Rob: You've written about that in a number of your books. Did this whole idea of top down centralization simplify making the straight lines, seeing the pattern from ten thousand feet up in the air, whereas what's really necessary is diversity and organized chaos of a sort?
JS: Well, what I've lived experience"one of my heroines is actually Jane Jacobs whose work now is part of the new urban planning. But she was, I think, the first person to think about how the city is lived and experienced on the ground by ordinary people and not just by people who are going to work and then home. So it's the, if you like, how life looks from the bottom. She then set about understanding a city from that perspective and it completely transformed, I think, what was an architectural or sculptural idea of cities that they should somehow look pretty from a helicopter. It's one of the things.
It's curious to me, actually, that whenever the city fathers in Philadelphia, for example, although Philadelphia has saved a lot of its old housing stock, when they're planning new urban projects, you typically have this photo of the architects and the city fathers standing around a miniaturization of a neighborhood, a block a sort of new development and they're looking down on it because everything is miniaturized as if they were god in a helicopter. The fact is nobody experiences the city from that vantage point and what we want to know is how the city will work and how it lives at ground level because that's the level at which most people are going to experience it.
I think this is a problem we have in a larger way. If you think of watching a basketball or football game, you see this game from a camera that's poised above the playing field or above the court and because it's at a distance it makes things look easier and slower. Whereas, if you were to place that camera at court level you would see the unbelievable intricacy and speed and apparent visual confusion through which an actual player has to pick his way, or her way. So it seems to me our whole way of looking at the world comes from this helicopter perspective and it distorts our sense of how difficult, complicated things are.
Rob: And this is so deeply woven into who we are now. In your book Two Cheers for Anarchism, you say that the use of patronymic naming, in other words giving names based on the father, was invented as a means of supervision and control and that they centralize knowledge and power. Can you explain that a bit and talk about that?
JS: Oh sure! That's one of my favorite, favorite things. I mean I came across this in writing Seeing Like a State and then wrote about it under"and so the fact is that until there were states and, if you like, churches that were collecting taxes and so operating like states, nobody in the world had permanent patronyms that were passed from father to son to grandson to great grandson and so on. This was a state project in order to keep track of people for conscription and taxes and land records and so on because almost all of the forms of naming historically have been for men and often for women as well naming of the relationship between a father and a son. So the "Mac" in Scottish names, or the "O" in Irish names, or the "Bin," or "Ben" in Middle Eastern names means "son of." So names only identify the father and that father's son and then that son would have a son who would have a different name and so the patronym after two generations disappeared. States actually want to keep track of people for, as I said, taxes, conscription- the early states before there was any kind of welfare state. So it was essentially states that were responsible for the creation, I mean later on, of identity cards and photo IDs and DNA and so on. But the patronym is like an early identity card and an effort to figure out who's who.
There's a great story that I tell. In I think it's the seventeenth century, on the Welsh-English border, in which a Welshman is involved in a court case and they ask him who he is. He says, "My name is Evan ap Huw ap William ap Vaughn ap." So "ap" in Wales meant "son of." So what he was saying was my father was so and so, my grandfather was so and so, my great great grandfather was" it's like the Old Testament" and so and so begat so and so begat so and so. That's the way in which he was able to identify himself by specifying the name of his father, grandfather, great grandfather and, as you go up each generation, you identify more clearly a particular individual. And the judge says, "No, we're not going to have that here in this court." England already has last names for most people and it turns out he has a house named Mostyn House. I guess, people named their houses then and he said, "Well, we're going to call you Evan Mostyn." So he went down in the court records as Evan Mostyn. What's interesting is this is a legal last name and he probably had to remember because the documents were in that form, but none of his neighbors and friends knew him as Evan Mostyn. So the nice thing is that you'll see exactly that moment in which a legal last name is being created for the first time by someone who hasn't needed it until he had this contact with the state.
Rob: You use this as an example, a kind of introduction to your discussion of the difference between vernacular and artisanal production in manufacturing compared to centralized, automated, Henry Ford type manufacturing. Could you talk a little bit about those ideas of vernacular and artisanal versus"?
JS: So let me give you a kind of also an example that I use. So I live in a town called Durham, Connecticut and there's a road that leads from Durham to a town called Guilford at the coast. We in Durham, this is a vernacular way of identifying it, we call this The Guilford Road because it tells us where we'll get to if we take it and the same road at it's Guilford end is called The Durham Road because it tells the people of Guilford where they'll get to if they take it. So these are vernacular names and notice that already we've got a single road that has two names depending on whether you're looking at it from the Durham side or whether you're looking at it from the Guilford side. There are also other roads to Durham from other towns and they call these roads The Durham Road. So it's kind of information. This vernacular knowledge is exactly what we need in Durham to identify a road because it tells us the most important thing, which is where it leads.
The state, however" and so, for certain kinds of other knowledge, you need an official system, a non-vernacular system. Vernacular's good for local people, not good for a kind of official knowledge. So if you're in a car accident and you're bleeding to death on the road and you call the ambulance and say, "Oh, I'm bleeding to death on The Guilford Road," well, there are many Guilford Roads and so you're going to have to specify which Guilford Road you mean. The state calls the road between Durham and Guilford, Route 77. So it then puts it in this universal, infinite, unique series of numbers in which every road has its own particular number. Now, Route 77 doesn't mean a thing to you until you see it on an actual map of one kind or another. That's a simple distinction. So, states require official knowledge to do much of their work and it is very different from vernacular knowledge.
Rob: And you describe how this really affects people's way of seeing and thinking and perceiving and it kind of seeps down into them, this imposition of the state of a centralized way. In your book, Seeing Like a State, you describe how this approach can be disastrous and lead to failure. Maybe not in the first year but after a certain amount of time because it is too simple. It's too stupid and it really doesn't work, but it looks attractive because of its simplicity.
JS: Well, the example that I give at the beginning of Seeing Like a State is as you know the invention of scientific forestry in Germany in which after trying to maximize the revenue from wood, the princes of Saxony and Prussia hired these, I guess you'd call them, scientists of the day. But their job was to actually make sure that the prince maximized the revenue every year from exploitation of forests by the sale of timber and firewood. So what they did, to make a long story short, is over time they would actually cut down a forest and they would plant the fastest growing tree which, depending on the kind of soil, would be a Scotch Pine or a Norway Spruce. They would plant it in straight rows all at the same time so you ended up then replacing a kind of mixed forest of many different kinds of species of trees with a forest of one tree and all of the trees planted at the same time so all of the trees were of the same age. While they were doing it, they planted them in straight rows. They did this because they thought of the forest now as like a one product machine as the production of the maximum amount of firewood and lumber. The result, as we all know, was to create a kind of green desert.
It was so monocultural as a forest that most of the species of insects and birds and animals disappeared. The forest actually" because diseases of a particular tree are able to spread like an epidemic when the forest is all just one kind of tree. These trees were actually prone to diseases and diebacks and so on. The result was, since we understood so little about the dynamics of forest growth and forest health and all of the creatures and flora and fauna that live in a forest and it's dynamics, that they ended up actually destroying a forest and had to invent something called, restoration forestry, which was not very successful either, in order to change this.
So, my" there are all series of things" I want to make the larger case that there are certain things that actually you can never learn from a book. Think of riding a bicycle, another example. You can't give someone an instructional booklet on how to ride a bicycle, have them pass a test on it and then put them on a bike and then expect them to be able to ride. They have to sort of experience the movement and balance and so on, little by little as we've all learned as we learn to ride a bike or taught our children to learn bikes. And so, that's something that's sort of like fishing or even playing basketball. These are things that kind of have to be learned by experience and practice and all of those things cannot be codified and made the object of a kind of book learning. These are, of course, skills that are artisanal knowledge. I think you were referring to that, is the way you became"
(interruption)
Rob: We're still here. Hello, hello, hello.
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