People From New Jersey

"Man must get his thoughts, words and actions out of this vast moral jungle. We are not predators. We are, hopefully, more than instinctive killers and selfish brutes. Why take such a dim view of our potentials and capabilities?"

"Man cannot pretend to be higher in ethics, spirituality, advancement, or civilization than other creatures and at the same time live by lower standards than the vulture or hyena … The Pillars of Ahimsa indisputably represent the clearest, surest path out of the jungle, and toward the attainment of that highly desirable goal."

"Redesigning the physical layout of a village is simpler than transforming its social and productive life. For obvious reasons, political elites–particularly authoritarian high-modernist elites–typically begin with the changes in the formal structure and rules."

"To grasp the prodigious variety of customary ways of measuring land, we would have to imagine literally scores of "maps" constructed along very different lines than mere surface area. I have in mind the sorts of maps devised to capture our attention with a kind of fun-house effect in which, say, the size of a country is made proportional to its population rather than its geographical size, with China and India looming menacingly over Russia, Brazil, and the United States, while Libya, Australia, and Greenland virtually disappear. These types of customary maps (for there would be a great many) would construct the landscape according to units of work and yield, type of soil, accessibility, and ability to provide subsistence, none of which would necessarily accord with surface area. The measurements are decidedly local, interested, contextual, and historically specific. What meets the subsistence needs of one family may not meet the subsistence needs of another. Factors such as local crop regimens, labor supply, agricultural technology, and weather ensure that the standards of evaluation vary from place to place and over time. Directly apprehended by the state, so many maps would represent a hopelessly bewildering welter of local standards. They definitely would not lend themselves to aggregation into a single statistical series that would allow state officials to make meaningful comparisons."

"The state's increasing concern with productivity, health, sanitation, education, transportation, mineral resources, grain production, and investment was less an abandonment of the older objectives of statecraft than a broadening and deepening of what those objectives entailed in the modern world."

"An illegible society, then, is a hindrance to any effective intervention by the state, whether the purpose of that intervention is plunder or public welfare."

"We miniaturize, and thereby domesticate, the larger phenomena that are outside our control, often with benign intentions."

"Changing the rules of regulations is simpler than eliciting the behavior that conforms to them."

"A key characteristic of discourses of high modernism and of the public pronouncements of those states that have embraced it is a heavy reliance on visual images of heroic progress toward a totally transformed future."

"I shall argue that the most tragic episodes of state-initiated social engineering originate in a pernicious combination of four elements. All four are necessary for a full-fledged disaster. The first element is the administrative ordering of nature and society-the transformative state simplifications described above. By themselves, they are the unremarkable tools of modern statecraft; they are as vital to the maintenance of our welfare and freedom as they are to the designs of a would-be modern despot. They undergird the concept of citizenship and the provision of social welfare just as they might undergird a policy of rounding up undesirable minorities. The second element is what I call a high-modernist ideology. It is best conceived as a strong, one might even say muscle-bound, version of the self-confidence about scientific and technical progress, the expansion of production, the growing satisfaction of human needs, the mastery of nature (including human nature), and, above all, the rational design of social order commensurate with the scientific understanding of natural laws. It originated, of course, in the West, as a by-product of unprecedented progress in science and industry."

"Only when these first two elements are joined to a third does the combination become potentially lethal. The third element is an authoritarian state that is willing and able to use the full weight of its coercive power to bring these high-modernist designs into being. The most fertile soil for this element has typically been times of war, revolution, depression, and struggle for national liberation. In such situations, emergency conditions foster the seizure of emergency powers and frequently delegitimize the previous regime. They also tend to give rise to elites who repudiate the past and who have revolutionary designs for their people. A fourth element is closely linked to the third: a prostrate civil society that lacks the capacity to resist these plans. War, revolution, and economic collapse often radically weaken civil society as well as make the populace more receptive to a new dispensation. Late colonial rule, with its social engineering aspirations and ability to run roughshod over popular opposition, occasionally met this last condition. In sum, the legibility of a society provides the capacity for large scale social engineering, high-modernist ideology provides the desire, the authoritarian state provides the determination to act on that desire, and an incapacitated civil society provides the leveled social terrain on which to build."

"The "interruption," forced by widespread strikes, of France's structural adjustments to accommodate a common European currency is perhaps a straw in the wind. Put bluntly, my bill of particulars against a certain kind of state is by no means a case for politically unfettered market coordination as urged by Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman. As we shall see, the conclusions that can be drawn from the failures of modern projects of social engineering are as applicable to market-driven standardization as they are to bureaucratic homogeneity."

"Certain forms of knowledge and control require a narrowing of vision. The great advantage of such tunnel vision is that it brings into sharp focus certain limited aspects of an otherwise far more complex and unwieldy reality. This very simplification, in turn, makes the phenomenon at the center of the field of vision more legible and hence more susceptible to careful measurement and calculation. Combined with similar observations, an overall, aggregate, synoptic view of a selective reality is achieved, making possible a high degree of schematic knowledge, control, and manipulation."

"If the utilitarian state could not see the real, existing forest for the (commercial) trees, if its view of its forests was abstract and partial, it was hardly unique in this respect. Some level of abstraction is necessary for virtually all forms of analysis, and it is not at all surprising that the abstractions of state officials should have reflected the paramount fiscal interests of their employer. The entry under "forest" in Diderot's Encyclopedie is almost exclusively concerned with the utilite publique of forest products and the taxes, revenues, and profits that they can be made to yield. The forest as a habitat disappears and is replaced by the forest as an economic resource to be managed efficiently and profitably.' Here, fiscal and commercial logics coincide; they are both resolutely fixed on the bottom line."

"One might, on the basis of experience, derive a few rules of thumb that, if observed, could make development planning less prone to disaster. While my main goal is hardly a point-by-point reform of development practice, such rules would surely include something along the following lines. Take small steps. In an experimental approach to social change, presume that we cannot know the consequences of our interventions in advance. Given this postulate of ignorance, prefer wherever possible to take a small step, stand back, observe, and then plan the next small move. As the biologist J. B. S. Haldane metaphorically described the advantages of smallness: "You can drop a mouse down a thousand-yard mineshaft; and on arriving at the bottom, it gets a slight shock and walks away. A rat is killed, a man broken, a horse splashes." Favor reversibility. Prefer interventions that can easily be undone if they turn out to be mistakes. Irreversible interventions have irreversible consequences. Interventions into ecosystems require particular care in this respect, given our great ignorance about how they interact. Aldo Leopold captured the spirit of caution required: "The first rule of intelligent tinkering is to keep all the parts" Plan on surprises. Choose plans that allow the largest accommodation to the unforeseen. In agricultural schemes this may mean choosing and preparing land so that it can grow any of several crops. In planning housing, it would mean "designing in" flexibility for accommodating changes in family structures or living styles. In a factory it may mean selecting a location, layout, or piece of machinery that allows for new processes, materials, or product lines down the road. Plan on human inventiveness. Always plan under the assumption that those who become involved in the project later will have or will develop the experience and insight to improve on the design."

"A good many institutions in liberal democracies already take such a form and may serve as exemplars for fashioning new ones. One could say that democracy itself is based on the assumption that the metis of its citizenry should, in mediated form, continually modify the laws and policies of the land. Common law, as an institution, owes its longevity to the fact that it is not a final codification of legal rules, but rather a set of procedures for continually adapting some broad principles to novel circumstances. Finally, that most characteristic of human institutions, language, is the best model: a structure of meaning and continuity that is never still and ever open to the improvisations of all its speakers."

"Mankind has been mesmerized by the narrative of progress and civilization as codified by the first great agrarian kingdoms. As new and powerful societies, they were determined to distinguish themselves as sharply as possible from the populations from which they sprang and that still beckoned and threatened at their fringes."

"The great high-modernist episodes that we have examined qualify as tragedies in at least two respects. First, the visionary intellectuals and planners behind them were guilty of hubris, of forgetting that they were mortals and acting as if they were gods. Second, their actions, far from being cynical grabs for power and wealth, were animated by a genuine desire to improve the human condition-a desire with a fatal flaw. That these tragedies could be so intimately associated with optimistic views of progress and rational order is in itself a reason for a searching diagnosis. Another reason lies in the completely ecumenical character of the high-modernist faith. We encounter it in various guises in colonial development schemes, planned urban centers in both the East and the West, collectivized farms, the large development plans of the World Bank, the resettlement of nomadic populations, and the management of workers on factory floors."

"A state mainly concerned with appropriation and control will find sedentary agriculture preferable to pastoralism or shifting agriculture. For the same reasons, such a state would generally prefer large-holding to small-holding and, in turn, plantation or collective agriculture to both. Where control and appropriation are the overriding considerations, only the last two forms offer direct control over the workforce and its income, the opportunity to select cropping patterns and techniques, and, finally, direct control over the production and profit of the enterprise. Although collectivization and plantation agriculture are seldom very efficient, they represent, as we have seen, the most legible and hence appropriable forms of agriculture. The large capitalist agricultural producer faces the same problem as the factory owner: how to transform the essentially artisanal or metis knowledge of farmers into a standardized system that will allow him greater control over the work and its intensity. The plantation was one solution. In colonial countries, where able-bodied men were pressed into service as gang labor, the plantation represented a kind of private collectivization, inasmuch as it relied on the state for the extramarket sanctions necessary to control its labor force. More than one plantation sector has made up what it lacked in efficiency by using its political clout to secure subsidies, price supports, and monopoly privileges."

"Metis, with the premium it places on practical knowledge, experience, and stochastic reasoning, is of course not merely the now-superseded precursor of scientific knowledge. It is the mode of reasoning most appropriate to complex material and social tasks where the uncertainties are so daunting that we must trust our (experienced) intuition and feel our way."

"Once the basic assumption of the superiority and attraction of fixed-field farming over all previous forms of subsistence is questioned, it becomes clear that this assumption itself rests on a deeper and more embedded assumption that is virtually never questioned. And that assumption is that sedentary life itself is superior to and more attractive than mobile forms of existence."

"Metis, far from being rigid and monolithic, is plastic, local, and divergent. It is in fact the idiosyncracies of metis, its contextualness, and its fragmentation that make it so permeable, so open to new ideas. Metis has no doctrine or centralized training; each practitioner has his or her own angle. In economic terms, the market for metis is often one of nearly perfect competition, and local monopolies are likely to be broken by innovation from below and outside. If a new technique works, it is likely to find a clientele."

"If the environment can be simplified down to the point where the rules do explain a great deal, those who formulate the rules and techniques have also greatly expanded their power. They have, correspondingly, diminished the power of those who do not."

"Following the illuminating studies of Marcel Detienne and Jean-Pierre Vernant, we can find in the Greek concept of metis a means of comparing the forms of knowledge embedded in local experience with the more general, abstract knowledge deployed by the state and its technical agencies."

"As we shall see with urban planning, revolutionary theory, collectivization, and rural resettlement, a whole world lying "outside the brackets" returned to haunt this technical vision."

"Those who do not have access to scientific methods and laboratory verification have often relied on metis to develop rich knowledge systems that are remarkably accurate. Traditional navigation skills before the eras of sextants, magnetic compasses, charts, and sonar are a case in point."

"The subordination of metis is fairly obvious in the development of mass production in the factory. A comparable de-skilling process is, I believe, more compelling and, given the intractable obstacles to complete standardization, ultimately less successful in agricultural production."

"Still, Scott's advice is far from useless. It can be applied to contexts far afield from those that concern him here. His case studies help explain, say, why national regulation tends to work better when it consists of altered incentives rather than flat commands. Some of the most successful initiatives in American regulatory law have consisted of efforts to increase the price of high-polluting activities; and some of the least successful have been rigid mandates that ignore the collateral effects of regulatory controls. Scott's enthusiasm for metis also suggests that certain governmental institutions will do best if they act incrementally, creating large-scale change not at once, but in a series of lesser steps. We might think here not only of common law, but also of constitutional law. Many judicial problems derive from a belief that judges can intervene successfully in large-scale systems (consider the struggles with school desegregation in the 1960s and 1970s), and many judicial successes have come from proceeding incrementally (consider the far more incremental and cautious attack on sex discrimination in the same period). And Scott also offers larger implications. A society that is legible to the state is susceptible to tyranny, if it lacks the means to resist that state; and an essential part of the task of a free social order is to ensure space for institutions of resistance. Moreover, a state that attempts to improve the human condition should engage not in plans but in experiments, secure in the knowledge that people will adapt to those experiments in unanticipated ways. Scott offers no plans or rules here, and a closer analysis of the circumstances that distinguish success from failure would have produced greater illumination. But he has written a remarkably interesting book on social engineering, and he cannot be much faulted for failing to offer a sure-fire plan for the well-motivated, metis-friendly social engineer."

"I think that the best judges are the ones that seek to apply precedent in good faith. I think most judges do that. But that is something that has to be done in good faith without skewing the precedent one way or the other. At the same time, there has to be a respect for the work of the district courts and not take an ivory tower approach to the review of what happens there. Those judges are the ones that see the people before them. They see the witnesses. The court of appeals just has a cold paper record. I think there has to be a reasonable level of deference given to the judgments of the Article III judge who has the trial before him. And with respect to all of one's colleagues in the judicial system, I think it is very important for a judge to have almost an irrebuttable presumption that every other judge who has looked at a particular issue was doing his or her best to discharge his or her oath just as well as I might be if I am fortunate enough to be confirmed."

"Clearly, there are limits on the Executive power. There are limits on the Commander-in-Chief power. Youngstown Sheet and Tube tells us that. That was a case where the President issued an Executive Order to seize steel mills, cited exigent circumstances related to the Korean War. The Supreme Court stepped forward and said no, you can't do that. That is a clear example of courts doing, I think, what the Senator described. How does a court go about that? I think that certainly as a court of appeals judge, you start with the Constitution itself. You go to Supreme Court precedent, which is obviously binding on any court of appeals. You look to the prior precedents of one's own circuit, which would be binding as well. The decisionmaking can also be informed by precedents from other circuits. I think you look at those things, and you try to reach a lawful result, which is precisely that and which is not a result which is driven by passion or considerations of the moment. That is why judges have life tenure."

"Even in a time of ferment and necessary social change—especially in such time—the most important thing about the legal profession is that we inherit the tradition of seven or eight centuries of continuous concern for the institutions and aspirations—for the processes, ideals and sense of right and justice—that make for a free and civilized society. It is not the age of the profession that matters... What matters most is that through the centuries the men of law have been persistently concerned with the resolution of disputes... in ways that enable society to achieve its goals with a minimum of force and a maximum of reason. Our own era has urgent need for lawyers not to resist change but to channel the vital forces at work in the community along the lines of justice and reason, on a scale and at a pace heretofore unprecedented. Only thus can we fulfil our ancient heritage."

"Whether we shall continue to be a Government of laws and not of men is now for Congress and ultimately the American people to decide."

"Social protest and even civil disobedience serve the law's need for growth. Ideally, reform would come according to reason and justice without self-help and disturbing, almost violent, forms of protest. … Still, candor compels one here again to acknowledge the gap between the ideal and the reality. Short of the millennium, sharp changes in the law depend partly upon the stimulus of protest."

"If modern science is likened to a the skyscraper, the... twentieth century triumphs are the sophisticated filigrees at its pinnacle that are supported by—and could not exist apart from—the massive foundation created by humble laborers."

"Although the authority of the ancient authors as the arbiters of all scientific knowledge had obviously been severely weakened, it did not immediately crumble. Too many professional, medical, ecclesiastical, and legal careers were founded on that authority for it to simply disappear without a struggle. The scientific elite resisted the infusion of new natural knowledge with all its might, but in the long run, its rearguard efforts were futile. ...The common sense of the working people prevailed and brought about the changes in worldview that have come to be known as the Scientific Revolution."

"Most significant of all was the success of Robespierre and the central Montagnard leadership to turn the revered memory of their fallen comrade to a potent weapon in the Jacobin triumph over the Gironde, who thereafter could convincingly be portrayed as destabilizers or fomenters of civil war for their role in the assassination of a great patriot."

"The "Baconian" sciences were the kind Francis Bacon had in mind when he issued a call to revitalize science by basing it on craftsmen's knowledge of nature. Bacon is remembered as the most effective critic of the traditional learning promulgated the elite institutions of his day. ...Bacon advocated compiling a "history of arts," or encyclopedia of crafts knowledge..."

"His martyrdom was the occasion for a massive outpouring of public grief throughout France, especially among the population of Paris. David painted his famous tribute to his friend and organized a spectacular funeral pageant; the torchlit procession wound through the streets of the capital for six hours, punctuated by a cannon salute every five minutes. A quasi-religious cult of Marat arose with eulogies likening Marat to Jesus. Busts, portraits, and medallions bearing the likeness of the People’s Friend were everywhere."

"Koyré based his analysis on a narrow definition of science that focuses only on its purely theoretical aspects. He saw the Scientific Revolution as the advent and triumph of what he called the "mathematization of nature." At the same time he downplayed experimentalism as a relatively unimportant aspect of the new science... Koyré's exaltation of the "Platonic and Pythagorean" elements of the Scientific Revolution... was based on a demonstrably false understanding of how Galileo reached his conclusions. ...By avoiding consideration of nonmathematical sciences, Koyré reduced the Scientific Revolution to the ideas of Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, and Newton."

"When I graduated from Georgia Tech I worked for Lockheed Aircraft Company, which in 1966 sent me to England for a year to work as a design engineer on the C-5A cargo plane. My time in England coincided with the escalation of the Vietnam War. Opposition to that war would become a central passion of my life for the next several years. When I returned from England to Georgia, I resigned from Lockheed in a public act of protest against its role as a war profiteer. As a result, I became virtually unemployable for a while as the FBI dogged my trail, warning prospective employers against hiring me. (I suspected this at the time and confirmed it years later when I got my FBI files via a Freedom Of Information Act request.)"

"The most important ploy that nineteenth-century European scholars devised to avoid acknowledging that the roots of civilization are Afroasiatic was to minimize the importance of Egyptian, Sumerian, and Semitic contributions and to focus instead almost entirely on the Greeks. According to this idea, the Egyptians, Sumerians, and Semites established rather static and uninteresting cultures, while the really worthwhile developments in the rise of civilization were the work of the dynamic and sophisticated Greeks, who were considered to be of Aryan stock because their language is part of the Indo-European family. ...It was claimed that the Greeks developed their culture all on their own, with virtually no contribution from the earlier civilizations."

"In the nineteenth century C.E., a small but influential group of German scholars led by Karl Otfried Müller decided that the ancient Greek authors did not know what they were talking about—that their traditions of external influences were simply "myths." …They were convinced that the principle of historical explanation was race, and they believed they had discovered the "scientific laws of race." …only the white race ...had the natural ability to create advanced civilizations. ...This "racial science" …served as a useful ideology to explain the "natural right" of white Europeans to dominate the darker peoples of the world."

"A blacksmith, Thomas Newcomen, in collaboration with a plumber, John Calley, produced the first commercially successful machine for "raising water by fire." Newcomen could not have based his design on prevailing scientific theory, White argued, because his engine relied on the dissolution of air in steam, and "scientists in his day were not aware that air dissolves in water." Evidently "the mastery of steam power" was a product of empirical science and was "not influenced by Galilean science.""

"Clifford D. Conner thinks... snobbery has distorted the writing of history from ancient times to the present, because historians are scribes themselves and it is a clean, soft hand that holds the pen. In writing about science, for instance, historians celebrate a few great names -- Galileo, Newton, Darwin, Einstein -- and neglect the contributions of common, ordinary people who were not afraid to get their hands dirty. With "A People's History of Science," Conner tries to help right the balance. The triumphs of science rest on a "massive foundation created by humble laborers," he writes. "If science is understood in the fundamental sense of knowledge of nature, it should not be surprising to find that it originated with the people closest to nature: hunter-gatherers, peasant farmers, sailors, miners, blacksmiths, folk healers and others.""

"Modern science will continue to be blindly destructive as long as its operations are determined by the anarchism of market economic forces. The problem to be solved is whether science, technology, and industry can be brought under genuinely democratic control in the context of a global planned economy, so that all of us can collectively put our hard-won scientific knowledge to mutually beneficial use. I am confident it can be accomplished, but will it? If so, there is reason for optimism. If not... well, to paraphrase Keynes, "in the not-so-long run we're all dead.""

"The French Revolution qualitatively transformed all aspects of human culture, including science, for better or worse. The institutional ideological changes wrought in French science by the Revolution and its aftermath shaped the subsequent course of modern science everywhere. The essential underlying factor, as the Hessen thesis maintains, was the victory of capitalism, which the Revolution consolidated. The new social order spread to Europe and the rest of the world, everywhere subordinating the further development of science to capitalist interests."

"Wilbur Ross goes with Donald Trump to , where Donald Trump praises the Saudis for leading the fight against terrorism. You know who the biggest funders of terrorism in the world are? He attacks ... an ally of the US that allows us to have our most important military base there. ...Wilbur Ross comes back from this trip, he goes on CNBC and he says, "...The Saudi people love us. ...There wasn't a single demonstrator, anywhere..." and Becky Quick ...says "...It's against the law to protest there. They arrest people. They whip them," and he said "Well, if you say so. I don't know... [M]y Saudi guards got out these two baskets of dates... what a heartfelt gift..." This guy doesn't even know when he's being bribed by a foreign government."

"To counteract all this, we are told that big government must now return, to regain control, redistribute resources and, with enlightened industrial policy, steer resources to particular national industries and green technology. This is what the debate looked like even before the pandemic. When the new coronavirus ravaged the planet, suspicion of the outside world and free trade exploded. Governments began to close their borders and demand that supply chains be repatriated. ‘I don’t want to talk about a victory lap,’ Trump’s rather enthusiastic business secretary said about the ravages of the virus, but ‘I think it will help to accelerate the return of jobs to North America.’ Financial Times’ global business columnist Rana Foroohar declared that ‘Globalisation as we’ve known it for the last forty years, has failed.’ Governments, meanwhile, decided that the way to protect the economy was bailouts for everyone – first for the financial sector, then for everybody else. People got used to the idea that gains are to be privatized but a growing share of losses are to be covered by taxpayers or central banks. When they run out of money, they just print more and when this creates inflation, people need another round of bailouts to compensate for higher prices. And so on."

"The other thing that was fascinating to me, was there was not a single hint of a protester anywhere there during the whole time we were there. Not one guy with a bad placard."

"I am not anti-trade. I am pro-trade, but I am pro-sensible trade, not trade that is to the disadvantage of the American worker and to the American manufacturing community."