On and Off the Grid
I've been digging into the work of the anthropologist and political scientist James C. Scott. His Seeing Like A State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed is particularly interesting*, showing how authoritarian modernism can disastrously simplify and fail to "read" traditional cultures and the body of knowledge and techniques that these bring to working in complex environments. His examples come both from state regimes both right and left and both villainous and rather more benign (i.e. Soviet collectivization and Tanzanian Ujaama villagification) and include intriguing oppositional voices, for example Rosa Luxemburg contrasted with Lenin and Jane Jacobs with Le Corbusier, oppositional voices from the left making the case for the complexity, sophistication, and value of traditional cultural practices. A startling juxtaposition here for me is that that between modernism and simplification, from the need to make things clear (Scott's ter...