CONCEPT
High Modernist Ideology
Scott's term for the sincere conviction that complex human systems can be redesigned from above by administrators armed with technical knowledge and rational planning — the ideological precondition for the catastrophes his career documented.
High modernism, in Scott's analysis, is not stupidity dressed as science. It is a specific kind of intelligence — the intelligence of the planner, the administrator, the systems architect — applied with such confidence that it overrides the messier, less articulable, but often more complete knowledge of the people who actually inhabit the systems being redesigned. The high modernist is not cynical. She genuinely believes, with the fervor of the committed, that scientific rationality will produce better outcomes than the organic, evolutionary processes through which functioning arrangements actually develop. This sincerity is precisely what makes high modernist ideology dangerous. A cynical planner can be negotiated with. A sincere planner, armed with institutional power and convinced of the rightness of the comprehensive plan, is prepared to override the resistance of those who experience the plan's costs — because, from within the ideological framework, the resistance itself is evidence of the population's need to be modernized.
