I think we should understand the meme version of Seeing Like a State et. al as a directional corrective. High modernism that totally ignores metis was bad in some ways and we backed off from it because of its excesses (e.g. scientific management is mostly dead), but ignoring the value of modernism would also give up the higher crop yields we now enjoy. The full version should be that it's not either/or, but both/and, but it's easy to see how that gets lost when a person just first realizes that we sometimes ignore metis too much.
Seabright is also doing a bit of storytelling. A Claude fact-check:
- The causality is softer than "textbook learning" implies. The Guiberts bought it as a country house, not a vineyard project — they didn't yet know what they would plant. Enjalbert was a personal friend who discovered the soil's potential on a visit. They didn't commission a theoretical analysis and then buy; serendipity preceded science. Daumas Gassac
- Enjalbert's famous caveat — he reportedly said the site could produce a grand cru but it might take 200 years — is omitted. (Widely repeated in profiles of the estate; I haven't verified the primary source of the quote.)
- Irony worth knowing: Aimé Guibert later became the loudest terroir-mysticist in the business — he's the "wine is dead" anti-globalization figure in Mondovino (2004) and led Aniane's fight against Mondavi's vineyard project in 2000–01. The poster child for science-over-tradition spent his later years arguing roughly the opposite.
It seems pretty obvious that metis and techne are better when used together than either one alone. Techne can accelerate the metis, and metis adapts techne to local nuanced specifics.
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I'm often in debates with people about legibility and systems vs individual virtues. People often bring up Seeing Like A State, Secrets of Our Success, and other books or articles in that vein to buttress the case for metis over top-down high modernist design. I sometimes found the conversations shallow, and Paul Seabright's 1999 (!) review of Seeing Like A State helps explain why.
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In the Languedoc there is a vineyard that teaches us an important lesson about textbook learning and its application to the world. In the early Seventies it was bought by a wealthy couple, who consulted professors Emile Peynaud and Henri Enjalbert, the world’s leading academic oenologist and oenological geologist respectively. Between them these men convinced the couple that their new vineyard had a theoretically ideal microclimate for wine-making. When planted with theoretically ideal vines whose fruits would be processed in the optimal way according to the up-to-date science of oenology, this vineyard had the potential to produce wine to match the great first growths of Bordeaux. The received wisdom that great wine was the product of an inscrutable (and untransferable) tradition was quite mistaken, the professors said: it could be done with hard work and a fanatical attention to detail. The couple, who had no experience of wine-making but much faith in professorial expertise, took a deep breath and went ahead.
If life were reliably like novels, their experiment would have been a disaster. In fact Aimé and Véronique Guibert have met with a success so unsullied that it would make a stupefying novel (it has already been the subject of a comatogenic work of non-fiction). The first vintage they declared (in 1978) was described by Gault Millau as ‘Château Lafite du Languedoc’; others have been praised to the heights by the likes of Hugh Johnson and Robert Parker. The wine is now on the list at the Tour d’Argent and the 1986 vintage retails at the vineyard for £65 a bottle. The sole shadow on the lives of these millionaires is cast by the odd hailstorm.
No one to whom I have begun recounting the story believes it will end well. Most people are extremely unwilling to grant that faith in textbook knowledge should ever be crowned with success. We have a very strong narrative bias against such stories. It is a bias we forget once our children fall sick or we have to travel in an aeroplane, but so long as we are in storytelling mode we simply deny that systematic textbook reasoning can make headway against whimsy and serendipity. Apart from anything else, it is deeply unfair that it should.
In Seeing like a State, James Scott is definitely in storytelling mode, though he seems unaware of the narrative biases that result. (It makes me curious to know what he’s like when he travels by air, which as an anthropologist he must do quite often.) He has two kinds of story to tell in this book, one of them interesting and one of them, well, not; but to compound the confusion he tells them as though they were one. The first kind of story is the more faithful to his subtitle, since it tells us that the reason certain schemes to improve the human condition have failed (my emphasis) has been a fixation with aesthetic (and specifically visual) simplicity. It is a compelling account[...]