WHEN HELPING YOU HELPS
ME
Behind The Left's Selfish Mask Of Caring ...
by Murray Soupcoff,
The
Iconoclast
January 6, 2003
When will the "caring" activists of the left ever learn? Never have so few individuals
with so many good intentions created so much misery for so many people whom
they wanted to help. As the social-engineering debacles of the last half century
in the United States have demonstrated, carelessness in "caring" for the disadvantaged
in our society only leads to a glaringly uncaring result.
After all, it was pioneering liberal-left social engineers in the 1940's and
50's who came up with the not-so-creative idea of fighting poverty in American
slums by ripping down existing for-profit rental housing and replacing the existing
rental stock with the cold, massive, impersonal concrete human stockyards we
now know as public housing projects -- the equivalent of urban hell for several
generations of the poor in North America. Not only was poverty not checked by
this urban "reform," but the absence of cheap rooming houses and other lodgings
for society's marginalized citizens ultimately created the phenomenon of urban
homelessness. And of course, we all know the many wonderful benefits that came
with living in comfy, government-subsidized "projects" -- rampant drug addiction,
vandalism, family breakup, gang wars, killings and social decay.
Oh, and did we mention an even more ingrained "cycle of poverty"?
Yet, the obvious bitter fruits of the liberal-left do-gooders' all-knowing beneficence
in providing "better housing" for the underclass did nothing to stop further
clumsy social-engineering efforts by this lot. For example, in the 1960's, confronted
with the demoralizing "evidence" -- most of it imaginary -- that poor self-esteem
and a cycle of "failure" was hindering the educational achievement of poor black
students, liberal-left educational reformers set about dumbing down the schools
in disadvantaged black urban slums. Unfortunately, the only noticeable result
of this attempt to treat the educational system as a social laboratory was that
standard test scores plummeted in these enlightened educational enclaves, literacy
became the equivalent of an endangered species, student conduct deteriorated
dangerously and precipitously, and a unique new "let's stay stupid" ethic (otherwise
known as not "going white") evolved among poor black students -- harassing any
fellow students who showed any desire to get an education to improve their lot
and break the chains of poverty.
Oh, and did we mention that schools in poor black urban slums quickly became
a mirror image of government-subsidized housing projects -- run-down urban fortresses
afflicted by the scourge of vandalism, gangs, hard drugs, random violence and
social anarchy?
However, not surprisingly, that hasn't stopped the liberal-left cognoscenti
from coming up with ever-more innovative ways to waste taxpayer dollars on ever-more
destructive "cures" for various real and imagined social injustices through
the years.
The $64,000 question is why? Enter a most educational book, The Careless
Society: Community & Its Counterfeits by community activist John McKnight
(Basic Books, 1995), a crusading tome whose insightful pages I recently revisited.
Even more specifically, I would single out Chapter One ("Professionalism") and
McKnight's groundbreaking essay in that chapter, entitled "Professionalized
Help and Disabling Service"
Granted, watching a Friends rerun is probably a more entertaining diversion.
However, if you're one of those people who feels guilty after being accused
by liberals of not being a caring enough person in your politics, then you'll
probably find this book most enlightning. It's a golden-oldie that still packs
a punch, even though it received minimum attention when it was first published.
So what new insight does Mr. McKnight bring to an understanding of the educated
"caring" classes and the ever-expanding "helping" industry they helm. Well,
if I might serve as your interpreter, let me first posit that I think he would
suggest that we all should recognize that no matter how intrinsically idealistic
and caring today's social "dogooders" might be, they are still human. Therefore,
self-interest is bound to intrude at times into even the most idealistic of
initiatives to help the less advantaged.
In other words, today's social reformers and activists may be well intentioned,
but they're fooling themselves about the nature of their mission. According
to McKnight, the language of the helping professions may be one of caring (just
like Bill Clinton, they feel the needy's pain). But behind what McKnight calls
the mask of caring lies simply one more expanding service industry --
a unique business (distinguished by its emphasis on doing good) in need
of markets, staffed by an ever-growing cadre of caring professionals in need
of income.
According to this scenario, today's caring elite of policy wonks and service
professionals need "need". They derive their livelihoods -- not to mention their
sense of superior goodness -- from servicing the "needs" of those whom they
define as "the needy."
So from McKnight's point of view, professional caring in modern society has
become just another business, but one whose true mission is masked by
its aura of caring and love for those whom it helps. Or to put it in his own
words:
It is clear, therefore, that the word 'care' is a potent political
symbol. What is not so clear is that its use masks the political interests of
servicers. This fact is further obscured by the symbolic link between care and
love. The result is that the political-economic issues of service are hidden
behind the mask of love.
Behind the mask is simply the servicer, his systems, techniques, and technologies
-- a business in need of markets, an economy seeking new growth potential, professionals
in need of an income....
The masks of love and care obscure this reality so that the public cannot recognize
the professionalized interests that manufacture needs in order to rationalize
a service economy. Medicare, Educare, Judicare, Socialcare, and Psychocare are
portrayed as systems to meet needs rather than programs to meet the needs of
servicers and the economies they support.
Most important, from McKight's point of view, this is not a shell game where "helpers"
consciously set about to exploit the needy for their own selfish ends. Instead,
servicers are well-intentioned individuals who so strongly identify with the caring
"face" of doing good that they cannot let themselves recognize its negative consequences.
The "mask" of goodness is so important to their sense of self, they can't let
themselves see its true face -- the exploitation of society's disadvantaged classes,
by a credentialed elite, to enhance both the economic well being and sense of
moral superiority of that elite.
In McKnight's words, "removing the mask of love shows us the face of servicers
who need income, and an economic system that needs growth." And within this framework,
"the client is less a person in need than a person who is needed." Or in pure
economic terms, the client is less the consumer than "the raw material for the
servicing system." In other words, today's dogooders need the needy, and must
continually identify new "need" (social problems) to grow their business (government-funded
social initiatives to "help" those in need and to create lucrative employment
for the enlightened classes who help them).
Therefore, even though it might not be the original intention of social dogooders,
it doesn't take long for those whom they set out to help to ultimately become
commodities in the business of caring -- and for the helpers, by implication,
to become the new industrialists of caring. And those helpers, I might add, include
a whole new educated class of professional social workers, psychologists, child-care
workers, government bureaucrats, administrators, legislators, social-policy wonks,
community activists, and even self-appointed ethnic spokespersons like Jesse Jackson.
Not surprisingly, one particular power dynamic most usually emerges from such
"helping" efforts: the helper is the expert who holds all control and power,
and the one who is helped is chronically consigned to the role of the dependent,
needy victim. For example, within this power paradigm, social-policy wonks
and social workers possess the professional training and expert knowledge to know
what's required to rescue the needy; and the needy "need" that professional intervention
since they are seen as being incapable of helping themselves.
Of course, when self-interested career "activists" like Jesse Jackson are involved,
another dynamic inevitably kicks in. The rich (come on down, Jesse) get richer
(from government and corporate "donations"), and the poor get nothing (from Jesse
and his associates).
Ironically, as John McKnight also suggests, many of today's much-advocated social-problem-solving
efforts are actually iatrogenic -- the equivalent of doctor-created disease. Meaning
that doctors like to gather the sick in infection-ridden hospitals, where ill
patients often contact infectious diseases which make them even more sick than
they were when they first entered hospital. Consequently, for many hospitalized
patients, the doctor-prescribed cure is worse than the disease.
In the same way, most liberal-left social "cures," via government-mandated social
engineering, are iatrogenic-- social "remedies" bedeviled by a bevy of harmful
unintended social consequences created by government agencies recklessly intervening
in the private sphere.
The problem is that public intellectuals of the left suffer from the hubris of
thinking they know more than they do. And over and over again, we are confronted
with more grim evidence that mere humans -- even the most schooled and brilliant
-- cannot control complex social processes sufficiently to achieve the societal
outcomes they desire. For example, the fabled War on Poverty in America may have
been based on the accumulated sociological wisdom of the academic intelligentsia
of the 1960's, but it quickly turned into a rout -- as a host of unintended social
consequences (created by the experts' ill-chosen social-engineering remedies)
ambushed all the good intentions and left the equivalent of a social killing field
among the hapless victims of left-wing largesse. Aside from the countless billions
of dollars wasted on needlessly enriching the educated helping classes in their
battle against the "social ills" afflicting the disadvantaged, the celebrated
campaign to eradicate poverty and its ills only reinforced the cycle of poverty
in black disadvantaged neighborhoods, created a frightening social contagion of
ever-escalating welfare dependency, family breakdown and neighborhood violence
-- and ushering in a shining new era of urban social anarchy and hopelessness.
Doctor-created social disease at its worst!
In the language of John McKnight, too often modern professional social service
is actually a form of disabling help. Rather than empowering those it whom
it intends to help, it leaves them isolated, passive and dependent. Rather than
getting better, the socially ill only get sicker.
In other words, it shouldn't be surprising then that, since the mid 1960's, all
the efforts to dumb down the education system to enhance the self esteem of disadvantaged
students, or to "understand" the social roots of crime and "reform" the justice
system to recognize the corrosive effect of such inequities on the "powerless,"
or to financially aid the needy because the system is so rigged against them,
have produced nothing more than increased illiteracy, crime, poverty and general
social misery.
Through the years, we've seen numerous "caring" initiatives like the Great Society
programs emerge, and we've witnessed the iatrogenic results of these initiatives
ultimately turn into today's social problems. Unfortunately, attempting
to "cure" those problems with more of the same "helping" medicine today will only
result in more unintended iatrogenic consequences tomorrow, and so on.....
If this cycle of left-wing "caring" is allowed to continue, the expanding industry
of helping will simply continue to get richer and more powerful while its disadvantaged
customers get "sicker" and poorer.
"Yadah, yadah, yadah..." retort liberals. "We've heard this refrain before from
uncaring conservatives who don't give a damn about the suffering of the less privileged."
But the interesting thing is that John McKnight is a former Executive Director
of the Illinois division of the American Civil Liberties Union, as well as a former
Director of the Midwest Office of the United States Commission On Civil Rights.
Not only that, but Mr. McKnight started his career as a community activist working
with the celebrated radical left-wing community organizer, Saul Alinsky. And today,
McKnight is still an aggressive community activist with an otherwise strong left-wing
perspective.
Obviously, unlike most of the left, though, Mr. McKnight has had a few enlightening
insights during the course of his efforts to change society. Perhaps we might
even view him as another liberal who was "mugged by reality" -- although he has
not become a conservative. But he's definitely a man of the left who has
recognized some of the left's limitations.
If there's a problem with John McKnight's insightful analysis of today's burgeoning
helping industry, however, it's his too narrow Alinsky-influenced focus on the
politico-economic interests at play in the growth of the caring industry. What
McKnight chooses to underemphasize and even ignore are the purely status and narcissistic
interests also motivating today's caring elite -- in particular, the sense of
moral superiority, self-congratulation and specialness that they derive from adhering
to the caring ethic. Today's "caring" progressives not only need "the needy" to
bolster their economic interests. They need them to bolster their sense of superiority
and specialness in relation to other social strata and special-interest groups.
For today's caring classes, it's their perceived sensitivity to the plight of
the disadvantaged, and their support of efforts to "help" the needy, that makes
them feel superior to the rest of society, even those wealthier and more powerful
than them. It's their caring that's the defining lifestyle trait that, in their
minds, sets them apart from the rest of society and allows them to feel socially
"advantaged" in respect to others. Billionaire financiers may make more money
than them. Republican presidents may have more power. But it's the caring classes
who are society's true elite, because they "care" more.
In their minds, it's not the results of their helping initiatives that count (most
of which are disastrous). It's their enlightened values and words. Only they are
sensitive and enlightened enough to care -- which demonstrates their social and
moral superiority over others (even those wealthier and more powerful).
Caring, then, is the unique currency that buys them status superiority and upward
social mobility within today's fragmented social hierarchy -- from their perspective
anyway.
Regardless, John McKnight and his work are still a helpful aid in identifying
the economic interests lurking behind what McKnight identifies as the mask of
love and caring worn by today's professional dogooders. And once it's possible
to recognize the economic interests subverting the caring language and deeds of
today's credentialed "helpers," it's not much of a stretch to identify the narcissistic
and status ambitions also driving this escalating push for a "caring society."
***
© 2003 The
Iconoclast
Murray Soupcoff is the author of 'Canada 1984' and a former
radio and television producer with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. He
also was Executive Editor of We Compute Magazine for several years, and is now
the Managing Editor of the popular Canadian conservative Web site, Iconoclast.ca
- Photo of the author courtesy of staff files
COPYRIGHT
© 2003 BY THE AMERICAN PARTISAN. All
writers retain rights to their work.
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