Weeding the Garden

of you

Australia, and particularly the province of Victoria and the city of Melbourne, descended into bizarre police violence over COVID-19 restrictions, then descended some more, then kept descending. We’ve reached the point at which the madness seems inexplicable; it spirals endlessly downward, becoming more and more irrational and disproportionate. It’s a frenzy, the closing scenes of Marat-Sade with government officials playing the role of the mental patients.

But it does make sense. It can be explained. And it’s not new.

A little more than twenty years ago, in a landmark example of scholarship derived from the act of noticing, the political scientist James C. Scott described the characteristics of the modern state and its ordering project. States, Scott argued, simplify. They render societies legible, and therefore apparently manageable, by telling a story that strips complexity from human social behavior – and then by trying to make that story real. Bureaucrats, finding that there are pieces of reality that they don’t understand and can’t control, decline to notice those parts of reality, instead noticing only the manufactured image of reality that they feel themselves able to direct.

“These state simplifications, the basic givens of modern statecraft, were, I began to realize, rather like abridged maps,” Scott wrote. “They did not successfully represent the actual activity of the society they depicted, nor were they intended to; they represented only that slice of it that interested the official observer. They were, moreover, not just maps. Rather, they were maps that, when allied with state power, would enable much of the reality they depicted to be remade.”

Scott identified four elements of this modern state-run social engineering: First, “the administrative ordering of nature and society,” the use of rhetorical tools to shape the perceived reality of the world outside the state that is to be acted upon; second, “high-modernist ideology,” centered on the absolute confidence that more science and more technology is always more progress; third, “an authoritarian state that is willing and able to use the full weight of its coercive power” to enact the science-as-progress story on its narrative simplification of society; and fourth, “a prostrate civil society that lacks the capacity to resist these plans.” (Cf. Bowling Alone for more information on #4.).

He starts with trees. Scott’s first chapter is about, stick with me here, Prussian forestry management in the late-18th century. Sensible German managers were dismayed by the disorder of the forest, which made it harder to use; it was hard to harvest a mess. So they planned, and they pruned, and they sought to establish a regimented forest with neat rows of normalbaum – normal trees. They sought, “through careful seeding, planting, and cutting, a forest that was easier for state foresters to count, manipulate, measure, and assess.”

The reduction of biodiversity was ruinous, Scott concludes, but slowly ruinous: it took a century to discover the full consequences of a deliberate monocropping of wild nature. “A new term, Waldsterben (forest death) entered the German vocabulary to describe the worst cases. An exceptionally complex process involving soil building, nutrient uptake, and symbiotic relations among fungi, insects, mammals, and flora – which were, and still are, not entirely understood – were apparently disrupted, with serious consequences.”

State simplification was a story about making the natural world more efficient and manageable, but it didn’t result in a more efficient and manageable natural world. The enemy – the disorder of the real – had a vote.

Scott isn’t alone in comparing the activity of the modern state to an attack on biodiversity in the name of making order. In one of the more important analyses of the Holocaust, the philosopher Zygmunt Bauman described modernity as a “garden culture,” a system of thought that relies on weeding and planting in rows.

Modern culture, Bauman wrote, “defines itself and nature, and the distinction between them, through its endemic distrust of spontaneity and its longing for a better, and necessarily artificial, order…From the point of view of the design all actions are instrumental, while all the objects of action” – that’s you – “are either facilities or hindrances.”

Here’s the big finish, Bauman’s discussion of the objects of action and their management as units to be placed in neat rows: “Once effectively dehumanized, and hence cancelled as potential subjects of moral demands, human objects of bureaucratic task-performance are viewed with ethical indifference, which soon turns into disapprobation and censure when their resistance, or lack of cooperation, slows down the smooth flow of bureaucratic routine.”

Our patience for you people is wearing thin.

Considerable evidence complicates our emerging view of the available COVID-19 vaccines. Highly vaccinated states and countries face severe outbreaks; equally or less-vaccinated nations move past a disease they regard as largely resolved. The recurring story about people who die of COVID-19 in the ICU while telling everyone who will listen that they did everything right – got double-vaccinated, wore the mask, socially distanced – is becoming too common to bother reading anymore. We know, and health authorities say explicitly, that people who receive the SARS-CoV-2 vaccines can still get COVID-19 and infect other people (“If you are fully vaccinated and become infected with the Delta variant, you can spread the virus to others,” the CDC website says). But government officials continue their ritual chanting: get vaccinated so we can “beat this thing.” If everyone occupies the same status, the crisis will end. Divergence is illness.

They aren’t talking about the utility of the vaccines, or studying evidence, or thinking about inconveniently messy real people and their lived experience. They’re gardening. They’re pulling weeds, planting in rows, and living out their faith in state-made order. Currently, people occupy many identities: fully vaccinated, partially vaccinated, vaccine-eligible but unvaccinated, vaccine ineligible, fully vaccinated by last week’s standard but lacking this week’s third shot (soon to be a fourth). When everyone is the same, we’ll be safe. The world will become ordered, reliable, simple, managed.

We’ll be normalbaum, planted in rows.

Or else.