CASW
National Award Presentation
Banquet Address
“Thinking
and Doing”
By
Gayle Gilchrist James, MSW, RSW (
President, IFSW
Associate Professor,
Friday 26 June 1992
7:00 p.m.
CASW Delegate Assembly
Delta Brunswick Hotel
24-28 June, 1992
President Dewhurst... Members of the CASW Board... Delegates to the
Assembly... Presidents and Executive Directors of Provincial and Territorial
Associations... Colleagues All...
and friends.
First of all, thank-you for inviting me to “come home”… and
what a homecoming it is. In whatever part of the world I may speak on behalf of
our colleagues in 54 nations, there is no place from which I welcomed an
invitation... and an award...more than from my own colleagues in
IFSW: BEING PRESIDENT
When I first truly
contemplated in my mind’s eye what it would be like to be president... or
that it was possible, was at the 1988 Alberta Association of Social Workers
(AASW,) annual meeting and conference, in response to their warm reception.
This may seem surprising, given my having declined formal and informal
nominations on three other occasions, and given that I had served 1978 - 1984
as Vice-President for the North American Region (which comprises NASW and
CASW). My “campaign” was largely out of my hands and in the safer
hands of Dick Ramsay, with the costs for posters being borne by two AASW
members: Donna Hamar and Gweneth Gowanlock. In all of this, I learned some
things... and I have some people to thank.
First, I learned that no one comes to this position alone, in the short-haul,
or the long-haul. There are “turning
points.” When I was 28 years old, I was nominated to the CASW National
Board on a motion made by Mary Morrison Davis and Harold Doxsee, of AASW. I
remember it so distinctly because I was so amazed... but not so amazed as to
decline the honour. There have been many other turning points since.., each of
them clear, important, energizing and, yet, in some ways a surprise. The point,
if indeed I am making one with any clarity at all is that events and
opportunities do present themselves but, likewise, one cannot force the fates
to give one what one wants. One has to be simultaneously deeply involved in
one’s existence and, at the same time, curiously detached.
There is one perfect moment when you are named President in front of the
assembled nations, at the opening ceremony of a biennial symposium. It is
perfect because your term all lies out in front of you... and you haven‘t
yet made one mistake. Not one. It is all perfect. The first meeting of the
“new executive” changes that… and you are a social worker in
the trenches, again.
Thirteen year ago, at the Alberta Association’s Annual Meeting, I became
President, and in 1981- 1983 the President of CASW. It is not incorrect to say
that you made me the International President, as well.., and I was grateful for
the presence in
There are so very many of you to whom I am unendingly grateful, for your
involvement in the profession I fell in love with... so many of you who
contributed to my development in ways of which you are probably unaware... and
by thanking a very few, please do not construe that there were not others who
go unmentioned this night. My nearly quarter century of service, if you call it
that, will end soon.
My special thanks go to...
Dr. Albert Rose, University of Toronto Professor Emeritus, Faculty of Social
Work, and a CASW Past President, for persuading me in the Fall of 1965 not to
abandon my M. S. W. and the profession.., to Dr. Bill Kirwin, who believed I
could teach and hired me as an academic... to Gweneth Gowanlock and her
successor, Eugenia Moreno, who showed me what a small national association
could do on the international stage if it had an executive director with
intelligence, purpose, and love.., to Bob Myers, (again) Albert Rose, and Ed
Pennington for forming Myropen Publications and rescuing” our
professional journal, to the great Presidents of CASW, like Don Karst, Dick
Splane, Glenn Drover, Madeleine Rivard-Leduc, Marian Walsh, and Gail MacDougall
whose joint and several commitments to excellence have expanded consistently
CASW’s sphere of influence, to Dick Ramsay, for his capacity, anywhere he
finds himself in the world, to make meaning out of people’s struggles,
including my own, and to John Mould, for the same reasons... and to those
colleagues, named and un-named who, in the practice of their profession, are
among “the disappeared,” the tortured, the persecuted and
prosecuted, the murdered and the missing, in many nations.
And, if it seems to you that my list includes the names of more men than women,
then, I ask you to consider two things:
1) my age and
the period in which I was educated; and
2) that my profession has always had in it androgynous males in good numbers...
and good mentoring is not same-gender specific.
President
Margaret Dewhurst has asked me to talk a bit about what may happen between now
and the Year 2000… about what challenges we face.
So I will talk about our greatest challenge: namely, how we think about
challenges. Our propensity
for cause and effect thinking, our allegiance to the old dictum “Seeing
is believing”... and, in short, our unexamined assumptions, must be
explored. Our minds also must go to what is unseen... we must perceive the
patterns of events (the inter-relationship of events as opposed to drawing a
straight line between two events and attributing causality)...we must learn
that “believing-is-seeing” is the lost half of “seeing-is-believing.”
And, I want to thank Geoffrey York of today’s Globe and Mail for
helping me prepare for this tale (“Poverty to worsen in 1990s: family
breakdown cited as main cause” June 26, 1992, Al & A3). More of this
later.
Finally, I want to argue for the expansion of our person-in-environment
perspective and especially for the expansion of our concept of environment to a
universal one... or, a “universe-full)” one.
“I don’t know if I can
Cry hard enough
For you to hear me now.”
Cat Stevens
Part of this
tale is devoted to explaining the link between what we think and do, as
social workers, and the new physics. We simply cannot do what we do...think the
way we think... and believe what we believe... without taking into account that
science and religion, or science and philosophy, or the physical and the
metaphysical, are headed toward a reunification in this last decade of the 20th
century. How we fight repressive policies depends on our manner of thinking,
not just about those policies, but about everything else in our environment,
and in the universe. This is no time to surrender our perspective on
person/environment transactions. What if the chaos of our lives, our families,
and our social services, our political and economic structures, operates by the
same principles as does chaos in the organic world...and there is a pattern
that we could understand and shape? Is that too much to postulate?
“If at a particular moment, we are in a position where we must choose a particular
model we should probably choose the most dramatic one -- that is, the one that imparts
to the event being studied the greatest possible significance.” (Peck, 1983: 38)“If everything in the universe depends on everything else in a fundamental way, it might
be impossible to get close to a full solution by investigating parts of the problem in
isolation.” (Stephen Hawking, 1988: 11)
There are other
lessons we have “learned” from the so-called “hard
sciences,” about how the world works, and I suggest to you that the
challenge for our profession is to figure out how these principles may be used
in social work. I am not alone in believing that we either make the paradigm
shift or we become a profession that lived for a century and is of interest, in
the 21st century, only to historians of the past cultures (Ramsay, personal
communication, 1989). Paradoxically, we are probably better equipped and better
situated than any other helping profession to make that paradigm shift.
What we see depends a great deal on what we are looking for. As K.C. Cole has
commented, “We assume that if we see a face looking out of a window that
there is a body attached to it...” (Cole, 1985: 66). This is, perhaps, a
startling way to begin to examine our assumptions, and our perspectives.
The perspective we take on a problem... how we perceive it... the assumptions
we hold, will all contribute to the way we self-determine the solutions at
which we arrive. Ivan Illich sounded the warning many years ago when he said
that we can abandon certain solutions “as we let go of the illusions that
made them necessary.” What he means is that we can surrender some of our
problem-solving behaviours if we change our definition of the nature of the
problem, or our relationship to it, or its relationship to us. For example, we
make submissions to the Minister, Health and Welfare
As westerners in the world, and as North Americans, we are reasonably adept at
cause and effect thinking and, indeed, have made some progress with this
thinking style that we learned in our higher (and lower) educational
institutions, a style we inherited largely from Newton. We know how to
systematically attack a problem; attacking it systemically gives us a great deal more difficulty. Our
mechanistic view of the world derives from
And while
The next great mind, and one of our time, is that of Stephen W. Hawking, born on
the anniversary of Galileo’s death. He holds
We have come to an understanding of quantum physics through the vehicle of
general systems theory. General systems theory has taught us about the
inter-relationship of parts and wholes...that the principles of organization,
reciprocity, complementarity, interdependence, and integration of interlocking
parts and wholes are inherent aspects of any living system (Finlay, Freeman,
and Stolar, CASSW: 1974). What this means in real life, is that there is
complementarity between the parts of a whole system, and that you cannot
“fiddle” with one part without its effect being felt on another
part of the system. You cannot de-index family allowance rates, and then
“cancel” that program, and not expect children to show up at the
chain of food banks across
And while it may be true that we can “borrow” energy (as defined by
Einstein, Hawking, and others) from other parts of our physical universe, we
who are charged with looking after the interests of clients have tended to look
at “borrowing” energy only from the social systems of one
country--Canada. By this, one means that we have viewed energy--not incorrectly--as
money, ideas, and people, hut in an attempt to meet the energy needs of one
part of the system, we have taken it from another. We de-index and
“clawback” and subsume family allowance, not to redirect these
monies to the poor, but to reduce the national debt, acting as though there
will he no negative effect on women and children...acting as though there is no
connection between tax policy and family policy. Causality, in the Newtonian
sense? Likely, No. But, as Weisskopf, Professor Emeritus at M.I.T. would say,
“There are connection” (Cole, 1984/85: 311).
If the best minds of our generation can give up the Newtonian view of the
universe, i.e., a linear one, and decide that Newton’s (and
Descartes’) mechanistic vision of the world as a giant clockwork was incomplete
at best, and probably dead wrong at worst, why can’t we apply these
insights in our own lives? In our way of thinking about things, we seem to
prefer to stick to “cause and effect”, or to theories of causality,
because they give us the (false) security of “predictability.”
“The
search for underlying causes is innately and powerfully appealing--not the
least because it implies the ability to control: if you know what makes things happen
(or not happen) you might be able to make them happen (or not happen) again.
Above all, people like to think that there are causes. It is disconcerting to
think that events are random, that the things we see around us do not conform
to an understandable (if still not understood) body of natural law.” (Cole, 1984/85: 298)
As Cole points
out (1984/85: 199-200), when people “talk about cause and effect...rarely
do they know if the effects are really caused by the causes...it’s
all too easy to link two events in the time and then say that one was caused by
the other… but you do hear educated people say that welfare causes
poverty, or that family planning causes teenage pregnancies, or that the
paucity of decent television programming is caused by people’s poor
taste.” One could add that people also seem to believe that it is our
health and welfare system which has created the national deficit, that the
availability of unemployment insurance creates unemployment, and that welfare
causes teenage girls to avoid work by getting pregnant.
Today’s Globe and Mail (op. cit., Geoffrey York) informs us, in
the same vein, that family breakdown causes poverty, that UI and social
assistance “were not conceived with the current situation in mind,”
and that governments “are beginning to reform the safety net” but are
“moving too slowly.” In case you remain unimpressed with this
example of linear/cause and effect reasoning, I ask you to consider George
Bush’s explanation that the
Again, as Cole said (1984/85: 301), “The truth is that we rarely
understand what forces are at work...only in quantum mechanics--in the physics
of sub-atomic things -- do causes spring out of nowhere, or at least out of
chaos, which is much the same thing” (1984/85: 305).
Disorder and chaos are interesting subjects; let us turn now to the recent, and
tremendously exciting “science of chaos.”
Many researchers, and those replicating the experiments of others, have had the
experience of having what appeared to be random and unpredictable findings
appear in their research results. These errant findings have usually been
rationalized away (“I’ve made a mistake,” or “the
computer has a bug in it”). For some, it was finding that very small differences,
like rounding out numbers to the eighth rather than the fourth place, over
time, made a phenomenal difference in their outcome. As Cole comments,
“as in foreign affairs and personal affairs, one small unseen effect can
he enough to change the entire configuration of events...on the surface,
causality and randomness may seem to be mutually exclusive; but, on closer
inspection, they must be seen as complementary facets of a larger
reality” (Cole, 1984/85: 311, 313). [This might be a lens through which
we could understand the rapid and turbulent changes in
Chauncey Alexander, a former president of the International Federation of
Social Workers, states in his keynote address to the
Alexander puts in it a dramatic way: “If a butterfly flaps its wings in
‘.. Lorenz (studying weather patterns in an attempt to predict them)
computed the fixed points of three variables.., he found that underlying the
randomness of the relationship of the three variables showed a dynamic pattern
that, when recorded graphically, resembled a butterfly‘ s wings or an owl
mask... the Lorenz attractor with its butterfly effect became recognized as the
‘sensitive dependence on initial conditions’, demonstrating the
fact that a system in a chaotic state could he altered through the
magnification that could arise from small changes.” (Alexander,
1988: 4, citing Gleick, 1987)
What this means
is that, in the linear world of
We do know, from both the “hard sciences” and the “soft
sciences” (which are rapidly becoming one science), that negative
feedback holds something in a fixed state, while positive feedback results in
an amplifying or expanding state. In other words, what we are now able to
demonstrate as amplifying waves on a computer screen when physicists map
non-linear dynamical systems, like weather patterns, is what the behaviourists
have told us for years, i.e., that punishment (“negative feedback”)
of certain behaviours exhibited by children simply is not a workable way to
extinguish undesirable behaviour. Is there a bit, a piece in our safety net
that we can amplify (for example, if we gave up universality, how and
what might we target?)
We do know that there is an order in chaos. What we do not know, in any given
situation, is what it is that confines the disorder to “acceptable”
levels, i.e., what is the “force,” “attractor,” or
“strange attractor,” as it is sometimes known? The critical
questions for us, as social scientists in what Ramsay now calls a “design
science profession,” is “how do we, in our personal and social
systems, manage to gain the contained and patterned randomness of chaos, as
opposed to utter randomness?”
Social workers are faced, as Alexander says, “with overwhelming social
and individual chaos in the milieu in which we must function... chaos is not
novel for us since it appears as symptoms of deficiencies in societal
institutions, of class conflict, of psychological disorder” (Alexander,
1988: 2).
We also know that all living systems, not otherwise curtailed, proceed from
order to disorder... and from disorder to order...but, over time, always in the
direction of increasing, complexity. In these matters, direction is very
important. There is not inevitability in this process, if we understand
the process and we understand the world in which we are living and if we work
with the great forces which move the world. The great forces which move the
world go on… our only choice is whether we recognize them, or not…
whether we count them “in,” or count them “out.” Who,
among you, is the “strange attractor,” not eliminating chaos which,
as we currently understand it, is impossible, but acknowledging it and working with
it to embrace its richness and complexity?
Cole says (1984/85:327) that “...the biggest mistake people make
in trying to create order out of chaos is to do it in one feel swoop… the
truth is that large-scale cosmic order is built on small- scale local order.
Stars don’t appear out of nowhere, but accumulate by collecting clumps of
matter over millions of years...social or economic order can’t be imposed
on chaos, but must he built up by many small simultaneous efforts over long
periods of time.” Sounds like community development to me.
You here, have an opportunity, to understand the patterns of the universe, as
best we know them in 1992. You, here, have the opportunity to think of how
Newtonian physics has lead you to where you are, and how a non-linear wholistic
perspective (which includes the new science of chaos) can lead you to a
different perspective on all social problems...it might even lead to a
different perspective on problems you are trying to solve in your personal and
professional lives.
As a profession,
we’ve long held to the importance of “the environment.”
It’s been part of our heritage...even if we didn’t yet know fully
that we meant galaxies, gravity, particles, atoms, EMG forces, nuclear forces,
and the patterns which bind it all together. We didn’t fully
comprehend what we meant when we said we wanted the sun, the moon, the stars
for our clients... but our blind intuition was not wrong.
We’ve always said too, that “one person can make a
difference” ... and now physics confirms that turbulence and chaos can be
modified by a “strange attractor” or even, a “periodic
attractor.” You, too, can effect a small change in “initial
conditions,” at a moment in time, which could effect a major difference
at a later... point in time.
As we come to the end of the century, we see the possible (not predictable) and
probable unification of myth and reality, science and religion, the physical
and the metaphysical. It is not easy, as individuals or as a profession, to
change our way of thinking about the way we think, the way we perceive, the way
we act. But we’ve had a longer run up to this take-off than any other
profession. And, while Earth as a living organism sets limits on economic
development, it sets no limits on social development, save those we set
in our heads. We have to know “the right time, and the manner of
yielding, what is impossible to keep” (Queen Elizabeth, 1976).
Only myth can guide our reality now, so let me end with the statement of
Tolkien’s King Elrond in Lord of the Rings 1965: 353).
The road
must be trod but it will be very hard. And neither strength nor wisdom will
carry us very far upon it. This quest may be attempted by the weak with as much
hope as the strong. Yet such is oft the course of deeds that move the wheels of
the world: small hands do them because they must, while the eyes of the great
are elsewhere.”
Thank you for this moment in time.
Endnotes
1. The origins of the reference to Ivan Illich, page 6 is, quite simply, lost
somewhere in the author’s rudimentary filing system.
2. The quotation by Queen Elizabeth, page 13, is excerpted from her speech, 6
July 1976, on the occasion of her presentation of the Bicentennial Bell to the
people of the
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