Few thinkers have changed how we see the world; even fewer have changed how we think about how we see the world. Mary Douglas, who has died aged 86, is one of the rare exceptions. Her field was culture, but she was as unlike the stereotypical cultural studies academic as one could imagine. A devout Catholic, she spent the last few decades in an extraordinary flowering of inquiry that is now providing insights in fields as diverse as the study of the Old Testament and the politics of climate change.
Douglas's theoretical apparatus allowed her to think in original ways about almost any topic. In a lecture earlier this year at the Young Foundation, she discussed "enclaves," the small groups which at their most extreme become terrorist cells. Where others emphasise their strengths, she emphasised their weaknesses: how prone they are to splits and sectarianism, and how hard it is for their founders to enforce rules. To survive, enclaves create around themselves what Douglas called a "wall of virtue"—the sense that they alone uphold justice, while all around them are suspect—yet the very thing that bonds them together encourages individuals within them to compete to demonstrate their own virtue and the failings of their peers. The only thing that can override this fragility is fear of the outside world—and so sects, whether political or religious, peaceful or violent, feed off the hostility of outsiders, using it to reinforce their own solidarity. The implication is clear for western governments: in the long term, defeating terrorism depends on ratcheting fear down, not up, dismantling the "walls of virtue" rather than attacking them head on with declarations of war.
Douglas's work has set in motion important new schools of thought. Perhaps the most fertile of these is now being used to make sense of why so many well-intentioned policies fail, and why some others succeed even though they appear to work less well on paper. Her starting point is a deceptively simple framework she has repeatedly used to make sense of organisations and societies. It should be part of the mental furniture of any educated person, like the laws of supply and demand in economics, or the laws of thermodynamics.
Any culture, Douglas argued, can be mapped on two dimensions. On one axis is "grid," the extent to which behaviours and rules are defined and differentiated, for example by public rules deciding who can do what according to their age, race, gender or qualifications. Examples of "high grid" would include a large corporation, or a traditional agrarian society, or families with clear demarcations of roles and times (when to eat, go to bed). On the other axis is "group"—the extent to which people bond with each other, and divide the world into insiders and outsiders. The more people do with a group of other people, the more they experience testing trials, or the more difficult the group is to get into, the stronger this sense of group will be.
These two dimensions come together to provide a simple 2x2 matrix: high grid and high group is hierarchy; low grid and low group is individualism; high group and low grid is egalitarianism; low group and high grid is fatalism. This simple model turns out to be a powerful tool for understanding social relations, and for making sense of how people see the world. We may like to believe that we choose and shape our own beliefs—but Douglas, drawing on the work of Emile Durkheim and others—suggested that it is much easier to understand societies by turning that assumption on its head: societies and institutions think through us much more than the other way around.
Within a hierarchical culture, the world is seen as controllable so long as the right structures are in place. Most governments tend towards hierarchy. It is the natural worldview of civil servants, political leaders and of most of the consultants working in and around big business and governments. To every problem there is a solution—so long as it is firmly enough implemented by a sufficiently powerful leader or elite.
In an egalitarian worldview, problems usually arise from too much hierarchy and inequality, and not enough bonding and solidarity. More discussion with more people is an unmitigated good, and any measures which widen inequalities are to be resisted. In an individualistic worldview, the answer to problems is more freedom—let people determine their own choices and things will come right. Dissent is to be celebrated; rebels are heroes, and the world is made, and remade, by the imagination and energy of individuals. The fatalistic worldview is most common among people with little power or experience of power.
These four worldviews can be found at every level of human organisation—from families and streets to global companies and the UN. They are constantly in tension, merging and combining in new ways. Indeed, they need each other. Hierarchies need to re-energise themselves with the creativity of passionate individuals, and some egalitarianism to reinforce their sense of common purpose. Egalitarian cultures need some hierarchy to resolve disputes and make decisions. Individualist cultures need some hierarchy to enforce the rules, and some egalitarianism to encourage people to care for each other. All, perhaps, need some fatalism to get by and avoid a constant state of rebellion.
In their recent book "Clumsy Solutions for a Complex World," which applies Douglas's ideas to the world of public policy, Michael Thompson and Marco Verweij use the example of climate change to show how these different perspectives can shape a strategic argument. For egalitarians, climate change is a consequence of profligacy of the rich north. A rapacious capitalist system has led to the destruction of the shared environment. Big government and big business have wrecked the world. The solutions therefore lie in a return to smaller-scale institutions, closer to nature, and a return to a simpler, more sustainable lifestyle.
From a hierarchical perspective, climate change is a problem that can only be solved with new hierarchy. Climate change is the result of millions of individual decisions that make sense in isolation, but that when combined risk destroying a common resource. The world now needs strong rules to cut CO2 emissions. That will mean treaties that go well beyond Kyoto; new organisations—perhaps a World Environment Organisation—to enforce them; and equivalent laws and regulations within nations. Scientific knowledge, collected by the IPCC, has provided the world with an authoritative truth about the climate that now needs to be taken seriously.
From an individualist perspective, both of the other groups are scaremongers, using unproven science to impose unnecessary burdens on the world. Past experiences show that people and markets are sufficiently adaptive to avoid disaster, given the freedom to do so. New technologies will arise from competition to cut emissions if that is what is needed, and in any case the solutions proposed by others are likely to be worse than the problem. As for the fatalists, we are simply all doomed. As they point out, all three other stories are plausible; all are strongly held by different groups; and all are resistant to disproof by any new evidence.
The same patterns can be found in relation to immigration. For individualists, immigration is a good thing; there should be as much labour mobility as possible. Given the freedom to do so, immigrants will contribute to their new society and economy. For egalitarians too, immigration can be a good thing, but needs to be supported by strong rules against discrimination. For hierarchists, on the other hand, immigration is more likely to be seen as disruptive, and if it does occur needs to be accompanied by active social engineering to ensure that migrants are properly integrated.
Rationalists like to believe that policy battles end with one side winning. But in practice this rarely happens, and when it does more harm is caused than good. Hubristic hierarchy—in the form of planning—was repeatedly discredited in the 20th century, just as hubristic neoliberal faith in markets has been discredited in more recent decades, and extreme egalitarianism was undermined by the anarchic experiences of revolutions in full swing. Many of us learn in life that overly neat and rational solutions don't work in practice, and Mary Douglas would argue that the best institutions and societies achieve a rough and ready balance between different cultures. Their inconsistency is part of what makes them work. This is perhaps not a new insight. But it is surprisingly rare to find it in any discussions of public policy.
As Michael Thompson and his collaborators have shown, the most successful policies tend to combine expert analysis and design with deliberation and partnership between many players, along with markets and other arrangements that tap into individual motivations. The worldwide web is an outstanding example, even if the internet was originally imagined as part of a command and control system for the US military. The Kyoto protocol is an example of relying on just one cultural model—top-down bureaucratic regulation of activities, but without much realistic prospect of implementation, let alone effective monitoring. Yet in practice, combating climate change will depend on the interaction of many cultures—some regulations and penalties combined with market forces favouring energy efficiency and renewables, and egalitarian cultures driving people to adopt more sustainable lifestyles and to take responsibility for the future of the group, in this case humanity.
How should governments use these insights? They cannot be translated into one precise method to be applied to any situation. Indeed, these insights are warnings against relying on any one set of tools to deal with such complex things as human society. But they are very useful when thinking about any given strategy to change the world. Bluntly, if it doesn't contain some room for all of the cultural frames, then it will likely fail. For example, public service reforms based only on incentives are as doomed to failure as strategies to cut anti-social behaviour that rely only on coercion.
Perhaps more troubling, however, are the implications of Douglas's work for the future. In more fractured societies, with weaker families and hierarchies, there are bound to be more isolates, more people detached from groups and hierarchies, who will be seeking meaning in enclaves. Some may be content to take refuge behind a wall of virtue. But others may take up arms.
Mary Douglas's biggest insight is, perhaps, a warning against depending too much on rational argument. How we see the world depends as much on where we sit as on what we think, and human beings can often be understood better through their rituals and behaviours than through their doctrines and beliefs.
