In his classic book Seeing Like a State, James C. Scott describes numerous schemes by which what he calls "high-modernist" planners attempted to impose order on the perceived chaos of human societies: collectivized farms in Soviet Russia, compulsory villagization in parts of Africa, unworkable cities like Brasília, etc. All of these schemes to overcome the messy realities of human existence have been able to survive their own manifest failings only because of creative workarounds discovered through human inventiveness and practical know-how (which, borrowing an ancient Greek word that Homer used to describe the wily Odysseus, he calls mētis / μῆτις).
Because centralized planning and government control are so often accompanied and justified by an ideology (communism, fascism, nationalism, etc.), we might find it productive to apply Scott's insights directly to the realm of ideas. We can call this "seeing like an ideology". Let us consider a few quotes from the conclusion to Scott's book.
The clarity of the high-modernist optic is due to its resolute singularity. Its simplifying fiction is that, for any activity or process that comes under its scrutiny, there is only one thing going on.
As I've observed before, there's never just one cause. Because reality is complex, we can't ascribe every problem in society to political corruption, systemic racism, climate change, the patriarchy, income disparities, government overreach, the left-wing march through the institutions, or any other single factor. Further, we also can't pigeonhole any individual person as "only one thing" based on class, race, ethnicity, gender, age, religion, political affiliation, educational attainment, etc. Yet it seems to me that ideologies necessarily engage in just this sort of reductive simplification. The results are well described in another quote:
Almost all strictly functional, single-purpose institutions have some of the qualities of sensory deprivation tanks used for experimental purposes. At the limit, they approach the great social control institutions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: asylums, workhouses, prisons, and reformatories. We have learned enough of such settings to know that over time they can produce among their inmates a characteristic institutional neurosis marked by apathy, withdrawal, lack of initiative and spontaneity, uncommunicativeness, and intractability. The neurosis is an accommodation to a deprived, bland, monotonous, controlled environment that is ultimately stupifying. The point is simply that high-modernist designs for life and production tend to diminish the skills, agility, initiative, and morale of their intended beneficiaries.
It strikes me that ideological movements, even absent their realization in institutions, can have a similarly stultifying effect. When everything personal is political, when everything individual is ideological, when (to paraphrase Mussolini) all is within the movement and nothing is outside the movement, then the emotional and intellectual life of the adherent becomes cramped, constrained, controlled, conforming, claustrophobic.
From the perspective of the ideology itself (if we can anthropomorphize such a thing), this is not a bug but a feature: in true binary fashion, a human being must be either an orthodox adherent or an archenemy. Moreover, it's not acceptable for adherents to be complex, because complexity is the nemesis of the reductive drive inherent in all ideologies. Yet complexity is the very essence of personhood. Thus I conclude that ideology is at root a dehumanizing phenomenon, just as its institutional counterparts are.
(Cross-posted at philosopher.coach.)
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