SYMPOSIUM
MAKING A DIFFERENCE:
Current Trends and Future Directions in
Social Work Practice
On the occasion of the Fiftieth
Anniversary of the
Faculty of Social Work,
and
The Baird Poskanzer Memorial Symposium
29 May 1993
Gayle Gilchrist James, RSW (
Associate Professor,
The
Faculty of Social Work
Preamble
Like the Faculty of Social
Work at the
I confess these things to
you, not to prove that I could not find an adequate self-help group in Edmonton
in which to bare my soul and share my pain but, rather, to explain my reverence
for those who, in the period Post-War to the Sixties, and based on many of the
same memories (personal and inherited), crafted a social safety net so that what
we experienced at the personal level could be ameliorated through political and
governmental action. One cannot be faulted for (as Matthew Arnold said in his
bleak poem, "
Better writers than I have
stressed the presentness of the past... Social worker Elaine Brody (1977) said,
"The well-being of the generations is interlocked individually and
collectively." Clarke Chambers, likewise, claims, "Social work, like
every other profession, must be possessed by a sense of history or else drift
without direction or purpose." Margaret Atwood, not even a social worker,
stated that "the future is a continuum of the past." Many social work
historians feel that those unfamiliar with our particular history are doomed to
repeat it. But, just maybe, the problem is that by teaching our history, we are
dooming future social workers to learning a framework that fit the 20th century
and has no meaning for the 21st century. Maybe our future is discontinuous with
our past. If we pass a kaleidoscope around a group of people, and we pass it
very carefully, we shall all agree on the one pattern that we see. But, should
one among us not be scrupulously careful in the passing, the elements in the
kaleidoscope will have re-arranged themselves in a new pattern, and earlier and
later viewers will disagree vehemently on the pattern they, themselves, all
witnessed accurately.
It is my business, here, to
change the pattern, while keeping the familiar elements. Who saw what, last, is
probably irrelevant; history may not help us now. We can still honour our
traditions and revere our ancestors...but the tree trunk has already bifurcated
and we are a new branch. Historian William Irwin Thompson says it best:
We will have to come right up to the edge to find out
where we are, and who we are. At the edge of history, history itself no longer
can help us, and only myth remains equal to reality. What we know is less than
what we are...The future is beyond knowing, but the present is beyond belief.
We make so much noise with technology that we cannot discover that the stargate
is in our foreheads. But the time has come; the revelation has already
occurred, and the guardian seers have seen the lightning strike the darkness we
call reality. And now we sleep in the brief interval between the lightning and
the thunder.
A DECALOGUE: OLD ELEMENTS | NEW
DIRECTIONS
"Move then with new desires,
For where we used to build and love
Is no man's land, and only ghosts can live between two
fires."
C. Day Lewis
Nineteen days from today, and
in this City of Winnipeg, we will have achieved the eleventh anniversary of
University of British Columbia Professor Emeritus Dr. Richard Splane's
"Decalogue" of "Recommendations and Exhortations" to Dennis
Dawson, M.P. (Parliamentary Secretary to Lloyd Axworthy, Minister of Employment
and Immigration), delivered on the occasion of the Canadian Association of
Social Workers' Biennial Conference (17 June 1982). Having thus acknowledged my
impending theft of his intellectual property (or did this model begin with
Moses?), I will attempt (shamelessly) my own decalogue of "Recommendations
and Exhortations" (Second Edition). In this exercise, you must be aware of
my assumption that social work, wherever it is practiced on this planet, must
deal with four elemental and interlocking realities or environments:
geographic, political, spiritual or metaphysical, and social (including
socioeconomic/sociolegal/cultural) ... a model for which I am indebted to Professor
Dick Ramsay.
Three further assumptions are
of importance:
a)
Elemental to
social work is the concept that context is what gives meaning. One can never
understand "the whole" by an in-depth study of one of its parts.
Social workers are only too happy to adopt a person-in-environment perspective
to explicate human behaviour, but are less enthusiastic about its reciprocal,
paired-opposite notion: environment-in-person.
b)
In both simple
and complex systems, everything is transactive. Everything arises in mutual
relation to everything else, so you can't blame "any-body" for
anything ... or "every-thing." Our demand for leadership may be a
plea for validation of one's wish to be a "follower;" only hired
assassins and their employers/payers are sufficiently linear in their thinking
to believe that "killing" the boss, the enemy, the non-believer changes
the basic direction of a living system. Any system which permits the
development of a dictator will give birth to a succession of clone dictators
upon the disappearance of the first one.
c)
We must deal in
probabilities, not predictions. What we have learned from the new science of
chaos, and what we have witnessed in our own field and in world events, is that
"sensitive initial conditions" may be amplified over time so that
chaos ensues. As it is impossible to know, with certainty, the "sensitive
initial conditions" of any enterprise, the predictive element of
cause-and-effect is lost, and we are forced to deal, instead, with "the
balance of probabilities" in all multifactorial situations.
1. Do Not Underestimate the Breadth/Depth/Length Of
Cuts in Our Social Safety Net (or, "The Day the Music Died").
The present is beyond belief,
especially for those who, dramatically and incrementally, from the 40's to the
70's, created
Cuts are in two major
directions: programs (and associated personnel), and independent advisory
agencies:
|
Programs |
Advisory
Agencies |
|
|
[My province and, perhaps,
others recently announced a round of mergers, too. One involves a film
marketing enterprise and an agricultural marketing enterprise, which caused an
acerbic
2. Realize That All the Aforementioned Program
and Advisory Agency Cuts Occurred With No Participation in Decision-Making by the
Groups Most Affected, and With No Public Discussion (except of the reactive
sort).
3. Realize That the Traditional Role of the Senior
Civil Servant Has Gone From One Of Specialist And Expert in The Matters at Hand
to One of Manager and Generalist, A Model Misappropriated From The Corporate
World (where is has worked little
better). Robert Samuelson, in a recent piece in Newsweek (10 May 1993),
declared:
We are now witnessing the death of management. By
management, I mean the peculiarly American idea (still taught at many business
schools) that a "good manager" should be able to manage any
enterprise, anywhere, anytime.... With hindsight, we can see the absurdity.
4. Realize That Government Cannot be Run Like a
Business and a Business Cannot be Run Like the Government. Business, in quasi-capitalist democracies, runs to
make a profit, while "the final end of government is not to exert
restraint but to do good" (Choate). Governments are responsible for the
well-being of all of its shareholder citizens; business has the luxury of
appealing to and advancing the interests of a part of the citizenry, without
reference to the universe of Canadians. Even William Gold, Calgary Herald
columnist, declared (27 April 1993):
(The Finance Minister's) rummage through the federal
purse was a true product of its time. Cut here, retreat there, diminish this,
eliminate that. It had so much to do with the national debt; so little to do
with the people...social and economic issues all over the public sector
spectrum are being addressed in separate compartments by people who do not
aspire to reform or even see the whole of society. This is all profoundly
scary. Our society is splitting into rich and poor economically, into ethnic
groups tribally, into special-interest factions politically. Will anyone come
forward to lead us all into a brave new world where new solutions count for so
much as bankers' books?
5. Realize Two Paired Ideas:
a) We do Not
Have a Deficit/Expenditure Crisis; We Have a Revenue Crisis,
And
b) It is Not
Our Social Safety Net That Has Created Our Deficit.
What we spend is a meaningless
figure unless it is seen in light of what we take in, and revenue forgone
is money as good as spent. Statistics
You may forgive my sarcasm,
if I suggest to you that these are "targeted programs," rather like
the Child Benefits Program; they are simply targeted at a different part of the
socioeconomic spectrum. How can so many believe that the way economic resources
are distributed is a function of inexorable economic laws and not a function of
political--that is, human--choices (Eisler)? And, the next time someone
scoffs at your suggestion of a fair and equitable tax system by telling you
there aren't enough rich to be taxed to make one iota of a difference in our
deficit, ask "What is your definition of 'rich'?" (My definition of
"rich" is anyone who makes in excess of twice the national average
individual or family income.)
And, if I may be permitted
one more piece of sarcasm: government expenditures on health, as a percentage
of the GDP, rose from 5.8% in 1984 to an "alarming" 6.2% in
1990, while in the same period, government expenditures on social programs
"rose" from 26.2% to 26.3% of the GDP. Put another way,
expenditures on social programs, as a percentage of total government
expenditures, "rose" from 55.6% of the budget in 1984 to 56.7% of
the budget in 1990 (StatsCan,
Canadian Social Trends,
Winter 1992 & Summer 1993).
I refuse to accept or
believe that our social safety net should be dismantled because of cost
increases in the order of one-tenth to four-tenths of one percent over a period
of six years, or even an increase of 1.1%! You should refuse to believe it too ... and you should stop acting as
though you believe it.
6. Learn a Third Language; It's Easy for Social
Workers, Who Are Accustomed to Listening With the Third Ear. You Can Learn to
Translate the Coded Language of Our Decade:
"Jobless recovery" = You may never have permanent, full-time employment
again in your lifetime, while those who control financial institutions,
investments, and can trade globally will be able to recover from the current
global recession.
"We have to be competitive" = I know I will win, and I know you will lose.
"Targeting benefits" = The loss of the anonymity of universal programs and
the reintroduction such classic concepts as the deserving and undeserving poor,
the deserving and undeserving ill and disabled, the deserving and undeserving
unemployed, and deserving and undeserving immigrants. Those with more than
twice the average national income are, by definition, "deserving."
"Job training for welfare recipients" = Work for welfare.
"Down-sizing," "right-sizing,"
"restructuring" = You're
fired.
"We cannot saddle our children with this
burden" = We can't think of a
thing to do for today's 1.2 million children living in poverty (1991) except
change the poverty line so there won't be so many.
7. Realize That Sexual and Gender Inequality is Not
Human Nature, That Diversity Does Not Need to be Equated to Either Inferiority
or Superiority, That Just Because Some Practices Have Endured Does Not Make
Them Adaptive, and That Singular Competitiveness Never Produces the
Exponential, Synergistic Transformations Engendered by Co-Operation (Eisler).
8. Realize That There is a Model in Pre-History for
Co-Operation, Peace, Caring, Productivity, and Equality (In Crete and Catal
Hayuk/Turkey) Which Existed for 1500 Years, Free of Domination and Oppression of
Any Kind, Where Practically All Material and Social Technologies Fundamental to
Civilization Were Developed.
9. Accept That, Given the Totality of the Needs of the
Peoples of This Good Planet, All of Us Will Have to Make-Do With Somewhat Less …
Including You and Me ... But in Such a Venture, Equity Need Not be the First
Thing Sacrificed.
10. Learn, as Some Multinationals (e.g., the
Reichmans) Have, That There Are Limits to Growth, and That "Sustainable
Development' Does Not Mean, and Cannot Be Made to Mean, "Sustained Development."
The Good News is That There Appears to be no Limit to Social Development. As
Vaclav Havel Said (Summer Meditations): "People Need to Hear That It Makes
Sense to Behave Decently or to Help Others, to Place Common Interests Above
Their Own, to Respect the Elementary Rules of Human Coexistence."
Conclusion
To return to William Irwin
Thompson...we can discover "the stargate is in our foreheads."
Hopefully, the revelation has
occurred. We are at the edge of history, where history no longer can help us,
and only our myths of dignity and equity remain equal to our current reality.
"Move
then with new desires,
For
where we used to build and love
Is no
man's land, and only ghosts can live
between
two fires."
C. Day Lewis
Notes
Atwood, Margaret. Interview
with the late Barbara Frum, CBC's The
Journal, 3 October 1989.
Brody Elaine (1977).
"Aging." Encyclopedia of Social
Work.
Chambers Clarke A. (1977).
"Archives of Social Welfare." Encyclopedia
of Social Work.
Choate Rufus. The New Yorker, 5 July 1976: cover.
Eisler Riane. (1987). The Chalice and the Blade: Our History, Our
Future.
Gold, William "Without
dreamers we see nothing."
Havel Vaclav, cited by Marc
Lisac in his column, "Havel's ideas apply to
Journal, 18
August 1993, A6.
Lewis CD (1952). "The
Conflict." A Little Treasury of
Modem Poetry (Revised Edition).
Minister of Finance,
"Budget Highlights: Government streamlining," The Budget Papers, Table 3.5, February 1992.
Samuelson RJ. "The Death
of Management." Newsweek, 10 May
1993: 55.
Statistics
Thompson William Irwin.
(1971). At the Edge of History:
Speculations on the Transformation of
Culture.
Related Letter:
The
Faculty Of Social Work
June 14, 1993.
Professor Gail Gilchrist
James,
Faculty of Social Welfare,
Dear Gayle:
A special word of thanks,
both official and personal, for your contribution to the Poskanzer Memorial
Symposium on the occasion of the Faculty's 50th Anniversary. Your paper was
challenging and thought-provoking, and a number of people have asked for
reprints. Denis will be in further touch with you with respect to this issue.
Once more, on behalf of the
Faculty, I'd like to express our appreciation for your generous response to our
request for your contribution to our Anniversary symposium and to its success.
Sincerely,
Addie Penner,
Chair,
50th Anniversary Committee.