulation is that, um, the inability
to adjudicate this war between humanities and STEM means that there is just a
standing skepticism about anything understood as scientific and technological
progress in the social realm. Because you science and tech people haven't
actually proven to us that you can integrate soul, and in fact you kinda
stopped trying. And so we just have a general worry about you. We have a
general feeling of danger-
Robin:
Right
Agnes:
... and that's gonna ground a move to regulate and control and confine.
Robin:
But we have to explain why there was a change. Did, how did the skepticism win
out when it wasn't winning before? Why was there the switch?
Agnes:
I don't think it completely won out. I mean, I think that-
Robin:
It certainly, there's a change.
Agnes:
Right. So I think that, um, I think that, like, the, the way that you might
think about it is that, um, uh, the, the battle started to, um, find its place
in politics, um, where, like if you wanna read the authors who are talking
about, hey, the world of precision doesn't make room for soul. If you wanna,
like, read those authors in, like, you know, 1920 or something, those authors
are all, like, novelists or, you know, philosophers or whatever. Um, um,
they're, they're not people who are involved in politics or who could
potentially be doing any regulating. And eventually this idea spreads outside
of those circles. That's what I would say is just that the, um, um, what we
are seeing is full-blown modernism, whereas in 1920 you just had the
beginnings of it, and the people who are pushing the, the tech progress were
enough that the c- the, the, the war hadn't really started to happen yet. And
so even if there were these people who were resentful of it, it could still
kind of go unfettered.
Robin:
Even in 1920 we had already had 70 years of rapid technical progress and
business change, so the world had accepted large changes in structures and
abstraction-driven, you know, businesses and reorganizing things. So it would
be-
Agnes:
Well, there were also huge critiques of those, right? I, uh, I, just a few
days ago I watched, um-
Robin:
But they weren't effective, clearly, right? That is-
Agnes:
That's my point, is that, that the war didn't, like, um, it wasn't a hot war
yet. It was like a cold war. And, um, um, so yeah, you have like, uh, like we
watched, in my class we watched a movie called The Crowd that is, like, a
critique of the city as a form of organization, and there were other such,
there are other such fa- famous movies.
Robin:
Right.
Agnes:
Um, this movie's from 1928. And cities were happening. It's not like they were
happening... It's not like The Crowd stopped cities from happening. But, um,
it's that the, you know, um, outlier views of a few intellectuals became
mainst- mainstream views, and then views that politicians could then
implement.
Robin:
So if you look at, say, Stalin, um, that's well before then.
Agnes:
Yes.
Robin:
So you might say in some sense modernism penetrated politics through
authoritarian governments well before it penetrated politics through
democratic zoning, et cetera.
Agnes:
Right. So I think i- in, you can, you can point to specific cases, right? So,
um, it didn't mostly penetrate. He, Stalin was an outlier. Um, that-
Robin:
Well, not, Hitler was also doing a lot of big social changes.
Agnes:
Right. So I mean, in general I think that, um, an, um, you know, an
authoritarian ruler is going to have, um, some incentive to move towards
legibility, um, if they can. Um, incentive to, um, increase legibility in
order to increase their control. That's a point that, um, Scott makes.
Robin:
Right.
Agnes:
But, um, but I think there's good reason why, um, you know, he didn't choose
Hitler and he chose Lenin and Stalin because there, there, this kind of, um,
like, the, the high modernist ideology is one that y- can be much more clearly
illustrated with them in terms of turning the whole country into a kind of
factory.
Robin:
Right. So it seems like there's a interesting time asymmetry here. That is, we
have the rise of the modern world where there are many, I mean, the rise of
the nation state happens in the last half of the 1800s, right? Uh, and so
that's peasants into Frenchmen, enormous changes in legibility and structure.
Agnes:
Yeah.
Robin:
So that was happening even without modernist rationalization or abstract
discussion of it, right? It, it happened as a fact in the social and physical
and business world. And then, uh, that led to- You know, people like Stalin
and many of the more totalitarian or, you know, central control governments
doing a lot of big experiments. And then you have the rise of the critique
part of modernism becoming strong enough to restrain those sort of grand
ambitions all over the place. So if we look at the two sides, as you might
say, of modernism, modernism itself was embrace- was in those two sides, but
the world was going on a separate trajectory without much influence from them.
But as they grew in influence and attention, then they started to be able to
influence policy and politics and, you know, the arts and public opinion. And
then, then that is when there's, there's more restraint because the, the
restraint side now has sufficient intellectual support that it might not have
had before. If that's a theory, I mean, the question's like, why couldn't the
public just have been skeptical before without the intellectuals? But we might
say the intellectuals need-
Agnes:
Yeah, so-
Robin:
They more needed the intellectuals to be skeptical, and then they finally had
enough intellectuals to be skeptical, and they reach, res- restrained the high
modernist project building.
Agnes:
So I'm inclined to think that some of the story here is even with people like
Stalin and Le Corbusier, um, see which way the world is running and then get
out in front of it and say, "I'm leading."
Robin:
Right.
Agnes:
That is, the process th- And this is something that I think Scott is, kind of
just gets wrong, but Peasants and Frenchmen gets right. The process, this
thing isn't, this, this, this standardization and homogenization isn't really
happening because a few people get that idea in their heads and they're like,
"Now this is how everyone has to be." It is somehow a, a organic process, um,
that, um, I... The only way that I can explain it in my head is something
like, um, there are just a lot of gains from cooperation that people start to
see that they can realize, and then they more and more start to shape
themselves in such a way that they will then be able to participate in those
forms of cooperation. So they might, um, you know, learn English because they
want to be able to, um, uh, coordinate with everyone else who knows English,
and that's alienating them a bit from their native language or whatever. But,
um, they're willing to accept that cost. Um, and so I think that, like, the,
the, the, the writers who first, who I'm reading in my class, um, uh, they are
not, um, saying, "Oh, I discovered something." Th- like, "I, I, I came up with
a new great idea." They're looking at the world around them, which has already
changed, which has already become modernist. Um, and they're saying, "What the
hell is happening?" Like, how could, how could this be happening? How could we
be losing our, like, local differentiation? Um, and, um, this is a kind of
catastrophe for, like, human nature. Um, but they, they're not claiming that
somebody came up with this idea and then imposed it on everybody else. They're
sort of noticing a process that seems to be internally driven. And then, you
know, some of these guys notice that same process and they're like, "Okay, I
can, like, speed it up." And that speeding up didn't always work out.
Sometimes it did work out. Sometimes it didn't work out. But it kind of seems
like the underlying process which keeps happening, and it keeps happening in,
in the face of regulation, in the face of everything else, uh, i- is what's of
interest. Um, we are, um, really strongly incentivized to homogenize ourselves
and to become more abstract as creatures, um, in order to cooperate with more
and more people who are further and further away in both space and time.
Robin:
I think you're right to distinguish processes in the world from just talk
among intellectuals, and to see the talk among intellectuals as largely caused
by the world rather than vice versa. Um, but I still want to see that there's
a dynamic here. It wasn't a constant across time thing. So certainly if you
look at the year 1500 or 16 or 1700, you're not seeing this huge-
Agnes:
Right
Robin:
... abstraction and legibility and these changes. Then in the 1800s through n-
Agnes:
Yeah
Robin:
... early 1900s, you see a lot of that more modernist process where big
projects happen and legibility is attempt, and it sometimes fails and often
succeeds. And people are abstracted from their local once varied conditions.
Um, but then that reaches a peak, and then it declines, I see. And I might
say, well, you know, there was just a really strong drive of the world to
change from being peasants, say, into cities and factories and, and the modern
world. But once you had a rough structure of the modern world, there was no
longer such a drive to change it radically, and so people were willing to sort
of lock it in and say, "This is the way we're gonna be now, and we don't wanna
change it so much." Uh-
Agnes:
Yeah, I think legibility has massively increased since 1950 in, like, just
about every respect. So I, I think it's just going up and up
Robin:
But our-
Agnes:
Big, big projects, okay? Big building projects. I agree with you. I agree that
there's a lot of NIMBYs, and that we have a lot of regulations, and
libertarians wanna complain about that, and you wanna complain about that.
Robin:
Right.
Agnes:
And that's fine, but I just think that that's one point. And the question, how
legible are two random human beings to one another? Pi- pick them up across
the planet, pull them up. How much can they understand one another's lives?
How recognizable will their lives be? How similar will be the music that they
listen to?
Robin:
Right.
Agnes:
How sim- will they be able to talk to each other?
Robin:
Okay.
Agnes:
On all of those fronts, we've just become way more legible.
Robin:
But not because of grand projects to impose legibility.
Agnes:
Yeah. As I said, I think we're, we are a little bit-
Robin:
We're-
Agnes:
... averse to the grand projects, yeah
Robin:
Right. Okay, so that's a difference I wanna notice.
Agnes:
I agree. That's a change. I agree.
Robin:
Okay.
Agnes:
But I think what we learned is that we can g- we can get this increase in
legibility without grand projects. We can get massive increases without grand
projects.
Robin:
Which then means we don't have to reason so abstractly about our lives and
world. That is-
Agnes:
Right, so-
Robin:
... we are more legible, but we are less using abstractions to make big
choices about our world.
Agnes:
Well-
Robin:
So that's a way in which-
Agnes:
... I think we, I think that's not true. I think the, the median human being
uses tons of abstractions to make big choices about their world way more than,
say, in 1950, and certainly more than in 1920, et cetera. I think cert- like,
a s- a tiny subset of great men who were doing things aren't doing those
things now. That's a change. But, um, we're doing more with abstraction. We
live more abstractly. We live less, with less concern for the details of our
local environment. We are constantly abstracted from where we are, and, and
glued to a screen, uh, where we, like, are engaging with a bunch of symbols.
Like, all of it's way more abstract. Our lives are way more abstract than they
ever were.
Robin:
Maybe we could wonder how long that could last. That is-
Agnes:
Yeah
Robin:
... are we, can we sustain this degree of legibility and loss of connection to
local details, and immersion in some shared world abstractions? Uh, is this
the new normal for humanity for thousands of more years? Or are we in an sort
of unusual moment that can't last? Uh, how well can we sustain this?
Agnes:
Yeah. I, I don't know. Um, I, I'm inclined to think that it's a big enough
change that, um, w- we're gonna be different, very different sorts of
creatures after this. We're not going back. Um, but we, we might not continue
in this mode of abstraction. Um, but-
Robin:
Mm-hmm
Agnes:
... um, uh, we, um-
Robin:
I mean, as you notice, as you know, I've focused on the loss of variety here.
Agnes:
Yeah.
Robin:
And worry about cultural evolution not functioning from this point on in a
world with such little cultural variety. And that's, you know, the peasants
had all this local variety, and we've crushed that.
Agnes:
Yeah.
Robin:
And now people aren't very eager even to be locally different, or to have much
local structure or detail in their world. Or, or it doesn't, not very
important to them.
Agnes:
So here's, like, a question that I have about local variety. Like, from
Peasants into Frenchmen. Um, in one way I agree with you that there was
variety. So there was different forms of dress, and there was even different
languages, and there was, like, different, like, marriage norms about, like,
were you not allowed to marry your cousin? Did you have to marry your cousin?
Like, et cetera, right? But in a lot of ways, the peasant life, like, that
gets described is actually quite homogenous. Like, they've all got charivaris.
And not just in France, in Norway, right? So, like, all across Europe, all
these peasants are actually living kind of similar lives in a lot of ways.
They, um, um... I, I, like, I, I... The, the question, has variety increased
or decreased, I, I find a bit difficult to answer because the question is,
which forms of variety are important to us? And, um, yeah. So-
Robin:
Well, for the, for my purposes, the idea would be that each place could be
different, and often chose to be different, but selection pressures would have
caused the homogeneity. That is, the homogeneity across Europe when each
peasant group could be different would then be explained by the fact that they
had a healthy cultural selection world that then induced them all to be
relatively efficient because they could be different. And when they were
different, they either got the gains or benefits from that, and we had this
information process of all these trials helping all of Europe figure out what
worked. And now the question is, if we're all in a shared world culture where
we aren't actually doing much local experimentation to deviate, how will we
learn what to do when we need to learn something different than what we're all
doing together?
Agnes:
What's driving the cultural evolution in the old peasant world, um, is, um,
you know, like, first and foremost, just kind of, um, natural constraints,
right? Um-
Robin:
Yes
Agnes:
... um-
Robin:
Death-
Agnes:
Uh
Robin:
... disease, poverty-
Agnes:
Right, like how much-
Robin:
... famine, war
Agnes:
... crops can the land bear, and climate. Um, and, um, you might just think
that doesn't, um, you- Create that much of a push towards variety, and that's
why the peasants were living pretty similar lives to one another. Um, again,
with some differences, like language differences-
Robin:
Right
Agnes:
... but, um, and that it's when you start getting, like, being formed a lot
by, like, war pressures, and then forming into larger groups in order to be
able to fight the other people, and then coming up with, like, a internal
political organization to increase the power of your group, um, that, that
is... Now we've moved somewhat away from peasant world, right? Even though the
peasants could be inside one of those things, but-
Robin:
Right
Agnes:
... it basically ignores them. Um, uh, th- that is the point at which there's
this kind of enforced monoculture, at least locally, right? Um, um, and that
monoculture seems, um, like where we have the, um, where we get sort of the
incentives for innovation and variety. Um, that is, peasant life doesn't
actually produce a lot of innovation. They're not... I remember one chapter-
Robin:
Right
Agnes:
... where somebody had developed a much better way of, like, doing hoeing,
like a certain device that was way, way more efficient. But the problem was
they're all so, um, starving, they all have so little food, so few calories,
that they couldn't build up the strength to use this thing. Um, eh, like, so
they're kind of stuck. The peasants are kind of stuck where they are.
Robin:
Right.
Agnes:
And, um, so it isn't this mecca of, uh, experimentation-
Robin:
Oh
Agnes:
... and variation. It's kind of a stuck world, and it looks like, um, it is in
some way the loss of variety there that gets you innovation and variety in
another sense.
Robin:
Right. So that's been part of my thesis, that there are these two levels of
culture, and we do great at the level of tech and business practice innovation
because we can vary those easily across our society. And because we have this
huge integrated society, we have world record rates of those things. Uh, it's
at the level of shared cultural norms, values, status markers, et cetera, that
we have less variety, and we find it, it's hard to see how we are searching in
that space. But even though we are changing our culture in that space. Right.
So, uh, you know, different ways of hoeing we're great at. You know, somebody-
Agnes:
But what I'm saying is the peasants weren't.
Robin:
R- I agree, right. So that's a, that's an improvement. It's in the, say,
marriage practices or-
Agnes:
Right
Robin:
... war attitudes or democracy-
Agnes:
But maybe one of those things-
Robin:
... or gender equality
Agnes:
... comes at the cost of the other.
Robin:
Right. That, it does. That's, that's the key point, right. Um, but, say, many
of these, um, projects, uh, in Stalin or Tanzania or whatever, they were
projects to sort of change a whole society together at once. There was this
idea that-
Agnes:
Yeah
Robin:
... they couldn't just piecemeal make these changes happen. They needed to s-
get a whole bunch of people to make a, a big set of changes together at once.
And that's the sort of thing that happened in that high modernist era that
doesn't so much happen now.
Agnes:
Yeah.
Robin:
We aren't trying to make whole regions suddenly change everything together.
Agnes:
Right. I think for largely the reason that Scott gives, namely it often works
out horrifically badly.
Robin:
Right.
Agnes:
Yeah.
Robin:
But that was the sort of modernist substitute for the old decentralized
competitive evolution process. The, you know, modernists thought, well, not
only could we, you know, invent particular things, we could try to invent
whole new s- you know, communities. And-
Agnes:
But-
Robin:
... that's a thing we've stopped doing pr- for good reason, but-
Agnes:
So, so when you say it's a substitute for the evolution process, what I'm
saying is the evolution process produced the peasants who were stuck, who were
not innovating, who were not producing variety, right? Not of the kind that
you're interested in.
Robin:
Right.
Agnes:
And so it's not-
Robin:
No, no
Agnes:
... it's not like the modernist thing isn't-
Robin:
No, but they, they were producing variety of, at the level of marriage
practices and gender equality-
Agnes:
Yeah, yeah
Robin:
... and stuff like that, that, that. So that's what-
Agnes:
Yeah
Robin:
... peasants could do that well.
Agnes:
Yeah.
Robin:
And then they couldn't do the, you know, hoeing thing well. And now the
modernist 1900 world was doing hoeing great.
Agnes:
Yeah.
Robin:
And then they also think we could also do this other thing, as long as we,
like, design it and, and deliberately do it. And then that's what we've
retrenched on and saying, uh, okay, I guess we can't do so much of that.
Agnes:
Right. I mean, I think that, you know, even the peasants didn't think of
themselves as, like, innovating in marriage practices.
Robin:
Sure.
Agnes:
Of course, they were all cut off from each other, and they just thought their
one way was the only-
Robin:
Right. Absolutely
Agnes:
... way of doing anything. Um, uh, so it wasn't, so the, like, I think that
there is, and this is what the modernist writers noticed, that cultural
variety is a real problem for human beings. We kinda can't deal with it.
Robin:
Yeah.
Agnes:
Except it's like, wait a minute, they're doing it this other way. Maybe we
should be doing it that way or not. Let's, let's figure this out.
Robin:
Right. Right.
Agnes:
Um, and, um, the thought that, like, we can just let them do their thing and
we'll all just do different things, um, it's like that works so long as we
don't know about each other, and the minute we know about each other, we start
either trying to kill each other over it or just trying to deliberate together
over it and be like-
Robin:
Right
Agnes:
... "Let's settle how we're gonna do this."
Robin:
We have this clever trick of liberalism tolerance-
Agnes:
Yeah
Robin:
... where we declare that it's not a problem because we pick some set of
things and saying, well, we have to, of course, agree on these things. And
then the other set of things we say, well, it's not a problem if people vary
in these things, and even if it is-
Agnes:
Yeah, but that's-
Robin:
... we just declare it
Agnes:
... like 10 minutes after we do that, we decide the second set of things
aren't important.
Robin:
Right.
Agnes:
You get the fall of religion and whatever. So-
Robin:
Exactly
Agnes:
... the po- the point is, the stuff that we don't all have to agree on becomes
unimportant because we really, really care about all agreeing. And so then
liberalism just becomes-
Robin:
Right
Agnes:
... 100% religion
Robin:
Or when something becomes important to us, we just move it over to the first
category and say, no-
Agnes:
Exactly
Robin:
... we have to fight over that, right?
Agnes:
Exactly. Right. So it's the-
Robin:
You know, once trans is important, we have to agree on trans. We can't have
different states-
Agnes:
Exactly
Robin:
... have a different opinion of that. We must have a national or international
agreement about how to treat trans.
Agnes:
Right. And the first, the first principle where you can see that is liberalism
itself, right? That's the part where liberals are not willing to be tolerant
for other ways of viewing things. Um, they're like, "No, you gotta agree to my
liberalism principles." Um, and then you can think whatever you want of all
the stuff that's totally unimportant. Um, so right, that, that's just the core
problem. Like, I think it, the paradox of tolerance, um, is a real paradox,
and, um, where it seems to go is just that we devalue all the stuff that we're
tolerant about.
Robin:
So if there are some intrinsic contradictions or issues of modernism or the-
Agnes:
Mm-hmm
Robin:
... modern world, you might have thought we would have to deal with those, but
here we are a century or more and a half past the initial rise of modernism,
and we seem to be in a somewhat stable scenario, where a bunch of these
contradictions just sit and remain as contradictions and conflicts that don't
get resolved. And will they just stay unresolved, I guess?
Agnes:
I think that's a really good point. Um, I think that there's this weird thing
when you start to see a new era dawning, um, uh, you know, as these writers
did. Um, you, you, you, you, you see some problems and you're like, "Okay,
let's get to it. Like, probably solve these in, like maybe 5, 10 years or
something." And I think that the deep, some of the deep tensions of modernism,
um, for instance, the question how can we allow, um, cultural difference? How
can we stomach cultural difference? The question, how do we relate precision
and soul or humanities and tech, that they're just really hard. And I, we
might... We're- I don't think we're much further along than these authors
were. Maybe we have, we're more aware of them. Um, but, uh, I, I think that,
I, I guess I think they're gonna be with us a while longer, um, and like maybe
on the order of, like, a couple hundred years longer. Um, uh, you know, the
Enlightenment, like, we, we have Enlightenment thinkers in the 17th century,
right? But the big ideals of the Enlightenment start to get realized hundreds
of years later. Uh, and, uh, so there's a kind of, uh... Yeah, I guess, I
guess I just think, um, maybe we'll never figure it out or maybe it was, it's
just gonna take a really long time.
Robin:
So Scott, here, the book we're focused on, is focused on big projects that
were inspired by the modernist confidence in-
Agnes:
And were bad. Big, bad projects.
Robin:
Right.
Agnes:
He could have called his book that.
Robin:
Right. Uh, but there's the question of have we just stopped doing such
projects? Is that no longer part of the modern world, or does that only happen
in areas where, say, it's never happened before, so we just haven't set up
blocks to it, say, with AI or social media or something, and we have big
projects there? But as soon as we decide that we need to regulate that, we'll
stop that, and we'll no longer allow those worlds to do big projects. Uh, is
Scott's big project stuff over?
Agnes:
So first of all, like I, I'm not sure how to think about this, but I, I'd be
inclined to think that, um, the Wild West of, like, idea space is a lot bigger
than the Wild West of, like, the United States, say. Um, that is, like, yeah,
maybe we'll come in and regulate, and then people will come up with some new
thing we haven't regulated yet. Um, that, that, that it's at least possible
that that's the way that we'll get more b- the way we'll get more big projects
is the way that we've been getting them, namely in domains that have been
hitherto unregulated. Um, I think it also is the case that we will be
choosing... There's a kind of equilibrium here that shows up, right, which is
that we also choose domains that are harder to regulate. So the, the whole
bottom-up thing, right? You could think of that at, like, it's really hard to
regulate Facebook. If... Like, we've all been trying, right? It's really hard
to regulate social media, TikTok, AI. Um, uh, there's this an- there's this,
um, impetus to do it. A lot of people wanna do it. But it's somehow a lot
easier s- to, like, have zoning or just be like, "You can't build a building
here." But exactly how do we prevent Facebook from getting people's data if
they're giving the data to Facebook? And so it may be that we will start to
find big ideas in domains that are harder to regulate over time. We're more
and more gonna select those domains.
Robin:
I feel like if you look at the government officials who tried to reorganize
Tanzanian farmers-
Agnes:
Yeah
Robin:
... their level of understanding of that farming world was comparable to our
understanding of Facebook, such that if we had had the hubris they had, we
might well just go in and throw a bunch of rules and, like, throw our weight
around and see what happened.
Agnes:
Yeah.
Robin:
So I think what's more happened is we are more shy about... At the same level
of knowledge, we aren't willing to do as much. We're less willing to start and
approve big projects like this compared to what they were back then, and part
of that, I guess, can be the learning from these bad ex- bad examples that-
Agnes:
See, but I, I, I'm inclined to think that it's, like, the, the proposition
of... It seems to me that, like, how you do the regulating. Like, with the
farmers it's like you can threaten them with death if they don't move
somewhere else or whatever.
Robin:
Right.
Agnes:
You build them houses and, you know. Like, uh, like I could have the-
Robin:
If we had that power, we could do that in Facebook. We, we could definitely
make rules that were-
Agnes:
Well, right, but, but the issue is that-
Robin:
... death threats
Agnes:
... right, but the issue is that it's like what exactly do we want? We, like,
like the government could sort of shut down Facebook maybe, um, but that's not
what people want, right? And, and so-
Robin:
People have a lot of proposed draconian rules for Facebook. We just don't
create-
Agnes:
Absolutely, but they're all different
Robin:
... a consensus on it, right.
Agnes:
Right. But they're all different, and there are many, many voices-
Robin:
We haven't empowered... I mean, there were probably lots of different concepts
for how to reform Tanzanian farming. There was just one guy in charge who
said, "No, we're gonna do it this way," so it happened that way.
Agnes:
Right. So then it may be the great man issue. That is, we're pretty committed
to doing things via really large groups of people who never want to agree
about anything, and so we're not gonna do very much.
Robin:
That does seem a plausible key. We're in the modern world without central
powers because we're shy about empowering central powers, and that's-
Agnes:
And we resent, we resent the great man. Like, why do they get to do
everything? To the extent we have these great men who, like, are really not a
lot like the great men of, of yore, right? But they're like, they run, like,
tech companies or whatever, and that's already bad enough.
Robin:
Right.
Agnes:
We already hate those people. Imagine if they had the p- kind of power that
Walter Rathenau or whatever, you know, um, those, those people had. Um, um,
people who designed Brasilia.
Robin:
Well, I think that is a change in the last century.
Agnes:
Yes.
Robin:
Um, I'm not sure how to, what, what to attribute it to-
Agnes:
I agree
Robin:
... necessarily, but-
Agnes:
The decline of the great man approach. Yeah. I agree that that is a, that is a
real change. Yeah. Okay.
Robin:
I think we're about out of time.
Agnes:
Yeah.
Robin:
Thank you for talking.
Agnes:
Yeah. Bye.
