A recent article about business responses to global warming highlights the extent to which hierarchical thinking can respond adequately to rapid changes in the climate. 

And it neatly illustrates the preoccupations of a hierarchical world-view, as understood by grid-group cultural theory.

The article, written by Leon Gettler, centres on the increasing role of ‘Chief Carbon Officer’ in businesses. 

'The job of the future will be the chief carbon officer, or CCO. That's because global warming is no longer an environmental issue.'

According to grid-group cultural theory, first established by anthropologist Mary Douglas, and expanded by numerous writers in several different disciplines, there are four fundamental world-views, related to social group strength and rule maintenance. The hierarchist position is ‘strong grid, strong group’. In other words it is both highly group-orientated and highly regulated. For this way of thinking, the crisis (any crisis) is less about external factors and more about who is in charge, and how the social structure is to be maintained.

When new data becomes available it needs to be assimilated into the existing structure in such a way as to answer the question, who is responsible for this, and what is their position in the pecking order?

In government we have seen in recent years the creation of new climate change portfolios at a ministerial level. Where exactly these portfolios sit is highly revealing. For instance a solution to climate change from a hierarchist point of view is to create a minister and a department for climate change. But tellingly  this will usually be a fairly junior position, and the department thus created will not typically be at the heart of government. One example would be a ‘Department of Environment and Climate Change’. From a hierarchist perspective, once this  is established the crisis is over. We now know everything that really matters: who is responsible and how senior they are.

This may seem an extreme characterisation, but this approach is evident in the article:

There are two major drivers of the change: legislation, and market forces coming from customers, investors and reputation.

It’s very similar in business, as the article  demonstrates. The crisis of climate change is easily depicted primarily as a crisis of roles in the organisation. The proffered solution is a Chief Climate Officer. One can guess how senior such a role is likely to be, at least initially. When the job title is ‘Chief Finance and Carbon Officer’, there may be some leverage, but the hierarchical nature of the organisation will tend to minimise the possibility of this happening in order to maintain the existing hierarchy as far as possible.

Not the only game in town

But the article also shows that hierarchy isn’t the only prism through which to view climate change responses.  It cites a recent initiative of Wal-Mart to introduce an environmental ‘scorecard’ for its suppliers.

The scorecard has suppliers rating themselves on such areas as product/packaging ratio, greenhouse gas emissions, recycled content, transportation, renewable energy and innovation. From February, the world's biggest retailer started using the scorecard to grade suppliers and make buying decisions.

Grid-group theory is useful because it enables people to see a little bit further than their own world-view and recognise that there is more than one way of doing things. This can be uncomfortable since the four world-views described by the theory are mostly mutually exclusive; they tend to define themselves in terms of their antagonism to one another. But this discomfort may be considered worthwhile if it results in a broader vision and more wide-reaching action.

Company structures and career paths shift with global warming Leon Gettler

The Age August 20, 2008

I’m planning to attend a public debate on religion, organised by Intelligence Squared. The motion is ‘We’d be better off without religion’, and the speakers include Victor Stenger, who wrote God, the Failed Hypothesis - How Science Shows that God does not Exist. I checked this out recently.

The blurb about Professor Stenger says:

Stenger maintains that plausible natural explanations exist for for all observable phenomena and there is strong scientific evidence against anything mystical or supernatural in the universe.

Not only does the universe show no evidence for God, it looks exactly as it would be expected to look if there is no God.

I’m not disagreeing with Stenger. It isn’t that there are two different types of evidence, that used by atheist scientists such as Stenger, and the evidence used by believers. It’s actually all the same. I think Stenger would agree with this. He seems to think the existence of God should be empirically observable as a series of  anomalies in the laws of physics. Many theists would agree with this. For example, miracles, by definition, are things that don’t normally happen, and are not explicable using scientific explanations that exclude the divine. What differs between this kind of believers and non-believers is not the available evidence, but the interpretation. Using a materialist framework of interpretation, Stenger can show how there is nothing supernatural and how the very category is suspect. Using a different framework of interpretation, believers can show how the existence of God is credible, especially if categories such as Faith are considered. So the disagreement is about different approaches to interpretation at least as much as it is about the evidence itself. Stenger seems to be of the opinion that there is only one valid method of interpretation and that is the scientific method. This is clearly untenable, since all sorts of human activity depend on non-scientific frameworks of interpretation (eg love, revenge, ethics, etc).

Although some scientists would probably dispute Stenger’s claims that there is no scientific evidence for the existence of God (or of anything supernatural), I am prepared to take his view seriously. Since he has been involved in identifying quarks and gluons, he probably knows something about physics.

I think, though, that his definition of God, while admittedly one used by many believers, is contestable. Is it necessary for God to be doing anything different from the laws of physics? Stenger thinks it is. If God’s existence is a scientific hypothesis then according to Stenger it fails.

But there is a different type of believer/non-believer. This type doesn’t regard God as a scientific hypothesis, but as a human creation, analogous to a work of art or an artistic practice. On this view God exists because humans created him. There are many non-believers in this kind of God, including most theists. It seems Stenger would agree with them, since he, like them, would probably regard this kind of God as no God at all. So Stenger has a great deal in common with the religious believers after all. The more he tries to distance himself from them, the closer they move together.

There’s a summary of Stenger’s argument here.