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Link:\xa0https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/10/14/book-review-against-the-grain/

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Someone on SSC Discord summarized James Scott\u2019s\xa0Against The Grain\xa0as \u201cbasically 300 pages of calling wheat a fascist\u201d. I have only two qualms with this description. First, the book is more like 250 pages; the rest is just endnotes. Second, \u201cfascist\u201d isn\u2019t\xa0quite\xa0the right aspersion to use here.

Against The Grain\xa0should be read as a prequel to Scott\u2019s most famous work,\xa0Seeing Like A State. SLaS argued that much of what we think of as \u201cprogress\u201d towards a more orderly world \u2013 like Prussian scientific forestry, or planned cities with wide streets \u2013 didn\u2019t make anyone better off or grow the economy. It was \u201cprogress\u201d only from a state\u2019s-eye perspective of wanting everything to be legible to top-down control and taxation. He particularly criticizes the High Modernists, Le Corbusier-style architects who replaced flourishing organic cities with grandiose but sterile rectangular grids.

Against the Grain\xa0extends the analysis from the 19th century all the way back to the dawn of civilization. If, as Samuel Johnson claimed, \u201cThe Devil was the first Whig\u201d,\xa0Against the Grain\xa0argues that wheat was the first High Modernist.

Sumer just before the dawn of civilization was in many ways an idyllic place. Forget your vision of stark Middle Eastern deserts; in the Paleolithic the area where the first cities would one day arise was a great swamp. Foragers roamed the landscape, eating everything from fishes to gazelles to shellfish to wild plants. There was more than enough for everyone; \u201cas Jack Harlan famously showed, one could gather enough [wild] grain with a flint sickle in three weeks to feed a family for a year\u201d. Foragers alternated short periods of frenetic activity (eg catching as many gazelles as possible during their weeklong migration through the area) with longer periods of rest and recreation.