“Bugs” and Blowback: Science and American High Modernism
American policy with regard to science and technology in the twentieth century had often been canceled with what James C. Scott described in Seeing Like a State
The concept of blowback originated within foreign policy and espionage circles. Essentially, the term describes when a completed operation, whether successful or not in achieving its intended goals, creates a situation that engenders unexpected negative outcomes for the original actor. While the term isn’t used much in scholarly work outside foreign policy, I believe it’s the best description of what we see in both books. Technologies were adopted for specific purposes, and were in some case effective and in some case ineffective. But in almost all cases, these technologies have unforeseen or unforeseeable consequences.
The narrative structure of Russell’s War and Nature fits nicely with this model of techno-political blowback to high modernist zero-sum tactics. Russell traces the coevolution of chemical-based warfare and pesticides in the period between the first World War and the early 1960s. (I use the term chemical-based weapons or warfare, rather than chemical weapons, as Russell’s definition includes more than conventional chemical weapons, to including incindiaries and potentially battlefield defoliants.) As both technologies were based on the development of new toxic chemicals, sometimes even the same chemicals, chemical manufacturers were able to rapidly shift from wartime to peacetime production, rapidly expanding in the process. Moreover, pesticides were seen as important to war efforts, as insect-borne contagion could be as dangerous to troops on the ground as mortar shells.
In looking at the language used in describing both chemical-based weapons and pesticides, Russell finds a common language of extermination and elimination.
The language used to describe chemical weapons reflects the general principle of total war. Moreover, he finds repeated use of the trope of equating enemy troops with bugs or insects, and calling for extermination. When looking at the language of insecticide advertisements and propaganda, he finds the converse—metaphors of war on insects, and the diseases that come with them. Government etymologists called for an outright war on the blight of insects, saying that nothing short of their complete elimination could ensure the survival and progress of the human species. In both of these examples, as well as tactics used “on the ground,” as it were, we find an overarching philosophy that the only solution for the problem of insects or enemy combatants was complete elimination—the type of zero-sum thinking that is inherent to high modernist ideology.
The final chapter of Russell’s book, however, is all about the blowback effect. The publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in 1962 brought about a backlash against the widespread use of DDT, which had in the years since World War II been widely promoted as a safe insecticide, advertised both for its safety for users and its military prestige—it had been a key insecticide used by the American military during the war. Carson’s book promoted the idea that the chemical was environmentally disastrous and a carcinogen that was unsafe for home use. The chemical was banned within ten years of the book’s publication.
Around the same time, public opinion toward the military use of chemicals began to shift. While the US chemical industry was miniscule before the first World War, it had grown quite rapidly, and was now a key component of the “military-industrial complex” that Eisenhower warned about in his farewell address. By 1963, the use of chemical-based warfare was becoming a major point of contention in the escalating US presence in Vietnam. Those who opposed the war would point to the use of defoliants, and later napalm, as indication that the war had gone too far, had become too barbaric, while some on the right argued that the use of all-out chemical warfare would be the most efficacious way to decisively gain advantage in the war.
At around the same time, both chemical-based warfare and mass use of insecticide were suddenly met with a mass of public disapproval, after almost fifty years of being positively associated with US dominance as an international power.
David McBride’s Missions for Science deals with the impact of US scientific and technological interventions in four areas with Black Diaspora populations. In Haiti, Liberia, the US “Black Belt,” and the Panama Canal Zone, McBride chronicles the way that American scientific and technological interventions served the purpose of expanding US imperialism and hegemony. Regional leaders like William Tubman, Booker T. Washington, and “Papa Doc” Duvalier, often shared the faith in the high modernist ideology expressed by outsiders leading US intervention. But while the goal of expanding US imperialism, the hopes for the power of science and technology improving the lives of those in the affected areas often failed, sometimes catastrophically. Public health efforts in the Panama Canal Zone were initially effective, but those leading failed to continue with further, more far-reaching, measures. Technical education in the Black Belt failed to change the underlying disparity in the social and political makeup in the area.
The best illustration of the blowback against high modernist intervention is Haiti. In Haiti, you have all four elements that Scott describes as necessary to the creation of a full-on disaster of social engineering—the administrative reordering of society, high modernist ideology, an authoritarian state, and a prostrate civil society incapable of effective resistance. In Haiti, when the US took over the administration of the state in 1915, their public health efforts actually did much to upset the existing structure of medical care, while their efforts to eradicate epidemic diseases on the island were ultimately unsuccessful. By the time the US pulled out, the population was still impoverished, and suffered high disease rates. “Papa Doc” Duvalier, who began his career as a doctor and made a name for himself in the mass administration of penicillin, came of age in this period, and was educated according to US high modernist principles of medicine. In the case of Haiti, the blowback from high modernist scientific intervention not only included the destruction of a health care system more adequately suited to palliative care and abatement in an unsuccessful attempt at eradication of disease, but also included helping to create the ideology of a man who became a corrupt autocrat whose reign of terror greatly increased the suffering of the people that those intervening had originally intended to help.
There is a fundamental fallacy in the high modernist faith belief in zero-sum games, when it comes to science and technological intervention. Social intervention of this type cannot take into account all the variables—future discovery, the wisdom of existing social structures, and the inability of social engineering to account for the complexity of such structures—it is impossible to verify that a strategy is a zero-sum game when one cannot account for all the players, the rules, or the changes that may occur with future research. So it’s quite possible that blowback is inevitable.
However, both of these books reflect what strikes me as a rather wise ambivalence toward scientific intervention. On one hand, there are many examples of this sort of blowback, with often disastrous consequences. On the other hand, certain scientific advances, especially in medicine, are so groundbreaking and present so much opportunity for the betterment of peoples lives that denying access to such medicines and technologies seems inhumane and immoral. It’s a complex question, but both of those books help to shed light on the difficulties and complexities, and will hopefully help to inspire further research and thought on the topic.
The (Il)legibility of Smoke
(Some more thoughts on two books I talked about in this post.)
James C. Scott’s Seeing Like a State and David Stradling’s Smokestacks and Progressives, while tackling related topics, could not be more dissimilar in approach. Scott’s book is a sprawling history of a type of phenomenon—an account of different iterations of a problem that covers multiple continents and the entire modern era, using a strong theoretical base to tie seemingly unrelated events. Stradling, on the other hand, limits his scope, limiting his book to popular smoke abatement movements in the US between the 1890s and 1940s. Stradling’s book is virtually absent of any underlying theoretical base—his book is primarily a chronicle of the periodic and seemingly unrelated interruptions, upsets, and setbacks that the movement suffered over that time. Despite their widely divergent approaches and subject matter, the two books can be seen as working quite well in dialogue, each book shedding light on what may be perceived as deficiencies of the other.
Stradling’s book is an excellent chronicle of events, thoroughly researched, and gives the reader a good understanding of the history of the argument for the abatement of coal smoke. The question he often ignores, however, is why—why do the leaders of the movement for smoke abatement change over time, from progressive women’s organizations to public health experts to engineers? Why was the movement, in all its various forms, ultimately so unsuccessful—unable to abate coal smoke right up to the time that coal lost dominance and primacy as a source of fuel? Why were certain popular movements for abatement at least initially successful, while others were so quickly struck down by courts and local governments? Why were cities willing to manage sewage and drinking water, but unwilling to see smoke similarly, as a health concern that needed to be managed by governmental works and interventions? Where any answer to these questions can be found in Stradling’s account, they are singular, contingent, and local. Stradling demurs from proposing any great unifying themes that connect these events, or to give a systemic logic to it all.
This is where the strong theoretical basis of Seeing Like a State becomes a very useful tool in deepening one’s reading of Stradling. One of the key concepts in Scott’s book is that of “legibility.” As the needs and duties of the state become larger and more complex, the state necessarily begins rationalizing. The subject, the land, and the state’s resources all must be structured and reordered according to some rational method. In doing this, the state must put primacy on some things, and ignore others. Simplifications are born. The next logical step is to transform reality to more closely conform to the cartographic/statistical simplification, in order to better measure and increase efficiency. In examples from early scientific forestry to the reordering of land use within villages, Scott demonstrates that this pattern is reiterated as the modern nation state is born. Early scientific forestry purged the forests of elements that were not seen in terms of economic value, preferring single-crop forests where the trees were lined up like soldiers, and robbing the environment of necessary biodiversity. Land tenure patterns were completely reordered in order to make them more easily comprehensible from great distances—ensuring more accurate tax collections, perhaps, but also removing localized patterns that tended to be more diverse, productive, and sensitive to the local terrain.
This is the process of the state rendering the illegible legible. Illegible groups, institutions, and patterns are localized, contingent, and lack uniformity, and are thus confounding to modern statecraft, which requires a large economy. The process of rendering legible—of simplifying, ordering, and making uniform—allows the state to rationally tax, assess, and predict its assets and its subjects. It is this process that is the essence of “seeing like a state.”
Of course, it’s not just states that see in this manner. In fact, Scott’s Yale colleague John Lewis Gaddis, in his book The Landscape of History, has noted that the process of simplification, rationalization, and rendering legible is actually quite close to the work of Historians. More to the point, any large organization or corporation must do essentially the same work in order to maximize profit or efficacy. In the era that Stradling is analyzing, the great industrial oligopolies of the time certainly sought to rationalize and make uniform the resources within their domain, including their employees. Frederick Winslow Taylor’s notion of Scientific Management is quite similar to early Scientific Forestry as Scott describes it. The movements of the bodies of workers, like the forests of eighteenth century Germany, were seen as unnecessarily complex and therefore wasteful. Taylorism was an attempt to rationalize the process of production, to simplify it. The worker was the subject of the corporation, almost as much as he was the subject of the state. And the gaze of both sought legibility.
We can see, then, that there were multiple “states” viewing the problem of coal smoke. While they have different and sometimes competing interests, they were united in a modality of seeing, in their inability to comprehend multifaceted complexity and preference for the legible. The problem of coal smoke in the progressive era into the 1940s, however, was multifaceted and complex. The propensity of the progressive women’s groups who began the campaign for smoke abatement to intermix health, ecology, economic cost, and quality of life concerns in their rhetoric, while it probably came closest to the complex truth of the issue, likely only served to undermine their arguments. Likewise, while it is always hard to put hard numbers to environmental health concerns, the disagreements among the medical community as to the effects of smoke on health, positive or negative, undercut the arguments of medical “experts” who took up the issue. In a particularly unfortunate irony, the discovery of the bacterial origin of tuberculosis seems to have been a blow to this movement that sought goals that would have only contributed to overall respiratory health.
Looking at the issue of coal smoke like a state—or like a corporation—the maneuvers made to counter and set back the smoke abatement movement were quite rational. Discounting the unquantifiable (illegible) moral and quality of life issues, and setting aside the still-debated public health concerns, smoke abatement didn’t seem to warrant the same type of radical intervention as the issues of sewage or potable water had not long before. The economic cost of the “smoke tax” on cities with high levels of coal smoke in no way matched the economic benefit brought by coal-based industry. Legislation enabling cities to regulate emissions and fine the worst polluters allowed for the potential of an offset of sorts to the (legible) cost of over-pollution. Likewise, the gradualist approach toward decreased emissions—and thus increased efficiency—made the most economic sense, as it led to eventual improvement and greater productivity without overburdening industry with regulation to a degree that it would harm the overall economy. As Scott repeatedly illustrates, the simplifications implicit to the process of rendering activities and processes legible often leads to lacunae in comprehending those activities—omissions that can cause changes in problem-solving strategies, and horrible miscalculations.
If Scott’s book can be used to provide a richer theoretical understanding of the events Stradling describes, what can Smokestacks and Progressives tell us about Seeing Like a State? Briefly, I think that there are three main insights that can be made about Scott from reading Stradling.
First, as I discussed before, you don’t have to be a state to “see like” one. Scott limits his discussion to the modern nation-state. While this suits the purposes of the book well, the insight into the manner in which the leaders of large, complex institutions render complex events legible can certainly be applied to corporate management. In Stradling we see the state frequently siding with corporations, even allowing corporate-appointed overseers to police corporate activities. There is an ontological symmetry at work here. The economic mode of perception that favors legibility and rationality is at work in both the state and corporate interests.
This leads directly to the second issue raised: one of the four conditions Scott contends are present in all the worst examples of state-sponsored social engineering is the inability of civil society to resist such plans. Stradling’s account of a popular movement repeatedly thwarted by state and corporate interests brings to mind a rather harrowing question: in our current state of late capitalism, with the multiple and multivalent forces of the state and corporations both “seeing like states,” as it were, is there any hope for civil society to actually force change when necessary? Do we possess the ability to resist social engineering that has the power and money of both state and corporate interests behind them? Stradling’s agents, the proponents of smoke abatement, don’t offer much hope. But it begs the question.
Finally, and on a similar note, as we watch the futile struggle of the smoke abatement activists, one must ask about the efficacy of the sort of “metis” that Scott celebrates in confronting the state, which is incapable of such fluid, contingent modes of knowledge. While the progressive women’s groups rhetoric proved ineffective, it was so in part because it reflected the sort of complex reality that the rationalist mode of seeing preferred by the state and the corporate interests. We watch the movement’s proponents snake, parry, and dodge—practicing a discursive metis, as it were. Ultimately, however, this constant movement only resulted in a repeated reframing of the discourse into terms that more and more closely resembled that of the state—and even still, it was ultimately not effective. Once the ontology inherent to “seeing like a state” reaches a sort of critical mass, are contingent, complex modalities of knowledge simply outmoded and ineffective?
William Cronon, Changes in the Land
Changes in the Land deals with the impact on the ecosystems of New England by Native Americans and colonial British settlers.
Cronon’s basic premise is that Native and English populations viewed the land and its use in fundamentally different ways, and that the decreasing population of the former and the increasing population of the latter led to a fundamental change in land use among both.
This in turn influenced the very environment itself, as the reordering of economies and land-use changed the landscape, the flora, the fauna, water quality… New England would have been almost unrecognizable in 1800 to someone who had seen it two hundred years prior.
The way man interacts with his environment fundamentally alters that environment. If Braudel was writing about how mountains and bodies of water influence human history, Cronon is writing about how human history influences mountains and bodies of water.
Cronon’s basic thesis—and the implications of adding the environment to how we view history—are unassailable and invaluable. This is definitely one of those books that’s a classic for good reason.
However, there were two small, niggling inaccuracies I noticed—things I only knew about due to later scholarship—that nevertheless I think point to some of the work's biases. I don’t feel that either of these damage the worth of the book, by any means, but they are telling or at least interesting.
First—on page 14, and again on pages 92-93, Cronon explicitly argues that part of the difference between Indian and English economies is one of scale. While this is true, the scale of the pre-Columbian North American economy is somewhat underestimated by Cronon, who argues that it was exclusively limited to inter-village and occasionally regional trade.
While it is true that there weren’t Native wholesalers shipping stuff out to the Pacific in the able hands of Indian Teamsters, Daniel Richter’s Facing East From Indian Country has demonstrated that the pre-Columbian Native American trade network was definitely a continental one, while still supporting Cronon’s assertion that it wasn’t a centralized one. Cronon, researching this book in the late seventies and early eighties, makes the common (and often but not always accurate) conflation of “low-impact” or “sustainable” with “small.”
Second—when comparing English and Indian views of land use, husbandry, and property, Cronon dismisses the Massachusetts Bay Colony’s understanding of land ownership as the product of land improvement as “little more than an ideology of conquest…” (57) While this is true in terms of how it was applied to Native Americans, it only tells half the story. In a working paper for the Rappaport Institute of Greater Boston, Harvard’s James Levitt has pointed out that this was actually a policy borne of quite progressive ideals.
The Massachusetts Bay Corporation, being allowed by its charter to govern itself from America without a direct overseer in London, brought many more of its shareholders to the new world than other of these colonial corporations. Once there, they quickly established this rule of land improvement as grounds for ownership—and then went the further step of making all land-holders members of the corporation. The result by 1631 was near-universal manhood suffrage in a direct democratic system via elections and town meetings—a level of franchise unmatched in the southern English colonies, and even in England after the English Civil War.
In focusing the book so exclusively on environmental concerns, Cronon’s history can at time lose sight of important things like civil rights and just governance.
Overall, though, I loved the book. It was a great read. I’ve been meaning to get around to it for a long time, and I’m glad that my Historiography class has finally forced me to do so.