WORLDVIEWS

To make sense of the world, we all create patterns of meaning.In my youth it was a tripartite division – conservatives, socialists and liberals. Not for me the Manichean approach of left/right or insider/outsider - there was always a third way. It was only in 2000, however, that I became aware of the four dimensions of grid-group theory which anthropologist Mary Douglas introduced - consisting of four very different “world views” (what she calls hierarchist, egalitarian, individualist and fatalist) which came to be known as “Cultural Theory”. I came across Mary Douglas’ theory thanks to public admin theorist Chris Hood’s “The Art of the State” (2000)

Another approach was that of cultural values – the work of people such as de Hofstede; Ronald Inglehart; Frans Trompenaars; Richard Lewis (of When Cultures Collide fame) and Richard Nesbitt a body of writing which emphasises the distinctiveness of national values most graphically illustrated in the Inglehart cultural map of the world and best explained in this brochure. Multinational companies were funding a lot of this work as they tried to understand how they could weld different nationalities into coherent and effective teams. Other companies had also been funding a lot of this work to try to get into the minds of their consumers - but international charities suddenly realised a decade or so ago could also be used to prise money out of all of us for their more altruistic purposes (see below) – a politicisation of which Adam Curtis' documentaries have made us much more aware

Those were the days when a body of literature called “path dependency ” was raising important questions about how “sticky” cultural values were…viz how difficult national behavioural traits are to change. And, just the other day, I discovered Betti’s argument that there were actually twelve ways of seeing the world (see list below)

Psychologists, sociologists, political scientists and anthropologists have approached this question of perceptions and values completely separately and at different times - making few attempts to engage one another in discussion It's such a critical issue that it's time they reached out to one another - and made the connection with the developing literature on world views

Recommended Reading

BOOKS

- Management development through cultural diversity Ronnie Lessem (1995) 
Lessem is a south african who uses the four lens of the compass to show how the 

environment governs our ways of thinking.
- When Cultures Collide – leading across cultures; Richard Lewis (1996) The book 

which introduced us to the field – and gave us marvellous vignettes of the strange 

habits of almost all countries of the world

- Spiral Dynamics – mastering values, leadership, change; Don Beck and Chris Cowan

 (1996)  with crucial explorations of the very different levels of explanation needed 

for discussions of behaviour and the values which underpin it.

- Riding the Waves of Culture – understanding cultural diversity in business Frans 

Trompenaars and Charles Hampden-Turner (1997) the Dutchman who took on de 

Hofstede’s mantle
 “The Art of the State” Chris Hood (2000)  uses Mary Douglas’ grid-group typology 

brilliantly to help us understand the strengths, weaknesses and risks of these 

various world views.
- The Geography of Thought – how westerners and asians think differently and why; 

Richard Nesbitt (2003) An American social psychologist gives a thought-provoking book
- “Way of life theory – the underlying structure of world views, social relations and lifestyles” 

– a rather disjointed and abstract dissertation by Michael Edward Pepperday (2009) an 

introduction to which is here

- Consumer Shift - how changing values are reshaping the consumer landscape (2011) 

actually much more about values and world views than it is about consumers….
-The Patterning Instinct; Jeremy Lent (2017) how worldviews develop and can change 

history 

- Cultural Evolution – people’s motivations are changing, and reshaping the world ;

 Ronald Inglehart (2018)  a political scientist who has been at the heart of discussion 

about cultural values for the past 50 years – and the book and this article summarised 

that work.
- Twelve Ways of Seeing the World  M Betti (2019 Eng – original German 2001) a 

curious book based on the work of Rudolf Steiner
- The Web of Meaning ; Jeremy Lent (2021) an important follow up to his 2017 book
- Theories of International Relations ed R Devetak and J True (6th ed 2022)
- Foundations of International Relations ed S McGlinchey et al 2022
- The Battle for Britain – crises, conflicts and the conjunctures  John Clarke 2023


ARTICLES
- Wicked Problems and Clumsy Solutions ; Keith Grint (2008) a short very useful article 

by an academic
- Common Cause – the case for working with our cultural values  (2010) 

a useful little manual for charities
- Finding Frames – new ways to engage the UK public (2010) ditto
- A Cultural Theory of Politics ” (2011) a short article which shows how the 

grid-group approach has been used in a range of disciplines
- Grid, group and grade – challenges in operationalising cultural theory for 

cross-national research (2014) is a very academic article although its comparative 

diagrams are instructive

- Britain’s Choice – common ground and divisions in 2020s Britain (More in Common

 2020) a detailed picture of the british people and their values these days

Changing One's Mind

 I have been totally blown over by Dougald Hine’s At Work in the Ruins (2023) which I read as the most profound exploration of our world views - and of how the combination of his experience of

• climate activism

• changing his domicile to Sweden a few years before Covid struck

caused him to question those world views. And to pose more profound challenges than simply those of global warming. The book digs deep into the ways we try to make sense of the world - a subject which I dealt with not so long ago. Here's how Hine describes it -

“Two paths lead from here: one big, one small. The big path is a brightly-lit highway on which many lanes converge. It unites elements of left and right, from Silicon Valley visionaries and Wall Street investors, through a broad swathe of liberal opinion, to the wilder fringes of Fully Automated Luxury Communism, and in some form it will constitute the political orthodoxy of the 2020s. It sets out to limit the damage of climate change through large-scale efforts of management, control, surveillance and innovation, oriented to sustaining a version of existing trajectories of technological progress, economic growth and development.

The small path is a trail that branches off into many paths. It is made by those who seek to build resilience closer to the ground, nurturing capacities and relationships, oriented to a future in which existing trajectories of technological progress, economic growth and development will not be sustained, but where the possibility of a ‘world worth living for’ nonetheless remains. Humble as it looks, as your eyes adjust, you may recognise just how many feet have walked this way and how many continue to do so, even now.

Which of these paths I would have us take is clear enough. The big path is a fast track to nowhere. We will not arrive at the world of fossil-free jumbo jets promised by the airport adverts. The entitlements of late modernity are not compatible with the realities of life on a finite planet and they do not even make us happy. But we may well follow that path for a while longer, as it leads us deeper into dystopia and leaves us more dependent on fragile technological systems that few of us understand or can imagine living without.

And what I think I can see now is that the very language of climate change will be owned, from here on out, by the engineers and marketeers of the big path. Any conversation about the trouble we are in, so long as it starts within the newly politicised frame of science, will lead inexorably to their solutions.

However far it may be from our political roots, we find that we have more in common with assorted conservatives, dissidents and sceptics – including some whose scepticism extends to climate science – than with the mainstream progressive currents that have so far had a claim to be on the right side of history when it comes to climate change. Under the authority of ‘the science’, talk of climate change will belong to the advocates of the big path, and those of us who do not wish to contribute to that future will need to find another place to start from when we want to talk about the depth of the trouble the world is undoubtedly in.” (pp34/35)

Along the way the author meets other travellers who also challenge the conventional wisdom – people like my compatriot Alastair McIntosh and others such as VM de Oliveira (“Hospicing Modernity”), James Bridle (“New Dark Age”) and Justin Smith. The book continues thus -

The path we are on now looks like a dead end and we are left to look for other paths worth taking. The way we answer such a question can be informed by science, but science alone cannot answer it for us because we’re not dealing with the kind of question that can be answered definitively through processes of observation, measurement and calculation. Rather, what we have is a question that calls for the exercise of judgement. And it cannot not be answered, since any response to climate change will contain an implicit answer. If the question is not made explicit – if the existence of upstream questions, these questions that take us beyond the boundaries of what science can tell us about climate change, is not recognised – then the default answer will be to treat it as bad luck and pursue some combination of techno-fixes and lifestyle adjustments.

The trouble is, compared to the promise of science, the exercise of human judgement looks terribly fragile and fallible. Indeed, from early in the development of modern science, before it even got that name, there have been those who hoped that scientific ways of seeing and knowing the world could free us from dependence on the exercise of judgement and the disputes to which it often leads. You can trace this hope within the history of environmentalism and the climate movements arising from it. Yet to expect scientific knowledge to take the place of the exercise of judgement is to ask too much of science, and those who have done so tend to end up disappointed, as we shall see.

In 1987, the Brundtland Report had established ‘sustainable development’ as the frame within which the international community would talk about the planetary situation: a framing which yoked the pursuit of ecological sustainability to the trajectory of economic and technological development, without any proof that this pairing could pull in the same direction. In hindsight, the five years between its publication and the Rio Earth Summit of 1992 appear as a high tide of international concern and intergovernmental action around the environment that remains unsurpassed to this day. This was also the moment at which the environmental movement drew back from the terrain of culture and established a new relationship with science. No longer was the scientific evidence a starting point for a larger questioning of society or making political arguments; now the evidence itself was to make the case for change, to carry the weight and do the work of politics.

This turn is not hard to understand: in countries where Green politicians had entered parliament, the demands of working within existing institutions drove a certain kind of ‘realism’. Meanwhile, the journey of David Icke from BBC sports presenter to Green Party principal speaker to promoter of lizard-related conspiracy theories offered a cautionary example of how the attempt to call your whole culture into question could unravel. pp59-60

Ways of Seeing

Each of us has a particular lens through which we look when we’re trying to make sense of the world. The International Relations people have it down to a fine art – with their classification of the subject into no fewer than 8 schools – realism, liberalism, marxism, structuralism, feminism, postcolonialism etc. (Chapter 7 of the link gives the lowdown on the various schools)   

In my youth, I was aware of a tripartite division – conservatives, socialists 

and liberals. I didn’t like the Manichean approach of left/right - there was 

always a third way, be it green or ecological. 
It was only in the new millennium, however, that I became aware of the 

four dimensions of grid-group theory which anthropologist Mary Douglas 

introduced - consisting of four very different “world views” (what she calls

 hierarchist, egalitarian, individualist and fatalist) which came to be known 

as “Cultural Theory”. I first came across Mary Douglas’ theory in 1998, thanks 

to public admin theorist Chris Hood’s “The Art of the State” which uses her 

typology brilliantly to help us understand the strengths, weaknesses and risks 

of these various world views. 

But it appears we have yet another way of understanding the world – viz 

“conjunctural analysis”. I agree it’s a bit of a mouthful but it basically denies 

the bias in the various schools and argues that we need to recognise the complexity 

of the world and to accept there are different levels of explanation for the 

way things are. John Clarke sets out the argument in The Battle for Britain – crises, 

conflicts and the conjunctures which, I have to confess, I found very hard going.

Further Reading about “World Views”

- The Battle for Britain – crises, conflicts and the conjunctures John Clarke 2023

- Theories of International Relations ed R Devetak and J True (6^th ed 2022)

- Foundations of International Relations l ed S McGlinchey et al 2022

- Britain’s Choice – common ground and divisions in 2020s Britain (More in Common 

2020) a detailed picture of the british people and their values these days

- Twelve Ways of Seeing the World M Betti (2019 Eng – original German 2001) 

based on Rudolf Steiner's thinking, this offers a curious typology

- Cultural Evolution – people’s motivations are changing, and reshaping the world; 

Ronald Inglehart (2018) a political scientist,who has been at the heart of discussion 

about cultural values for the past 50 years – and the book and this article summarises 

that work.
- Grid, group and grade – challenges in operationalising cultural theory for cross-national 

research (2014) is a very academic article although its comparative diagrams are instructive
- “A Cultural Theory of Politics” (2011) a short article which shows how the grid-group 

approach has been used in a range of disciplines
-  Consumer Shift - how changing values are reshaping the consumer landscape Any 

Hines (2011) actually much more about values and world views than it is about consumers….

- Common Cause – the case for working with our cultural values (2010) a useful little 

manual for charities
- Finding Frames – new ways to engage the UK public (2010) ditto
- “Way of life theory – the underlying structure of world views, social relations and

 lifestyles” (2009) – a rather disjointed dissertation by Michael Edward Pepperday 

and introduction to which is here.

- Wicked Problems and Clumsy Solutions; Keith Grint (2008) a short very useful 

article by an academic

- The Geography of Thought – how westerners and asians think differently and why; 

Richard Nesbitt (2003) An American social psychologist gives a thought-provoking book

- “The Art of the State” Christopher Hood (1998) A brilliant essay on the usefulness 

of grid-group analysis

- Riding the Waves of Culture – understanding cultural diversity in business; Frans 

Trompenaars and Charles Hampden-Turner (1997) the Dutchman who took on de Hofstede’s 

mantle
-When Cultures Collide – leading across cultures; Richard Lewis (1996) The book which 

introduced us to the field – and gave us marvellous vignettes of the strange habits of 

almost all countries of the world
- Management development through cultural diversity Ronnie Lessem (1995) 

Lessem is a south african who uses the four lens of the compass to show how the 

environment governs our ways of thinking.