Science Quote by Mary Douglas

The chill in Douglas's line is how calmly it stages apocalypse as a seminar topic. "Some scholars" does a lot of work: it distances her from the claim while naming an intellectual fashion, the kind that turns history into a conveyor belt and conflict into a forecast. The passive construction ("have been arguing") hints at a discourse swelling in the background, not a single thesis she wants to own. Douglas, an anthropologist of classification and ritual, is allergic to inevitability. So the sentence reads less like a prophecy than a diagnostic: watch what happens when educated people start narrating violence as "the next step."

The phrase "civilizational clash" is a high-level abstraction that smooths out blood and politics into a grand pattern. Pair it with "organized religions" and you get a neat, almost bureaucratic cast list: blocs, institutions, identities with flags. That's the subtext Douglas is prodding. Once you speak of religions as organized civilizational units, you invite thinking in terms of boundaries, purity, contamination, and collective threat - exactly the symbolic machinery religions (and nations) often mobilize. Her quiet implication is that these categories don't just describe conflict; they can manufacture it by teaching publics and policymakers what to expect, and whom to fear.

Context matters: Douglas wrote amid late-20th-century anxieties about modernity's supposed secular endpoint, and on the cusp of "clash" rhetoric that would dominate post-Cold War commentary. Her intent is to puncture the seduction of big, tidy historical scripts and to remind readers that "human history" isn't a staircase; it's a story we keep rewriting, sometimes with catastrophic incentives.