Nineteenth
National Conference on Perinatal Social Work
The National
Association of Perinatal Social Workers
Keynote
Address
May 17, 1995
- Westin Hotel
Professor Gayle Gilchrist James, MSW,
RSW
Associate Professor
The
Faculty of Social Work
PROGRAM
CITATION
"Order
and Disorder in Turbulent Times"
"Social work's person-in-environment focus is
right, as far as it goes. But the environment in which we function is an
incorrigibly more complex universe than our traditional training has allowed us
to believe, and we are left with two apparently contradictory things: order and
chaos. What laws do we have, what laws can we invent, to explain the organized
complexity of our daily existence? How do we locate the simplicities?"
PREAMBLE
Social
workers are storytellers. Permit me to tell you a tale.
Before
I taught child and adolescent development in a university ... my chief
qualification, being that I had no direct experience in raising children and
was, therefore, unencumbered by bias, I worked in a multidisciplinary clinic
for children who were in elementary school, in a large public urban school
system. As part of that 8-year wonderful professional experience, the staff and
I came to know this province's first neonatologist, who virtually
single-handedly changed delivery and perinatal
management practices. He also did audacious and unpopular things like making
social workers, and families, part of his neonatal interventive approach. He
facilitated the development of a second neonatal intensive care unit in this
city. It was in this unit that my godson was born in 1976, 2 1/2 months early
and weighting 3 lbs 4 ozs.... born to the woman that
had been the teacher in our Education Clinic.
Chaos,
the subject of my speech this evening, became a very personal experience for
us. And so, this night, I would like to honor three sets of people who, in
microcosm, symbolize the efforts of the many who, then and since, have moved us
from disorder to order:
• Dr. David Schiff, who proved
one person could make a difference, represented by Professor Margot Herbert,
the first perinatal social worker at The University
of Alberta Hospitals.
• Paddi
Koleyak McFadden, on behalf of parents and teachers,
who have sought to improve the quality of life of survivors of dangerous
beginnings.
• Cathy Morrison and Kelley
Clark, on behalf of North American perinatal social
workers, who have had more experiences with grief and joy than the majority of
social workers ever experience.... and who brought us together in this room.
Taken
together, the energy these strategic allies posses, connected across time, is
formidable, and a grand force to counteract entropy.
_________________
"CHAOS" — Where Brilliant
Dreams are Born. Before the beginning of great brilliance, there must be Chaos.
Before a brilliant person begins something great, they must look foolish to the
crowd.
I CHlNG IMAGE, Image #3
Let us be foolish together.
As
social workers, we have tried to be rational, to practice with wisdom instead
of with mere practice wisdom. In our increasing search for predictability in an
uncertain and turbulent world, in our search for guaranteed outputs and
outcomes, we increasingly have adopted both the language and the strategies of
management gurus. We have worshipped "total quality management and process
re-engineering", solutions, which Margot Gibb-Clark of the Globe and Mail
says were "being applied like quickie diets - with about as much lasting
effect" (2 January 1993). While there have been, indeed, some successes in
the short run, many of these "fads" have foundered because they were
based on the assumption that the future would be a linear extension of the past.
It is not so and we can't make it so.
Parenthetically,
I would add that I am also concerned bout the de-layering, i.e., the
disappearance of directors of hospital social work departments. As the
co-founder of one out-placement service said, those thrown out are "the
guts of the organization — the history, the corporate memory, the
conscience and the succession line" (Howes,
citing Evans).
As
children we learned the dangers of cause and effect (sticking a bobby-pin in an
electrical unit will light up your life); we learned its mysteries ("step
on a crack, break your mother's back"); in high school we sat through
physics classes with teachers who intoned Newton's laws like a mantra
("For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction"), a principle
we tried to perfect, after school, in pool halls across North America.
Those
of us who went into professions were especially seduced by determinism, because
our own success in employing linear cause-and-effect thinking was so
self-evident. We'd study, we'd work hard, we'd avoid the major temptations (if
not the minor ones) of adolescent and young adult life, we'd graduate and get
good jobs — real jobs — just like we always knew we would.
Sure,
a few of our pals fell by the wayside, to our great surprise, but the
"careless" pregnancy, the suicide, the concussion in the football
game, the untimely death of someone's father, the 3 a.m. car accident, were all
things that could be explained away, as random events or as due to some
heretofore unknown, fatal flaw, in the character of the victim. We dismissed
the randomness of these events and kept our cause-and-effect thinking in place,
and when we couldn't locate the cause, we blamed God. We did not apprehend that
these bits of disorder in our immediate world foretold things to come, so great
in number, that we would be forced to consider disorder in the universe as a
near and present danger, mystery, and opportunity. It is against this backdrop
that we can begin to look at chains of events and of patterns, as social
workers are accustomed to doing, but on a much wider screen than ever we
imagined, and the projectionists are more likely to be physicists and
mathematicians than psychologists and sociologists. Hence, the emerging science
of chaos.
Determinism
is not dead, nor should it be. It comes highly recommended as a technique for
navigating pedestrian crosswalks, where the variables are few. Its usefulness
in a dynamical system like social work practice is more limited, because the
variables are so numerous, the direction of change is rarely linear, and time
(as you know) can be counted in a heartbeat.
What
could have been the triumph of determinism deserves a rather smaller
celebration. Barry James, citing Augusto Forti,
then-Assistant Secretary General of the United Nations/Vienna, states
(International Herald Tribune. September 18, 1991), says that
"Their ideas have led
us to the catastrophe of Marxism and brought us to the end of industrial
civilization. Now we know the world is not a marvelous watch but part of an
expanding universe. Things are no longer predictable.''
Let
us now turn to some of the basic concepts of chaos, for its peculiar language
may be obscure and, in this instance, The Social Work Dictionary (Barker, 1991)
is no help at all. There is no mention of chaos, much less of such terms as
butterfly effects, Mandelbrot set, sensitive dependence on initial conditions,
or fractals. Later, I will try to explain what implications these may have for
your social work practice.
LESSONS FROM
CHAOS THEORY
Chaos
is an informal term for a new field of research, sometimes called
"non-linear science" or "dynamical systems" (Brennan 1992:
42-43). [It is also a term we use colloquially, as in "My job is total
chaos right now".] In the main, chaos theory is being explored by
physicists, mathematicians, biologists.... and a handful of social workers (for
example, Chauncey A. Alexander, 1988). Ever vigilant for new themes, even the
advertising industry has co-opted the word. Witness an advertisement for Four
Seasons Hotels in a glossy magazine: ".... from chaos to comfort in mere
moments" (City and Country Home).
We
seem to have strayed a long way from Poincare's much less trivial observations,
defined by him in 1892. Poincare, a French physicist, was the first to blow
Newton's laws out of the water by observing that, stretched to three or more
bodies, Newton's laws of mechanics failed to hold and that, instead, one got
"the potential for non-linearity, for instability — for incipient
chaos" (Briggs and Peat, 1989: 41). This is, I believe extremely important
for social work practice: How many times do we ever have the luxury of dealing
with only two linked variables? How often do we have the absolute necessity of
dealing with three or more variables? dozens of variables? Working from a
person(s)-in-environment perspective virtually guarantees that social workers
must use theoretical models that seek to understand the nature of the world,
models which explain the effects of non-linearity and the "breaking up of
order into chaos and the more surprising emergence of order from chaos"
(Greenberg, 1989). We know now, in fact, what we knew (only) intuitively before:
a given input does not necessarily produce a proportional output; we live and
work in complicated non-linear systems, and the unexpected is, or ought to be,
the expected.
We
used to think that, if "one knew all the variables… and one had a
large enough computer to handle all these uncertainties, it would be possible
to model, or describe in mathematical terms, any system no matter how
complex" (Brennan, 1992: 43). Furthermore, we thought that we had "a
perfect paradigm of law and order'' and that, if we could only collect the
proper data (input) we could ensure "a predetermined series of
changes" (Cohen & Stewart, 1994: 189). We could string together a
series of short-term predictions and, voila, an accumulation of these would
become a long-term (accurate) prediction.
It
is not appropriate, here, to wander through the history of what happened in the
emerging science of chaos, from the time of Poincare's observation, slightly
over 100 years ago (a history foreshortened by the fact that few comprehended
until 1954 what he'd really said, according to Briggs and Peat).
Both
"hard" scientists, and the scientists in social work, have been
preoccupied with prediction, manageability, control, and the analysis of parts,
thinking that if we could get the pieces down right, we would understand the
whole. We aimed for finding the regular patterns and smoothing-out or ignoring
the irregularities, whether we were meteorologists trying to predict the
weather, cardiologists trying to control ventricular fibrillation, economists on
Black Monday in October, 1987 when the stock market collapsed, biologists
trying to understand the cyclic nature of the rabbit population, or social
workers attempting to help a dysfunctional family cope with an at-risk newborn.
With the help of computers, we were forced to awaken ourselves to the
irregularities. As
Many biological systems, and
many physical ones, are discontinuous, inhomogeneous, and irregular. The
variable complicated structure and behavior of living systems seems as likely
to be verging on chaos as converging on some regular pattern.
Briggs
& Peat (1984:14-15) urge us to construct "a new mirror to hold up to
nature: a turbulent mirror", so that we will "see how in the
landscape on one side of that mirror ... the ways in which order falls apart
into chaos; how on the other side… chaos makes order; and how at the
mirror's elusive surface — at the nexus between these worlds… "
we can shift attention from a system's quantitative properties to its
qualitative ones. This is a long way of saying that we can no longer use our
reductionist strategies to study parts in isolation from wholes, that there is
a peculiar kind of harmony between order and chaos, and that change is at the
heart of both evolution and revolution. Adapted for this audience, one could
say that it will matter a great deal to you, as perinatal
social workers, working in and with complex dynamical systems, that you take
into account the chaos in the whole system of health care. How might you want
to accelerate, amplify, or dampen-down the never-ending cycles of
order-to-disorder to order? To intervene in a cycle, even minimally, is as big
a decision as to let a cycle run its course… but then, of course, you
would have to live with the effects of the interventions by, and the
bifurcations caused, by others! One can postulate that we have ignored
turbulence and chaos, or endured it, thinking somehow if we took it into
account, we were encouraging it to stick around. [This is called
"denial", in other quarters.] Well, the good news is that, like
regularity, chaos has its parameters, too. To go back to the colloquial example,
your life may be chaotic and you can't locate your socks, but there are a
limited number of places you will look for them: under the bed, in the wash
hamper, etc. It is unlikely you would seek or find them in the microwave. That
is contained randomness.
Lessons to be Learned
There
are many things we have learned from staring into and floating through the
turbulent mirror. In the interests of time . . . and digestion and Danny Hooper
... I will deal with but one, ce soir.
This
is "the butterfly affect", or "the sensitive dependence on
initial conditions''. Remember
Even
Czechoslovakian President Vaclav Havel, speaking at the 1992 World Economic
Forum in
You have certainly heard of
the "butterfly effect." It is a belief that everything in the world
is so mysteriously and comprehensively inter-connected that a slight, seemingly
insignificant wave of a butterfly's wing in a single spot on this planet can
unleash a typhoon thousands of miles away.
As
we say in social work, everything is connected to everything else.
What
is being described here is the move from simplicity to complexity, and complexity
has its own laws, which we do not understand at all well … yet. But it
does help with some things ... it does make me comfortable with rejecting
outright the linearity of trickle-down economic theories … and I will
never again say, or believe; "What goes up, must come down." and,
because I can never know all the sensitive initial conditions, I will not know
the probabilities of the interest rates on July 1st when I have to renew my
mortgage ... or, until then, what I should wear for the weather conditions.
There are, however, consequences of our freedom, especially of our freedom to
think. One can find a peculiar comfort in facing chaos, searching for its
patterns, and working in partnership fashion with colleagues who are intrigued
rather than frightened. There is also a comfort in knowing, as I said at the
beginning of this evening, that one person can make a difference, that one can
be one of those sensitive initial conditions. Each of you can be a butterfly.
Back
to Vaclav Havel (1992):
The world … has
something like a spirit or soul … something more than a mere body of
information that can be externally grasped and objectified and mechanically
assembled. Yet his does not mean we have no access to it. Figuratively
speaking, the human spirit is made from the same material as the spirit of the
world. Man is not just an observer, a spectator, an analyst, or a manager of
the world. Man is part of the world and his spirit is part of the spirit of the
world … only those who are looking for a technical trick … need
feel despair. But those who believe, in all modesty (and I hold you among
them), in the mysterious power of their own human Being, which mediates between
them and the mysterious power of the world's Being, have no reason to despair
at all.
REFERENCES
Alexander
CA (1988, September 23). "Chaos: Finding the future in social work."
Keynote address to the Arizona Chapter of the National Association of Social
Workers (NASW).
Barker
RL (1991). The social work dictionary (2nd
ed.).
Brennan
RP (1992). The dictionary of scientific
literacy.
Briggs
J, Peat FD (1989). Turbulent mirror.
City and country home. (1990, September), p. 19.
Cohen
J, Stewart I (1994). The collapse of
chaos: Discovering simplicity in a complex world.
Gibb-Clark
M (1993). Gurus predict even more management chaos for 1993: The unpredictable
changes may have the consolation... of causing strategic allies to share experiences.
Globe & Mail.
Gleick
J (1987). Chaos: Making a new science.
Greenberg
OW (1989). [A book reviews of A. Zee's, An
old man's toy: Gravity at work and play in Einstein's universe, and of John
Briggs, and David Peat's Turbulent mirror, in International Herald Tribune}, 18 August, 1989, p. 16. Greenberg is
a Professor of Physics at The University of Maryland, working on the theory of
elementary particles, who was requested by The
Washington Post to write this review.
Howes C, citing Bob Evans (1995, May 13). "Fads gut companies, says
placement exec", Calgary Herald,
Bob Evans is co-founder of Evans Duff Associates, a
James
B (1991). "Of Galileo, faith and society", International Herald Tribune, 18 September, 1991, p. 22.