In Seeing Like a State, James C. Scott remarks that deliberately restricting the information one registers offers ‘a high degree of schematic knowledge, control, and manipulation.’ To see like a state means to engage in a ‘greatly schematized process of abstraction and simplification’ that creates a focused and dense ‘narrowing vision’ of reality. As Daniel Kahneman argues in Thinking, Fast and Slow, the human mind also seeks to make the world it inhabits easier to understand by using two cognitive systems. The first deals with regular occurrences and forms ‘the structure of events in your life.’ The second system puts the experiences of this first system into longer-term context. Here, Kahneman observes that ‘the mind is good with stories.’ A story that works, and that is repeated frequently by the second system, forms a condition of ‘cognitive ease’ where ‘things are going well’ whereas ‘cognitive strain’ indicates the existence of unavoidable problems and ‘unmet demands.’ These stories then shape how we interpret the regular occurrences under the first system. Kahneman further reminds us that ‘anything that makes it easier for the associative machine to run smoothly will also bias beliefs.’ Like Scott’s ‘narrowing vision,’ the narrative that forms a ‘cognitive ease’ will have us experience the world in a way that sustains our narrative conception of it.
The social and economic order of our present day constitutes such a persistent cognitive ease and, as the increasingly immediate experience of climate change shows, an unsustainable narrative. Caring for the environment responsibly has not formed part of our collective cognitive ease, either because we had not registered it before or because our mind has explained it away using the dominant narrative. Thus, long-term success of any attempt to build a more sustainable society will have to rely in great part on crafting a new and equally sustainable narrative of our global environment we can successfully repeat to ourselves.
One narrative which excluded nature from view simply relocated it to a designated setting outside of society. William Cronon recognised the origin of this ‘dangerous dualism that sets human beings outside of nature’ in Romantic visions of nature. Underpinned by the ‘wilderness paradox’, they suggest that if ‘nature, to be true, must also be wild, then our very presence in nature represents its fall.’ Cronon argued that this narrative ‘poses a serious threat to responsible environmentalism.’
Subtler and more complex relations between humans and their immediate environment were not registered. Nature as such was removed from the responsibilities of society entirely. Such a vision took hold over 19th century America as a narrative of the conquest of the frontier by civilization. Frederick Jackson Turner argued that the encounter with the frontier’s wilderness and the struggle for control had shaped a restless, practically minded and freedom-loving American character. As he concluded that ‘the frontier has gone’, he was also forced to admit that it ‘has closed the first period of American history.’ Nature was thus indeed not entirely excluded from the narrative, yet it had been ascribed the passive role of a wild, unchartered territory. While it shapes all those attempting to conquer it in its image, it was never seen as part of civilization after its subjection.
There were, however, instances in which nature reasserted itself within the social world that had excluded it. Reporting on the devastating Dust Bowl phenomenon (a period of severe dust storms and drought in American prairies), the Great Plains Committee told President Roosevelt in 1936 that there was ‘no reason to believe that the primary factors of climate…in the Great Plains region have undergone any fundamental change.’ Instead, it located the cause in a ‘mistaken homesteading policy.’ The Midwestern system of agriculture was founded on the ideal of the ‘sodbuster’ farmer: small-tenant homesteaders who would move quickly from plot to plot and focused on the cultivation of wheat instead of cattle-herding. This policy was a deliberate choice that related directly to the self-perception of Americans as individualist, democratic and capable of dominating the frontier. What suffocated in the Dust Bowls was not merely a specific Midwestern agricultural system but an entire narrative about what it meant to be American.
Despite having become an increasingly unsustainable story the emerging American society had told itself about itself, Cronon’s work proves the durability of the frontier-narrative. It remained present not least in American politics during the Reagan presidency. Moreover, the Dust Bowl experience only formed a particular instance of cognitive strain. Yet as Bruno Latour argued in We Have Never Been Modern, such instances were underpinned by an entire civilizational narrative that removed nature from our view. The adoption of a ‘modernist constitution’ had separated nature and humans into two distinct ontological zones by sealing off society from a realm of ‘translation’ in which nature and society are intertwined. Latour’s argument itself is a form of cognitive ease. What makes one modern is not simply living in an artificial society but the adoption of a narrowing vision that removes the interrelation of nature and society from our view and thereby produces society in the first place. Latour locates the origins of this condition in the insistence on the artificiality of political order in the thought of Thomas Hobbes. The modern politics he had inaugurated seemed to suggest that in inter-human relations, nature and peace were mutually exclusive. Consequently, ‘modern man’ had succumbed to a narrative of artificiality that began to drive the expansion of commercialism and European civilisation against the disorder of nature.
What sounds similar to Cronon’s argument became an even stricter separation that begins not with the natural world but the exclusion of the nature of the individual human being. As commercial society began to flourish, Denis Diderot imagined a conversation between a Chaplain that had accompanied Bougainville on his explorations and the Native Tahitian Ourou; the rediscovery of nature there played a central role. As the historian J.G.A. Pocock noted, ‘The Tahitians were fictional types standing for an uncomplicated natural condition.’ What the Chaplain encountered was ‘the natural man’ who is ‘unimaginable outside the society created by his legislators.’ In the dialogue, Ourou lays out his worldview in which nature is central rather than marginal: ‘Pay close attention to the nature of things and actions, to your relations with your fellow creatures.’ He lives in a world governed by the inherently benevolent axioms of maternal nature. Ourou had never been subjected to either the narrowing vision of the state that sought to use an ordered nature as efficiently as possible or the cognitive ease of an enlightened commercial society that removed nature from its narrative.
Latour’s theory argues that the modern constitution only comes under pressure once consequences of ignoring the interrelations of society and nature start to spill over into purified society. Yet nature is tangibly present in the Chaplain who had been tempted by local women to disobey his vows. Similarly, the settlers in the Midwest were not oblivious to the natural world that surrounded them or the influence the frontier had on their character and that of its conquerors before them. Moreover, if we read Hobbes closely, then the desire for peace is itself natural. It is not human nature which produces the devastating war of all against all, but simply the absence of a principle of order. These instances remind us that, in practice, society is never entirely purified. Rather, nature is omnipresent. What we deem to have been a process of purification may thus well be nothing more than the adoption of a certain narrative about nature. In this sense, we might be modern not because we have excluded nature from our view but rather because we have deliberately adopted that interrelation of nature and society that best fits the narrative of our ‘cognitive ease’ which carries our modern, industrial and commercial social order. Not nature itself but other interrelations with nature came to lie outside that narrowing vision.
The emerging enquiry into global environmental change then offered the first opportunity to reflect more widely on the sustainability of that choice of narrative. As in the case of the Dust Bowls, it came at a time at which first inconsistencies appeared in the otherwise convincing story of modernity. The publication of the influential Limits to Growth report in 1972 – an attempt to model the possibility of exponential economic and population growth with finite supply of resources – then inaugurated a new mathematical and computer-based approach to situating ourselves within our environment. Previous problems of the classification of different factors as natural or human seemed mitigated by their reduction to mathematical influences on a dynamic world-model. Moreover, instead of selecting one narrative over others, the report could draw on a wider array of interrelations. However, when introducing their methodology, the authors stated generally that ‘every person approaches his problems with the help of models.’ Models are just another form of simplification and science itself is subject to cognitive ease and its related forms of bias. It can only recognise those parameters that are included in a specific narrowing vision. Like Limits to Growth, already Thomas Malthus had realised in his infamous Essay on the Principle of Population that present rates of growth and development could not be sustained. Importantly, Malthus recognised that his argument was limited in great part because ‘the histories of mankind that we possess are histories only of the higher classes.’ While Malthus’s interest in the poorer members of society must of course be read in the context of his wider views of their role in driving population increase, his insight reminds us that science too relies on the parameters of a certain narrative. At the same time, these scientific approaches help us recognise the shortcomings of our narrowing vision and demand the integration of new parameters.
The cognitive ease we live in and the narrowing vision the state operates under are thus not set in stone. The authors of Limits to Growth were able to reach their conclusions by proposing a narrative that relied on the integration of nature into social and economic processes in a way in which it had previously not been seen. The result may have been yet another simplification but one which approached a ‘truly global’ view recognising the interactions of humans, economic growth and nature in terms of a dynamic, global environment. Facing the resulting ‘cognitive strain’, they demanded an adaptation of our view of the world to make way for a ‘global equilibrium’ of sustainable living standards. Limits to Growth thus offers a blueprint for what it may need to arrive at a sustainable narrative for the present moment.
This is not an entirely scientific process, however. To return to the original concepts, it is in particular Scott’s theory that is aware of the necessity of such continuous adaptation. The state has a deliberate choice of what to include in the abstraction of reality it deals with. On an individual level, Kahneman’s cognitive ease seems more inert. However, he does think that ‘people can overcome some of the superficial factors that produce illusions of truth when strongly motivated to do so.’ So far, imminent collapse of our relations with nature brought about by unsustainable forms of cognitive ease have proven strong enough a motivation. Similarly, we are still registering the increasingly fierce consequences of global warming as a form of ‘cognitive strain’ of an old narrative. Our political systems are only gradually beginning to adjust their vision so as to capture the environment and the complexities of its relations with other parameters. We too will have to recognise the unsustainable social and political narratives we have used to explain our lives up until now before being able to pass over into a sustainable form of ‘cognitive ease’ that relies on a more inclusive narrative of our global environment.
This article was originally published in OPR’s Issue 14: Fictions and Narratives.