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 lebensraum imaginary is a collectively held, institutionally embedded vision that treats populations as ecological variables, governs territory as a function of demographic composition, and invokes natural necessity as the warrant for coercion. They move ecological or demographic futures into a present hierarchy of who may remain. These imaginaries work by naturalizing them into fact, then hierarchizing the population, then acting on the ranks. It reproduces through instruments and institutions whose operators need not endorse or even recognize it. Lebensraum imaginaries are a wider architecture that precedes and outlives verdicts about who is an ecofascist.
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.