Quantitative Chauvinism and Lebensraum Imaginaries
epistemic register · i
n. A political operation: the deployment of numerical instruments to foreclose political deliberation by converting contested claims into apparent technical necessities. It operates through three reinforcing patterns — the will to simplify (compressing complex social processes into a single governing metric), the rule of expertise (insulating quantified claims from democratic scrutiny through credentialed authority), and the politics of inevitability (converting conditional projections into mandates that foreclose political choice).
political register · ii
n. A recurring epistemic architecture within ecofascism: organized visions of environmental futures that naturalize hierarchy and exclusion as ecological necessity. Three constitutive features: ecological crisis as the ground for palingenetic purification (national rebirth from decadence); demographic content given to that contamination (the wrong bodies, the wrong fertility); and the coercive sorting of populations authorized as stewardship rather than violence. Lebensraum is a deliberate reference to a concept crossing biological, ecological, social, and political boundaries — one that animated the calamities of the Third Reich but has longer roots and more unsettling afterlives.
One architecture, traced across a century and into the next — from a barren mesa in Boulder to an autonomous machine deciding who gets evacuated. Tap any chapter.
The Greatest Shortcoming traces a hundred years of American demographic and environmental governance through five eras — from the Olmsted Report's grammar of scarcity to climate triage as administrative routine. It identifies the actors who built the instruments, the organizations that circulated them, the metaphors that made them persuasive, and the political projects they served. And it asks whether measurement can be redirected: whether the same quantitative tools that narrowed the circle of concern can be rebuilt to widen it.
By Brian C. Keegan.
Selected works referenced in chapter 1: Theodore Porter, Trust in Numbers; Alain Desrosières, The Politics of Large Numbers; Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism; Matthew Connelly, Fatal Misconception; Emily Klancher Merchant, Building the Population Bomb; Betsy Hartmann, Reproductive Rights and Wrongs; Sheila Jasanoff & Sang-Hyun Kim, Dreamscapes of Modernity; Roger Griffin on palingenetic ultranationalism.