Anti-Social Work
I’ve always been proud to be a son of social workers—’60s activists who made good on their idealism. My Dad was a frontline case worker taking his rusted station wagon into some pretty dodgy neighborhoods, while my mother became a clinical therapist.
The common thread of their very different careers was meeting clients as they were to help foster personal agency and better navigate the world—whether that meant maintaining a job, mending relationships or just getting up in the morning. And yet, as I grew up perusing journals of the National Association of Social Workers over my morning Cheerios, the institutional narratives were seldom so nuanced.
In dry jargon laden with footnotes, publications tended to cast people as powerless pawns being victimized by a fundamentally unjust system. To help clients function independently within that system was to leave others behind and ultimately to prop up and legitimize the rotten social order, counterproductive to the broader mission of reconstituting society altogether.
Better to enroll as many as possible into as many programs as possible, amassing a reserve army to demand ever more benefits and progressive bureaucracy. Acculturing people to middle-class social norms was, if not a complete waste of time, not nearly as important as leveraging them politically.
It was a school of thought, I learned in college, rooting back to a couple of professors at Columbia’s School of Social Work, Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven, who in the ’60s had called for flooding the welfare rolls to generate a crisis and force federal reform. Conscientious experts like them stood ready to solve poverty and all social problems, given enough money and power. From what I saw of the School of Social Work over the years it’s become the reigning ideology.
Most social workers remain genuinely devoted to helping their clients operate in the world as it is. But plenty with equally good intentions, especially among the thought and institutional leadership, subordinate concrete practice of empowering individual households and neighborhoods to hazier abstractions of advancing the collective.
However beautiful the dream, it’s hurting people: shortchanging the downtrodden of real incentives to strive in favor of a technocratic salvation that will never come. But from high places, with human beings but statistics and talking points, instilling helplessness and enabling dysfunction seem small price for the eventual payoff of a centrally managed society.
Even as legit practitioners try their best, it’s an ever more uphill battle—pitted not just against deepening social challenges but also idealistic and/or opportunistic academics, bureaucrats and political appointees for whom worse is often better so long as it leads to more authority and funding. Priorities and supposed best practices (not to mention promotions and raises) are increasingly defined by those with grander ambitions than helping empower their clientele.
For such magnificent visions the ends inevitably justify the means, of course, well worth whatever human cost in the short term. Eventually, once the great and good have total control, they really do hope to circle back to try to clean up the mess—picking up the pieces for an enlightened new order.
In a sense, The Ivy Exile represents my own quixotic attempt at social work: an earnest effort to reconcile the unreconcilable, to unite ancestral enemies, and somehow help foster further exchange among thoughtful humans across the political spectrum. Lord knows America needs it, as institutions degrade and the public rightfully loses faith in the deteriorating technocratic-managerial class. Must our discourse really remain so petty and small?
Less and less do the driving imperatives behind ostensibly public-interest programs have anything to do with the true public interest as the bipartisan majority of voters might define. Instead, professional incentives nearly all point to declaring states of emergency and entrenching by special order what the power players who matter wanted in the first place, over troubling with whatever nonsensical superstitions their pet global villagers might bumble upon.
I wish I could say I had the answer, but raising the right questions has to be the next best thing. Proper therapy rarely involves quick easy “solutions,” but rather marinating purposefully in uncomfortable truths, in the fetid stench of our common humanity. Whatever the answer(s) may be, it sure ain’t the sanitized euphemistic establishmentarian status quo.
Next: The Spirit of St. Louis
Post-60s Leftism—its entire movement and ideology—is written, produced and directed by secular white liberals and is designed first and foremost to meet their political, social, and emotional needs, most especially their deep-seated need to publicly atone for their guilt and "privilege". Thus whatever benefits accrue to their pet victim classes are only secondary or incidental, as they are simply symbols or pretexts for an endless pseudopolitical group-therapy session.
This is why all Left idealistic schemes never achieve any real success or lasting social improvements, as this isn't the purpose of their project, and in fact might threaten it.
I'm constantly shocked by how people can drape themselves in abstractions like "Justice" and "Equality" and this gives them a permanent get-out-of-responsibility card; also, how America continues to subsidize people who work to denounce and unravel it and turn their children into weapons in the Permanent Revolution; and most especially infuriating is how when we at last achieve the equality of living in rubble (the only possible equality), the architects of our dismantling will walk away unscathed. (They always do.)
Charles R. Morris's "A Time of Passion" is out of print but you may be able to find a used copy, as I did. Morris ran anti-poverty programs in Trenton for LBJ's Great Society. He finally concluded that the result if not the aim of programs like his was jobs for bureaucrats: "To the profound disappointment of community organization activists, the local anti-poverty agencies were rapidly transmuting into tired civil service organizations, preoccupied with job grades and tenure, hardly the advance guard of a new age of social reform...With a clarity of logic which somehow eluded the antipoverty program designers, poor people readily appreciated that bigger welfare checks were a more direct and certain way to increase their incomes than the confusing self-improvement schemes hawked by Washington."
According to Morris, the social workers in the War on Poverty had overestimated the economists' expertise while the economists overestimated that of the social workers: "Social workers never questioned that economists had plumbed all the mysteries of the economy; and the economists who designed the antipoverty program never doubted the availability of a similarly encompassing social technology." Morris claims the reason both camps were wrong about each other was "a kind of professional courtesy extended among experts in that era of expertise." That era has passed.