Metis and .*-rationality
High modernism, spontaneous order, legibility, the Great Society, technocracy, local knowledge
2017-07-24 — 2026-05-09
In Which High Modernism’s Erasure of Tacit Local Knowledge Is Examined, and Bullet-Proof Ritual Powder Is Offered as Evidence That Genuine Rationality Is Concealed Within Apparently Irrational Belief.
James C. Scott’s famous Seeing Like a State (Scott 1998) argues that governing at scale requires first making things legible — flattening the wriggling specificity of a forest, village, language, or workforce into standardised, gridded representations a central office can read at a glance. Scott calls the result the synoptic gaze: a top-down view that sees only what fits its pre-built categories. Legibility is the price of administrative scale.
But the categories were built somewhere else, by someone with different problems. The lossy compression throws away whatever the central office wasn’t trying to count, and quite a lot of that turns out to have been structural. Scott names the discarded residue metis — the local, embodied, often-tacit know-how that grew up alongside specific rivers and soils and people. The peasant who knows which rocks the goats won’t slip on; the engineer who knows the only way to start this particular old machine in winter; the doctor who knows that a particular family always under-reports its symptoms. Metis is what a checklist cannot capture, and what the high-modernist state confidently believes it does not need.
That confidence is I think what Scott means by high modernism: the conviction that a sufficiently rational plan, drafted by sufficiently well-trained planners, can replace the organic order it overwrites. His famously photogenic example is the German Normalbaum of “scientific forestry” — a forest reorganised into uniform rows of legible timber, a runaway success for one rotation and an ecological catastrophe by the second. Jane Jacobs (Jacobs 1992) had made the same case for cities a generation earlier: the modernist street-grid is a Normalbaum with people in it.
(Reamer 2024) adds the complication that the same critique cuts at market-driven standardisation. Hayek’s price system is, on one reading, a humbler synoptic device — a way of compressing dispersed knowledge into a few numerical signals without anyone needing to understand the whole. On another reading, it is the same flattening move, decentralised. Scott himself worried that large-scale bureaucratic capitalism eats metis much as the high-modernist state does, only on a different schedule.
Lou Keep, The Use and Abuse of Witchdoctors for Life:
In 2012, the recipe for gri-gri was revealed to an elder in a dream. If you ingest it and follow certain ritual commandments, then bullets cannot harm you. The belief is puzzling, inasmuch as bullets did seem to keep killing people. More puzzling: not only did it survive, it was adopted by many neighbouring villages, cities, and regions. “Why?”
The paper argues that gri-gri encourages resistance on a mass scale. Beforehand, given a mix of brave and cowardly, only a small percentage of a village would fight back. If you want to have any hope of surviving, then you need everyone to fight back. Gri-gri lowers the perceived costs of said resistance, i.e. no reason to fear guns when the bullets can’t hurt you. Now everyone fights, hence, gri-gri’s positive benefits. Moreover: since more people are fighting, each gri-gri participant also raises the marginal utility of the others (it’s better to fight together). And, since there are highly specific requirements for using the powder (if you break a certain moral code it doesn’t work), gri-gri also probably cuts down on non-war related crimes. Take group-level selection: the belief in and use of gri-gri will thus allow any given village to out-compete one without gri-gri. After a time, these will either be replaced by gri-gri adherents (hence spreading it geographically), or they’ll adopt gri-gri themselves (also spreading it).
As far as “sober looks at horrifying situations” go, this is a good one. It’s clever, it’s a decent analysis of why certain beliefs persist despite being false, and I’m glad to know that economics has finally found Nietzsche.
[…] most outside members would classify their beliefs as “irrational” or “stupid”.[…] One can well imagine a government program to ban gri-gri, which would misunderstand its value, and therefore expose the villagers to raiding parties with no decent defence mechanism. […]
I’ll presuppose that local powers have all read the paper, recognise the importance of gri-gri, but still want to modernise.[…] They decide to retain the effects, but remove the “magical” aspect as unnecessary. This presupposition is how a whole lot of people do read Seeing Like a State. You make the previously-strange beliefs legible in state language. In doing so, you assume that you have “understood them” yourself well enough to continue modernising. The problem with High Modernism, it’s assumed, is that the capital-S State is destroying useful practices, not necessarily that it’s destroying those practices period. Retain the utility and you might as well get rid of the superstitious beliefs.
1 Incoming
Leighton Woodhouse, Manners of State
Today, we’re in the midst of another revolution: a digital one. If feudal etiquette resulted from administrative centralisation and the condition it created of continuous physical proximity of political rivals in the royal court, the bourgeoisie — or their inheritors, the managers — now exist in an infinitely more diffuse arena, where we compete for status in virtual space with rivals we’ve never met in person and likely never will. Especially in the new work-from-home economy, we can no longer surveil each other’s slightest gestures and facial expressions for signs of threat or opportunity, but we can scrutinise every word and syllable of our rivals’ social media posts for signs of in-group or out-group affiliation. We can’t monitor each other’s table manners online, but we can interrogate the implications of one another’s stated beliefs on social media, drawing wild inferences to expose our enemies’ lack of moral and political sophistication. We can’t readily display our command of etiquette as evidence of our elevated class position, but we can flaunt our understanding of and conformity to the political orthodoxy of the bien pensants.