Science Quote by Mary Douglas

“Hierarchy is much reviled in the present day” lands like a cool ethnographer’s eyebrow-raise. Mary Douglas isn’t nostalgically cheering for bosses and bureaucrats; she’s diagnosing a mood. By the late 20th century, “hierarchy” had become a dirty word in educated Western life, bundled with patriarchy, colonial administration, class snobbery, church authority, and corporate chain-of-command. Douglas, trained to see social arrangements as cultural technologies, is pointing out that the taboo itself is a social fact worth studying.

The line works because it smuggles a challenge into a blandly observational sentence. “Reviled” is strong moral language, but “in the present day” distances the speaker from the chorus. That small temporal phrase implies contingency: if anti-hierarchy is historically situated, it’s not self-evident truth, it’s a preference with its own rituals and blind spots. Douglas’s broader work (especially her grid-group thinking) treats hierarchy as one of several viable ways humans coordinate trust, accountability, and meaning. When a culture declares hierarchy illegitimate, it doesn’t escape structure; it tends to reinvent ranking through different currencies - charisma, expertise, “authenticity,” popularity, or moral purity.

The subtext is a warning against moral monoculture. If we only know how to criticize hierarchy, we may become naive about the hierarchies we still inhabit - informal ones that are harder to name, harder to challenge, and easier to deny. Douglas is inviting the reader to swap reflexive disdain for cultural literacy: not “Is hierarchy bad?” but “What problem is this hierarchy solving, and what new problems appear when we pretend we’re beyond it?”