People say Britain is ungovernable. The challenges are too big, the job of running the country impossible, and six prime ministers in ten years is offered as proof. The usual responses stay inside that diagnosis. We need better people, better coordination, better data, a clearer plan. Each assumes the system can already see what it needs to do and is simply failing to do it well enough.
There is a prior question the talent argument skips. What if some of the work a country needs is not being done badly but is not housed anywhere at all? Not a role performed by the wrong person, but a function absent from the architecture by construction, because no one ever built it in.
Consider what holds a complex society together. Below the level of any particular ministry or agency there has to be something that integrates: something that weighs which timescale matters for a given decision, which losses are acceptable, what the whole is for. This is not the work of any single institution. It sits above all of them and takes them as its object. It asks what each layer is constituted not to see. Call it the integrating function. When it is working you do not notice it, because it shows up only as decisions that feel proportionate and timely. Its presence is invisible; only its absence is felt, as drift, churn, and the sense that nobody is steering.
For most of European history that function was supplied automatically, and at no cost, by a shared religious frame. The sociologist Peter Berger called it the sacred canopy: an overarching account of what mattered and why, which made the social order feel objective rather than arbitrary and gave every institution beneath it a place in a larger whole. Émile Durkheim, earlier, had described the same thing as religion’s real social work, integration, and named what its breakdown produces: anomie, the condition in which shared norms no longer orient anyone. The canopy did the integrating for free. No ministry had to convene it, fund it, or staff it. It was simply the background against which everything else made sense.
The canopy is gone. That is not a complaint and not a call to rebuild it; the loss is real and, for many reasons, not to be mourned wholesale. But the work it did has not gone away. What has happened is that a society inherited a full set of functional institutions and no organ above them doing the integrating that the canopy used to supply as a background condition. The slot is empty. And because an integrating function is invisible when it is present, its absence does not announce itself as a missing organ. It is experienced instead as the country being hard to run, the problems being too large, the office being impossible. Ungovernability is the felt shape of the empty slot. It is the modern, secular form of Durkheim’s anomie, dressed up as a complaint about scale.
This reframes the resilience question that sits underneath so much current anxiety about preparedness and risk. The instinct is to fund more expertise, draw a clearer blueprint, appoint the right specialists. But appointing subject matter experts is not the same as becoming a resilient society, because the structural question, what the whole can ask, weigh, and hold together, is upstream of the knowledge question and expertise alone cannot reach it. This is the argument set out in the-governance-of-resilience. A country can be rich in experts and still have nowhere that the integrating work is done.
The honest conclusion is uncomfortable. The integrating function now has to be performed deliberately, as conscious structural work, rather than received as an inheritance. There is no automatic supply to fall back on. Whatever fills the slot, and the most promising candidate is something like practical wisdom, judgment about what the right thing is in a particular situation, exercised across the whole rather than within any part, it will have to be built and maintained on purpose. The danger is rebuilding a canopy: a single thick frame powerful enough to integrate is also powerful enough to capture and ossify. The task is the harder one of doing the integrating work without erecting the monolith. That is the real shape of the move from-optimised-to-resilient asks of a society, not more capability inside the existing frame, but the deliberate construction of the function the frame used to give away.
Further reading:
↳ the-governance-of-resilience: why structure is upstream of expertise in any resilient organisation.
Garden notes
- the-governance-of-resilience — the integrating function is the society-scale version of the structural question that expertise alone cannot answer.
- from-optimised-to-resilient — building the integrating function deliberately is what the shift toward resilience actually requires.
- separated-knowledge — the same pattern inside organisations: those who can see are cut off from those who can act.
- frame-failure — ungovernability as the felt symptom of a frame that no longer fits, mistaken for a problem of scale.