CHAPTER VI
At the beginning of this study it was said that a definition of social work was in demand for practical use. We have developed a definition which seems to hold good as far as it goes. We have said that social work includes all voluntary attempts to extend benefits in response to a need, which are concerned with social relationships and which avail themselves of scientific knowledge and employ scientific methods. It remains to test whether this is sufficiently descriptive and sufficiently definitive to be of any practical use. Is it inclusive enough to allow social work to claim all its legitimate functions and exclusive enough to rescue it from unreasonable demands? These things can only be tested by trying it out in discussion. It is therefore the purpose of this chapter to attempt such a trial by assuming that social work is no more and no less than the definition indicates and requiring it, on this representation, to run the gauntlet of familiar criticism.
Up to the present time social work has not been the subject of much serious analytical comment. It has been too inchoate for that. But a sort of guerilla warfare of criticism pursues it in private conversation, on public platforms and in the obiter dicta of current literature. The criticisms are of three principal sorts, those which say that what it does is somehow unworthy, those which say it does too much and those which say it does too little; or, more fully stated, those which charge it with an unwholesome interest in wanting to play providence to other people, those which think it is attempting something in defiance of the laws of nature and those which scorn it for tinkeringwith abuses which should be fallen upon and annihilated.
In the first group may be classed the view of people who find the world well enough as it is and think that social workers stir up hornets’ nests from sheer meddlesomeness and love of power. As this belief never survives any considerable acquaintance with social work or any but very provincial knowledge of the world it need not be discussed. More considerable is the criticism of those who object to social work because they think that to make demands in the interest of other people is patronizing or sentimental or both. They think that the people might possibly ask very different things of life from those which the social worker asks for them; that if the social worker wishes to help them he should confine himself to seconding their motions; that an outsider and mere witness of an abuse who has never felt its weight is not the one to draw up its indictment or to prescribe a remedy. But their objection is not altogether on these grounds. Even when social work makes the same demands as its clients have made for themselves the irreconcilables continue to denounce it for undue interference. Some of them, to be sure, think that while self-respecting people are asking their plain rights in their own name and that of justice social work makes it easy for the community to neglect their demands and yet salve its conscience by supporting such benefactions as it finds convenient. But this last belongs with the next group of criticisms and must be answered along with them. We are for the moment concerned only with the strange but apparently rooted belief that there must be something spurious about a movement in which people are not speaking for themselves.
It is evident that even people who commend social work, often do so patronizingly as though it were something not to be taken very seriously because it is not self-supporting and cannot claim the great, humdrum, unchallengeable sanction of self interest. Moreover people in border-line occupationswhen referred to as social workers will repudiate the name as though it might discredit their work by taking it out of the busy wholesome world of fair exchanges and putting it in a world of patronage and possible hypocrisy. Men advocating industrial welfare work are commonly not satisfied to claim that it pays for itself and will be no expense to the business that installs it, but assert with an air of rescuing it from suspicion, that it results in a net profit to the man who puts it in and is therefore “not sentiment” but “good business.” Those who, though themselves not originally industrial workers, go into the labor movement, very frequently pour scorn on the social worker while feeling themselves safe from corrupting condescension in a company that is only asking for its own rights.
The element of justice in the charge does not need to be pointed out. Bernard Shaw has warned us against doing unto others as we would have them do unto us for fear they may not like it. But for members of a gregarious species some tolerance of ministration seems unavoidable. Within the labor movement itself those with a margin of time and energy are constantly acting in the interest of those who have none. We all begin life with several years of sheer dependence on the altruism of our elders and if we live long enough come again to some form of dependence. As we look back on the slow mitigation of man’s inhumanity to man there seems at least good ground for putting the burden of proof on those who scorn all benevolent interference. We have already noticed that what passes in one generation for special interest in the fortunes of others seems to a later time plain obligation.
“Almost every law on the statute books,” says a historian, in reference to protective legislation, “was forced upon the legislature by the disconcerting zeal of a few enthusiasts. We marvel at the slight concessions to humanity which satisfied them, we should rather admirethe originality which led them to denounce cruel and oppressive conditions which had satisfied the legislature and against which their victims had not always turned.”[61]There is the crux of the matter—the victims will not, cannot always turn. In the palmy days of utilitarianism when the opposition to doing for others was felt with the mighty impact of which the present vague distrust is the last faint ripple fading across the public mind, Mill himself will be found writing that although it can be stated as a general rule “that most persons take a juster and more intelligent view of their own interest, and of the means of promoting it, than can either be prescribed to them by a general enactment of the legislature, or pointed out in the particular case by a public functionary” nevertheless “there is no difficulty in perceiving some very large and conspicuous exceptions to it.”[62]And among these exceptions he proceeds to enumerate protection of persons incapable of judging or acting for themselves whether from defective intelligence or immaturity, and the protection offered by labor legislation and by public charity. Elsewhere he also remarks, “Those who most need to be made wiser and better commonly desire it least, and if they desired it would be incapable of finding the way to it by their own lights.”[63]
It could probably be shown that the great bulk of social work acts in the interest of people unable to speak for themselves or vaguely wanting something they cannot find “the way to by their own lights.” But victimization and helplessness are entirely relative matters and social work is prepared boldly to extend benefits wherever they are wanted.
Science has now laid a broad road and is leading the plodding crowd where the keen feet of Pegasus have always carried the subtle minded, whatever the contemporary creed. “Darwin” writes a popular social psychologist “intheDescent of Man(1871) first enunciated the true doctrine of human motives, and showed how we must proceed, relying chiefly upon the comparative and natural history method, if we would arrive at a fuller understanding of them. * * * Social Psychology has to show how, given the native propensities and capacities of the individual human mind, all the complex mental life of societies is shaped by them and in turn reacts upon the course of their development and operation in the individual. * * * The fundamental problem of social psychology is moralization of the individual by the society into which he is born as a creature in which the non-moral and purely egoistic tendencies are so much stronger than any altruistic tendencies.”[64]That is to say the problem which social psychology must solve is the problem of how this moralization is brought about. The significance of such doctrine for social work is in its entire discrediting of any naive individualism and its indication that man being an animal that lives not solitary but in groups some form and degree of interdependence is, for him, in the first order of nature. The interests and inclinations corollary to that interdependence are inescapable for him.
If this is the case objection to the social work we have defined could not be “on principle” but must be to special forms of service on specific grounds of inexpediency or because of the manner or quality of the service. Although it is the manner and quality of service which make the social work of any given time and place what it is they are nevertheless incidentals entirely separable from its nature and principles. Objections are brought on specific grounds of expediency by those who claim that social work does too much and these objections will be considered in their turn. Objection is also made to the manner and quality of the social workers’ services and it is this objection which really animates the charge against the altruism of social work.
This study is an analysis of the nature and functions, not the performance of social work. It must, however, consider a general objection to the nature and quality of the social workers’ services which so often passes for an objection to social work itself.
This vague distrust of social work which we have just been considering, this dislike of it as something sentimental or undemocratic, is really a dislike of these incidentals which social work has a perfect right to disclaim if it can. It is a moral and aesthetic repulsion, an aversion for the sort of thing which social work sometimes seems to be.
It is social case work that is most open not only to misunderstanding but to abuse. In it social work is especially liable to the defects of its qualities. People who take for granted the social work that is done in connection with the courts, the schools, institutions dealing with defectives and in many other connections without troubling to consider what it is they are accepting and even relying upon, will, because of what they think social case work to be, pour scorn upon “uplifters” and social workers generally.
The social case workers’ professional contribution to a situation consists in doing whatever she does in conscious relation to a general situation, in the ease of her contacts and the range of her resources.[65]There is no limit to the knowledge of a situation which it may be useful for her to have. A speaker addressing the first students in the New York School of Philanthropy is on record as referring to “investigation” as a necessary evil which must be bravely faced and telling them they must always make it plain that “the person in distress has asked you to help him and that youmeanto help him, to help his soul and not only to feed his miserable body, and that you cannot help him unless you doknow all abouthim.”[66]Of course that is to give an ell when an inch is asked for—and an ell of very different stuff. The statement was made twenty-five years agoand is not given here as typical either of this time or that, but as an instance of the sort of thing which is said and passed on and resented, all in good faith. Obviously the more the case worker knows, provided she can understand it, the better she can do her work. But because of the very real requirement to employ trained workers and the rapid expansion of the profession young people are employed as fast as the schools will grind them out. And when social work lets loose on difficult situations people disqualified for dealing with them by their youth or inexperience or native incapacity or all three it must expect its reputation to suffer. But, taken at the best, there is great presumption in the attempt of one mortal life to analyze and prescribe for the totality of another. A too nice matching up of the inferential motive with the act to be accounted for, a too meticulous testing for the qualities presumed necessary for a certain degree of self direction, entail a veritable invasion of one life by another. It is hard for the analytical to remember that any explanation, no matter how true and inclusive, is only one thread drawn from a web. The generalizations which we can make after taking cognizance of a certain number of instances are just as much and as little applicable to any given life as the probability tables of an insurance company. They are illuminating as guides to general expectation but will not closely correspond to any particular case. There cannot be any authoritative, objective determination of the proper elements and relationships of life, and any attempt to arrange for the life of another as a whole is profane. The clearest sighted come often enough into unlit passages of their own destiny where they must grope forward in bewilderment and a kind of awed respect for things which could go unsuspected and yet all along be “nearer to them than breathing, closer than hands and feet.” Who then shall interpret another?
Yet life must be met with a certain hardihood. For theconspicuously defective we know that self direction is impossible, and for the intolerably troublesome we accept coercion, but in the case of the merely dependent there are delicate lines to be drawn. Social work knows perfectly well that it is possible to degenerate into “substituting one neurosis for another.” Hamlet, thrusting on the bewildered courtier the flute which that courtier could not play, spoke for many an inarticulate protestor, “Why, look you now, how unworthy a thing you make of me! You would play upon me you would seem to know my stops; you would pluck out the heart of my mystery; you would sound me from my lowest note to the top of my compass: and there is much music, excellent voice in this little organ; yet cannot you make it speak. ’sblood do you think I am easier to be played on than a pipe?”[67]
Lincoln is credited with the observation that the Lord never made the man who was good enough to have power over another man and, by its option of giving or withholding benefits, social work undoubtedly holds its beneficiaries very much in its power, not to mention the cases in which it has actual guardianship, legal or otherwise. A German social worker accustomed to the strict German notions of regulation could yet say after a study of American social work, “an individual is never so absolutely at the mercy of an administration as when he is the beneficiary of a relief system.”[68]It is the social worker who is the champion of individual rights all down the line from insisting on discrimination among the men referred to en masse as “the criminal” to rescuing orphan children from the uniformity of plaid dresses all of a length. But who shall rescue the beneficiaries of social work?
Is it any wonder that people sometimes shudder at what social workers take upon themselves? But these are only the risks incident to great opportunity. If some socialworkers run a policy into the ground, if they have neither imagination, reverence or a sense of humor, that is the fault of human nature and not the fault of social work. There are doctors who prescribe for cases they do not understand and fail to save the patients, there are dishonest and even addle-headed lawyers who defeat justice, and there are ministers of religion who are hypocrites, but their existence does not utterly discredit their professions. The quotations from the national conference and elsewhere must have made it clear that this sort of personal imposition and finessing in control are, if nothing else, too poor game to attract the main energies of social work. These have large issues to absorb them and the effect of the scientific methods and scientific knowledge which our definition makes essential is to encourage a robust interest in things clearly knowable and an attitude attentive and curious rather than dictatorial and inquisitive. Social work being the lineal descendant of charity has the family weaknesses and, perhaps even beyond its deserts, the family reputation. But the one question for anyone willing to do it justice is whether these weaknesses are characteristic of its present phase or fading hang-overs from the charity undisciplined by science. The records of past munificence with their evidence of interest in giving as a means of grace for the giver, of indifference regarding the supposed beneficiaries, of wholesale prescriptions of what is proper for “the poor,” of breaking up of families, imposition of uniform labor and total disregard of private claims must be either unknown or forgotten by people who think a decay of neighborly respect and an inclination to regiment the dependent have been produced by the innovations of scientific social work.
So far we have been trying to get at and answer the rather vague charges of those who think social work unworthily employed. Clearer indictments are brought by the three groups who want us to turn from the defeatedand let them go under. The least extreme of these simply points out that life unfolds in terms of alternatives and the time, the skill, the substance and interest lavished by social work on the incompetent might have given opportunity to baulked ability. Of course incompetence and ability are relative matters and some forms of social work could make out a case for themselves as engaged on the task these critics would prefer, but it is easy to see the general bearing of this criticism and by our definition social work is committed to the very concern for the disadvantaged with which they charge it. But the definition also stipulated for the use of scientific knowledge and methods and once you have social work and social science playing into one another’s hands you can answer even the baldest utilitarians on their own grounds. The effort to help where help is most needed has been to the social work of our definition a road to prevention of abuses which affect competent and incompetent alike, a means to better understanding and control of our social organization. In social as in other forms of science the normal is often only to be understood after observation of the abnormal. Moreover, the really imperative services of social work are evidently forgotten by these critics as well as by the second group who would say hands off to social work. These imperative services can be indicated for both groups at once.
This second group are opposed to social work, not as a mere waste of means which might be better employed, but as an actual menace. They think it thwarts the action of the salutary principle of nature by which the “fittest” survive their less “fit” brethren. The tacit assumption behind this view is that if all social work were suspended tomorrow, vigor and capacity would have pre-eminent survival value and the unfit would be eliminated and the race purged of an undesirable inheritance strain.
The race is to the swift and the battle to the strong, but in modern life, even where there is no social work, thedefeated are not forced clear off the stage with any degree of promptitude. Complete dismissal comes only by the arrow that flieth by noonday or the pestilence that walketh in darkness and our modern versions of these strike the weak and the strong in a ratio which it would be hard to compute. War and industrial accidents take not the worst but the best and some of our most destructive diseases take, fairly indiscriminately, any who are exposed to them or their predisposing conditions. Meanwhile, what is there to extinguish the unfit? Though in a sense defeated they continue to live on and they leave progeny. Even without social work they would not starve or freeze to death in numbers sufficient to have the minutest effect upon the quality of the race.
The man of sub-normal intelligence, of bad nervous organization, of specific defect even, can, in most modern communities keep alive by his own efforts. He will drag on, abysmally incompetent, indolent, badly behaved or ill. He may irregularly rent a shelter which other men would refuse, he will inevitably do his little bit to demoralize the labor market and the work he from time to time takes up and he may, for one reason or another, go for awhile to prison. His demands on the almshouse we will omit as it would probably in this connection count as social work. He can do our work badly, put the cost of his keep on the community if he goes to prison, make our pockets or our persons unsafe, if he happens to be that way inclined, spread disease and even, for a consideration, vote. What is to be gained by leaving this poor creature to his own devices and the haphazard propagation of his species? From a biological point of view, nothing at all, and his running amuck is a nuisance and a menace. What could social work do? From a biological point of view, also nothing. If indeed the man were so far defective that it could confine him to an institution it might in that way prevent his leaving a family but this simple precaution the biological criticswould probably arrange for through some other agency. But social work might greatly limit his troublesomeness.
One can only conclude that those who advocate leaving the unfit to their own destruction do not know, as social work knows, how slow that destruction is going to be, how costly and troublesome to the community in which it is taking place, how many people may be, first and last, involved in it and, above all, how little likely it is to culminate before the unfit man has left children to succeed him.
Such glaring cases of unfitness are however not typical of the sort with which social work most often deals. More typical is such mild cherishing of unfitness as the securing of eye-glasses for a nearsighted child. Would it do any good to leave him without glasses, unable to see the blackboard at school, considered a blockhead, unhappy and defiant and growing up at odds with the world? He would be no whit less likely to have a family of shortsighted children.
Since the relative security of civilized life allows the unfit, left to their own devices, to live long enough to demoralize their community and perpetuate their strain, a humane guardianship supplied by social work, with an eye to prevention and all the possibilities of the social situation, is simply the safeguarding of a group in which spontaneous elimination has ceased to be sufficiently expeditious for the public safety.
The last of those who would say “hands off” believe that the needs to which social work at present ministers are chargeable to a few major abuses in our economic system which could and would be removed by swift revolutionary measures were it not for false hopes of gradual reform—hopes which social work helps to keep alive. They think that if the distress caused by “the present system” were left unrelieved people would be shocked into summary abolition of the system. The chances of concerted action onany such program are so infinitesimal that it is difficult to regard such a proposal as anything but a mere “talking point” of propaganda. The abuses of the “present system” are too hideously great for us to risk any momentary discontinuance of their relief without a very certain guarantee of the desired results.
And when it comes to that we can but remember that the blackest nights of human oppression have not led to the brightest mornings of human brotherhood, though there has been many a fine gesture of uprising. What Mr. Wells remarks in his “Outline of History” apropos of the results of the French Revolution seems to be true of any attempt to emancipate life at a blow. “When these things of the ancient regime had vanished, it seemed as if they had never mattered. * * * the immense promise and air of a new world with which the Revolution had come remained unfulfilled.
“Yet, after all, this wave of revolution had realized nearly everything that had been clearly thought out before it. It was not failing for want of impetus but for want of finished ideas. Many things that had oppressed mankind were swept away forever. Now that they were swept away it became apparent how unprepared men were for the creative opportunities this clearance gave them. And periods of revolution are periods of action; in them men reap the harvest of ideas that have grown during phases of interlude, and they leave the fields cleared for a season of new growth, but they cannot suddenly produce ripened new ideas to meet an unanticipated riddle.”[69]Despite the years of thinking that have elapsed since 1789, the Russian revolution finds itself in the same case. The present party that has attempted its clean sweep of previous organization is rich in coherence and intention but not in organization and expedients.
Much of what social work is now doing is developingexpedients of social practice equally applicable and equally necessary under any form of government. The question of whether social work as such should occupy itself with the development of such expedients or with revolutionary projects belongs not with the discussion of its overdoing, but of its doing too little. The advocates of revolution say “hands off” but they really despise social work for temporizing.
To those who charge it with temporizing, the third and last group of its critics, social work listens very gravely. They touch it where its conscience is tender. The first group, those who charge it with unworthy patronage and intrusion do not touch its principle at all. It knows better than any one else the sort of thing that may easily be done in its name, knows that its recruits are unregenerate human beings who will have to learn to put aside personal for scientific curiosity and resist their enormous temptations to tyrannize. It knows that the things for which that first group condemns it are things which will always continue to menace it but things which, on the whole, it is growing away from. The second group, those who charge it with interfering with natural selection and wasting opportunity on lame ducks do not shake its conviction. It knows perfectly well that not social work but the abundance of mere food and shelter and the ingrained sympathy or solidarity, or what you will, of civilized man is what prevents the elimination of the unfit and that these unfit can only be made innocuous and self-supporting by methods and arrangements worked out by the intelligence of the especially fit.
But when this third group tell social work that it is not extending benefits but in the long run delaying their extension, when they tell it that there is a dragon “privilege” which can grow new heads of offence faster than it can cut them off, when they say that social work must be either utterly entangled in its own red tape or corrupted by theflesh pots of Egypt not to see that it is simply compounding with the mammon of unrighteousness to allow the continuance of privilege and abuse, then indeed social work itself is troubled. It has known all along that those are wrong who say it is a mistake to serve the disadvantaged, but to be told that it—social work—is not serving them, that is a very different matter. The charges are two, first that it is selfish and pharisaical, and second that it is practically bought for the defense of privilege. The first complain of
“The organized charity scrimped and icedIn the name of a cautious statistical Christ.”[70]
“The organized charity scrimped and icedIn the name of a cautious statistical Christ.”[70]
“The organized charity scrimped and icedIn the name of a cautious statistical Christ.”[70]
“The organized charity scrimped and iced
In the name of a cautious statistical Christ.”[70]
Social work is confessed by the definition, to be “cautious” and “statistical.” Used in this opprobrious sense the words make a reproach that could scarcely be more bitter, but who would want a doctor to pour out without stint the strichnia needed by his patient’s heart? The development of methods, standards and technique has been referred to in these pages as matter only for congratulation. But obviously these have their dangers like everything else. Our childish humanity has been tempted, from the days of the medicine man on, rather to claim the confidence of a gullible public by the impressiveness of its ceremonies than arduously to achieve that confidence by the excellence of its performance. The temptation to aim at an impression is especially strong in the case of social work because it often does for people the sort of things that friends are at the same time sporadically attempting. When with every intention of producing efficiency social work tries to establish “standards” it again has to risk the shift of emphasis from the work to the technical measurement and the resulting tendency to attempt what can be put through in good form instead of what most needs to be done.
But the greatest resentment is probably not caused by these lapses, which social workers themselves know better than outsiders. “Organized charity” did not, as it is soeasy for those who know only the present to assume, originate suspicious scrutiny. Charity was “cautious” in the sense of the bitter couplet long before the present organized charity movement. The fierce old English poor law took no chances on “impostors”[71]and the dread of them by the private charities of the continent in the sixteenth century has already been referred to in these pages. It is, of course, easy to see the necessity for “investigation” when charity is on a large scale. But it is easier to resent for oneself, or one’s friends, the mortification of being suspect; and to many people “organized charity” has never meant anything more than an attempt to prevent overlapping and imposture. But in the scientific charity movement precaution soon sank into insignificance beside the more positive purpose of learning enough about a situation to tackle it intelligently. This is a trifle harder to understand and even easier to resent. When we want help we usually have a pretty definite notion of just what help we need, we are in a touchy mood to begin with, and unless we are very nice people indeed we resent any questioning of our preference. It is a matter of common knowledge that those who do not appreciate the difficulty of the doctor’s task and the time required for cures drift from one dispensary to another and try physician after physician in search of one who will treat their troubles as they think they should be treated and give them the relief for which suffering dares not cease to hope. What wonder if a yet greater dissatisfaction is felt with the deliberateness of the social worker. And if, as we have said in the definition, he is to proceed by “scientific” methods he must be as “cautious” and “statistical” as the doctor.
But granting the need of caution in procedure it is shocking and repellant, on the face of it, that this organized charity should make the throbbing woes of a fellow creature the subject of dehumanized records. It is bad enough thatpeople should be required to strip their predicament bare, exhibit all their helplessness and violate reticence to expound whatever can “throw light on the situation”—but why must it be recorded? But it is shocking enough to learn that someone we care for is known as a certain sort of case in a hospital and yet we have now so far appreciated medical exigencies as to accept it as a necessity. In other matters also we may come to realize that there is no impertinence in impersonal treatment for purposes of serviceable classification, and for all classification the prerequisite is records.
A final source of misunderstanding is the double nature of the social worker’s task. Not only in relief work but in other lines as well he is not free to do as he would, he cannot always command the means. He can decide what he thinks would best be done but then he has to consider what sort of approximation to that best the resources of his association or community allow. The Webbs, in outlining a proposed reorganization of the English relief system, say that “Nothing has contributed so much to make the visits of the Poor Law Relieving Officer odious as themixtureof his inquiries—as to the sickness of the person who is ill, or the lunacy of the person of unsound mind, and at the same time, as to the means of the family and as to what relations could be made to contribute.”[72]This stewardship for public or contributed funds and for doing things quite irrelevant to any intention of social work do more than anything else to make it seem “scrimped.”
Social work, then, may take heart of grace. It is, once again, being condemned chiefly on misunderstanding and for the rest on its mere shortcomings. All human undertakings must expect that and try to amend and carry on.
It may summon its courage and meet the last charge, the one that seems to make it most uncomfortable, a charge that not only says it bails the sea with a sieve andlocks the door when the horse is out of the stable, but goes farther and ascribes motives—“the social worker is called an apologist for the status quo; he is called a little brother of the rich; he is accused of taking tainted money;”[73]—and why? Because social work continues in what its critics consider “remedial” work instead of addressing itself to wholesale and summary prevention.
Whose fault is that? Let any one who blames it on social work turn to the reports of the national conference. Let him turn to the “Survey.” He will find no lack of interest in prevention. The fact is that social work is paid for by voluntary subscriptions, philanthropic foundations, and state appropriations. So far all these sources of support, the potential representatives of the people in the legislature no less than wealthy donors, are more accessible to an appeal for relief of existing misery than to an appeal for the prevention of possible catastrophes. This ties the hands of social work even in the simple matters in which it might alone do more “preventive work.” But social work cannot alone, in any but a secondary sense, prevent the situations it is called upon to relieve. It works prevention as hard as it can and puts it up to the community in plain terms, but the situations which, at our present stage of progress, largely occupy its services could only be prevented by a living wage and regular employment, work that would not poison or exhaust the worker, sanitary and decent housing, clean milk, and so on through the list of those simple requisites of a civilized life which are now inaccessible to a large part of our population. Social work cannot give employers the will or the ability to pay a living wage; it cannot provide the masses with decent housing and unadulterated food nor, all at once, with a corresponding standard and habit of living. And if it should stop all it is doing now, in order to devote itself to prevention, neglected children would grow up unhealthy and vicious, the feeble-mindedwould multiply and every calamity of today become a fruitful source of multiplied disaster tomorrow. One might as well ask that all physicians cease treating from day to day the many diseases that afflict us, the better to devote themselves to a wholesale campaign of prevention. The social work of our definition has its own specific work to do from day to day. It must, like medicine, care for the handicapped in each generation and prevent the spread of contagion while it uses the margin of its energies for prevention and progress.
Social workas we have described it, is not synonymous with social reform. It has no more responsibility for reform on “general principles” than has any other profession or calling. That it should ever be thought to have is a tribute to its thoroughness and convincing proof of its devotion to prevention.
We are told, as though to settle the case against social work, that there are even social workers “who, while they may not say it publicly, do not hesitate to say privately that they regard social work as a mere “palliative,” and while they get their living from it, their real hopes are pinned to the coming social revolution.”[74]The personal immorality of anyone who would continue to get a living from a calling he believed to be sailing under false colors is not our business, but, if social work is what our definition says, there is no reason why any social worker need hesitate to say, either privately or with all the publicity he can command, that his hopes are pinned to the coming social revolution, or to the effects of New Thought or the Seventh Day Advent or anything else to which he may have happened, according to his lights and temperament, to have pinned them.
Social work attempts to serve persons in need of help; it shepherds the rear of the social procession; it cares for the casualties; it also claims opportunity for the unprivilegedand asserts the rights of the individual lost in the mass. In so doing it finds itself effecting progress in the many ways already discussed. They are usually indirect ways. These critics assume that it could induce progress directly by an attempt to bring about radical social changes that would do away with the need for its services. They quote against it Tolstoy’s indictment of our social system—“The present position we, the educated and well-to-do classes, occupy is that of the Old Man of the Sea, riding on the poor man’s back, only, unlike the Old Man of the Sea, we are sorry for the poor man, very sorry. And we will do almost anything for the poor man’s relief; we will not only supply him with food sufficient for him to keep on his legs, but will provide him with cooling draughts concocted on strictly scientific principles; we will teach and instruct him and point out to him the beauties of the landscape; we will discourse sweet music to him and give him lots of good advice. Yes we will do almost anything for the poor man, anything but get off his back.”[75]
Such a picture makes everyone unhappy to reflect on and in face of it thoughtful social workers take stock of their position. But they can only conclude that to accuse social work per se of insincerity and temporizing, of clinging to a snug berth, because it does not attempt to end this intolerable situation by revolution is to imagine it both greater and less than it is. We have already seen that it is only a calling like others with a day’s work of its own. Reforms merely free it from old duties and open the gates to new ones and there is no reason to suppose that changes the most radical would do away with the need of it or the human impulse that perpetually recreates it. Whether revolutionary methods would free us from present abuses and confront us with a new set but, as it were, upon a higher level, is, of course an open question and a relevant one. But it is a question of pure expediency facing the social worker of each generation as it faces anyone else andit in no way involves the integrity or the permanency of the function of social work.
The alternatives in the interest of which social work is by these critics condemned are the labor movement and social revolution. But these are hardly genuine alternatives. Both of them have the allegiance of people in many callings, but each provides a day’s work to a comparatively small number of organizers and other workers. There is no logical reason why a social worker should not be active in the service of either or both and yet remain in his calling, as the bricklayer, lawyer, or laborer may.
The labor movement and social revolution and social work are three things of three entirely different kinds. The labor movement is a tide in human affairs. It is the projection in practical issues of certain interpretations and ideals of life. Social revolution is a cataclysmic expedient for precipitating, in finished form, readjustments which the labor movement and certain other influences tend gradually and adaptively to effect. The one is a great movement now under way, the other a vast enterprise or a vast dream. For them is spilt the martyr blood that is the seed of every church militant. They throw down a gauntlet; they raise a banner; they stir our hearts. But why not let the social worker also plod on with a good conscience and a hope for his labors.
For while the tired waves, vainly breaking,Seem here no painful inch to gain,Far back through creeks and inlets making,Comes silent, flooding in, the main.And not by eastern windows only,When daylight comes, comes in the light;In front the sun climbs slow, how slowly.But westward, look! the land is bright.[76]
For while the tired waves, vainly breaking,Seem here no painful inch to gain,Far back through creeks and inlets making,Comes silent, flooding in, the main.And not by eastern windows only,When daylight comes, comes in the light;In front the sun climbs slow, how slowly.But westward, look! the land is bright.[76]
For while the tired waves, vainly breaking,Seem here no painful inch to gain,Far back through creeks and inlets making,Comes silent, flooding in, the main.
For while the tired waves, vainly breaking,
Seem here no painful inch to gain,
Far back through creeks and inlets making,
Comes silent, flooding in, the main.
And not by eastern windows only,When daylight comes, comes in the light;In front the sun climbs slow, how slowly.But westward, look! the land is bright.[76]
And not by eastern windows only,
When daylight comes, comes in the light;
In front the sun climbs slow, how slowly.
But westward, look! the land is bright.[76]
Social work is a group of callings representing a certainfunction of civilized society whatever form that society may take. Its nearest analogy is educational work. Whatever form society may assume education seems likely to retain the functions of rendering available the experience and conclusions of the past and developing the capacities of each generation as it comes on. Similarly we can ascribe to social work, under whatever system of society it may be conducted, the functions of completing inadequacy, extending benefits and rescuing the individual from the category. In a community where no one was poor or out of work, where abundance of pure food and decent housing were available for all, where wholesome recreation was attainable and attractive, and physical and mental hygiene as much a matter of course as school attendance, the tasks of the social worker would not be what they are now; they would be changed beyond our imagining. But they might still be present. In some distant sunny noonday of a healthy happy world it may even be possible that the supernormal will need rescue from victimizing by the mass. Even today social work is concerned for the superior child handicapped by a public school routine that forces him to keep step with the average and the dull.
What is overlooked by those who fail to see this permanency in social work is that it has a day’s work of its own. Since its object is personal service, it tends to focus in the present and since that personal service is primarily the relief of need, it is relative to the standard of the times. “Radicalism is not an absolute but a relative school of thought. It stands for the things that the government is not ready to do. Hence it is that no government is really radical.”[77]Social work is radical in the sense that it proffers services that have not yet become duties. It is by the same token that it is also relative and will, despite changes in social organization, continue to relieve new needs, to extend new benefits and to rescue individuals from newly-felt forms of regimentation.
That social work, as a calling, does not make itself tributary to any one social philosophy casts no suspicion on its integrity. Nor is it strange that the majority of social workers individually should continue to hold, on the subject of revolution, the opinions of the majority of their fellow citizens. That social workers should become so much interested in their own methods of relief as to forget the prime object of all their system, that they should become so devoted to the success of particular undertakings as to be unobservant of other and perhaps better attempts to relieve needs is a reproach to the guilty persons but it no more touches the principles and functions of social work than similar faults of practitioners in other lines condition the presumptive functions of their respective callings. Were this a discussion of social work in practice it would be necessary to consider the degree to which its practitioners have realized its possibilities. But a study of the nature and functions of social work such as this purports to be would lose itself in confusion in any attempt to determine precisely how far instances have run true to type. The teaching offered by the schools and the interests reflected in the National Conference prove beyond a doubt the direction of its main stream.
The charge we have just been discussing is the last of the major accusations commonly brought against social work, and the definition we have been using has now been shown to describe a social work that can meet its critics squarely and retain a claim to a function of its own in social economy and a certain character and integrity.
It is one of those human activities which are pursued, as we say, for their own sake. It can be justified on utilitarian grounds but the justification never amounts to more than permission to follow our inclination untroubled. Yet, unlike other such activities, unlike recreation, art and learning, it does not reach out to life at its happiest and most conscious, its fullest and finest, but seeks, “Rather thescorned—the rejected—the men hemmed in by the spears.” Social work lifts burdens, fills needs, extends benefits.