Siren Song Called Legibility

In his book, Seeing Like a State, James C Scott wrote:

“The pre-modern state was, in many crucial respects, particularly blind; it knew precious little about its subjects, their wealth, their landholdings and yields, their location, their very identity. It lacked anything like a detailed “map” of its terrain and its people.”

The land and the people were both “illegible” to the government.

 

It therefore seemed obvious that knowing the land and the people, and even organizing them to make things “legible” to government would lead to better governance. From there, it is a short trip to what Venkatesh Rao describes:

“(The state) merely views them as resources that must be organized in order to yield optimal returns according to a centralized, narrow, and strictly utilitarian logic.”

That might sound ominous, but as Rao explains:

“The attempt to maximize returns need not arise from the grasping greed of a predatory state. In fact, the dynamic is most often driven by a genuine desire to improve the lot of the people.”

 

You must have guessed what happened next. If something (illegibility) is a problem, it doesn’t mean the opposite (organizing things to make them legible) is a good thing. Like the German government’s attempt to convert “wild and unruly forests” with their hard-to-quantify resources into “orderly stands of the highest-yielding varieties” led to environmental catastrophes. Other examples include Le Corbusier style “unlivable grid-cities like Brasilia”. And Chandigarh.

 

And yet this tendency to organize the messy real world and make things “legible” is practiced by governments, big companies and even individuals. Why? For one, our brains are wired that way. In general:

“The brain goes nuts trying to find order in the chaos.”

 

Rao cites an interesting example of something where making things legible worked out well: standardized time zones. “The bewilderingly illegible geography of time in the 18^th century” gave way to a “systematic, global scheme for measuring time, with sensible time zones”. This is another reason why the idea of making things legible is so appealing: it’s a good idea, we feel, with some exceptions. Wrong, says Rao:

“The reason the formula is generally dangerous, and a formula for failure, is that it does not operate by a thoughtful consideration of local/global tradeoffs, but through the imposition of a singular view as “best for all” in a pseudo-scientific sense.”

Thus, because (1) illegible chaos is hard to make sense of, (2) our brains are wired to abhor chaos and love patterns, and (3) we truly believe we are organizing the world to make it a better place, “the relative simplicity and platonic orderliness” of legibility becomes a siren song that we are unable to turn a deaf ear to.