Adam Small
Re-reading my writing of last time, about a posy of great visual artists and their works, I came to a consideration of social work – social work being a foremost profession, given the reality of poverty and the misfortunes of people that accompany it. I did not, last time, mention the great Spanish painter, Goya (1746 - 1828), whose works often lead us into the province of social work. So also does work of Velázquez and Vincent van Gogh.
The latter’s (often referred-to) Potato Eaters, obviously (perhaps too obviously) involves poverty. Poverty, as “the haunt of misery”, is a central concern of social work – the discipline being, among other things, a matter of care for the poor (children in particular) as one of life’s “undervalued groups”.
I treasure this description of people with whom social work engages. It was coined by the social worker and writer Ruth Wilkes. What a wonderful professional she was!
As social work professor at the University of the Western Cape (UWC) during the Eighties and Nineties, I prescribed Ruth Wilkes’s work as necessary reading (also for first year students). Some colleagues wondered at this, I know. I, in turn, wondered whether, firstly, they knew Wilkes’s work, and, secondly, whether they cared for the kind of social work it entailed.
Most social workers, and also teachers of it, ride out the profession as a mechanically hands-on affair of intervening – intruding, really – in people’s misery: even this might be helpful, but is not the most sublime practice of the profession.
Wilkes’s social work thinking is not linear, but philosophical throughout, repletely holistic. A respect for persons prevails: persons are not seen as “objects that are in need of help”. Indeed, there is a kind of helping which is base rather than uplifting. It might still pass as social work, but of a kind I would rather not be associated with.
During my teaching of social work, I would represent UWC at the periodic gatherings of the International Association of Schools of Social Work. I recall two visits, one to the USA at Washington’s Catholic University, and one to Tokyo, Japan. I was also privileged to meet social workers in Atlanta, Georgia.
Across the board, I found the same sinkings and rises of our profession as in Cape Town. (Prof. Brunhilde Helm, then Department Head of UCT’s School of Social Work, pleasingly used to call social work “the discipline of charity”.)
The bad trend in social work is a full-frontal, almost ugly, kind of intrusion in people’s travail; the other, Ruth Wilkes’s type of practice.
I was impressed with and greatly appreciative of at least one Social Work teacher I met during these outings, Prof. Stuart Rees of Melbourne, Australia.
Like myself, he had a Ruth Wilkes approach to the profession, and it was pleasant for us, whenever we met, to sit talking about our teaching and practice.
My time in the profession – it was just my good fortune – was preceded by my training in and teaching of Philosophy, and (importantly) my schooling in Fine Art. The significance of a knowledge of visual art for competence in social work is most helpful.
Philosophical insight like that of a Martin Heidegger’s or Ortega y Gasset’s, informs our thinking about concepts like helping and compassion, and provides a background for high quality social work. It is not out of order for one to speak of “high quality” helping, like it is not misguided to speak of high quality concerning any product – even chocolate: after all there is chocolate and chocolate, both being the thing called by that name, the one very different from the other. However, it is a careless judge who does not care one way or the other.
A knowledge of visual art leads us to quality as far as compassion is concerned. The imprint on one’s mind of, say, Velázquez’s misformed dwarves (for instance, Sebastia de Morra, or the court jester Calabazas) – unfortunate brain-impaired persons, primes one to an approach in social work that is simply different from a drudging run-of-the-mill day to day practice. One may not have instant results, but your effort is far more telling.
A Goya-inspired aid to our depth of feeling, is his reminders of the horrors of war, such as his Disaster of the War(referring to Napoleon’s pillaging of Spain during 1808 to 1813). An experience of brain-damaged children came my way during the Seventies when I was with the Western Cape Foundation for Community Work (FCW) in Athlone. A woman from Bokmakierie came into FCW often, with her daughter slung (literally) over her shoulder. The child was probably 20 years and older, but – what a cruel thing to say – a “living cabbage”. I was thrown out of gear: what was there to do? What can helping mean in a situation like this?
Mrs I, the mother, now long dead, came begging, (her husband was always drunk and the house, which I visited, was damp and dark, a veritable hellhole of existence). I would give her some money from our petty-cash box. Other staff told me that this was wrong, that I “just encouraged the woman”. I thought, “Bad cess to you then!” At least, the woman went away feeling she was not unwanted...
Written art, also, is helpful in the forming of compassion. In my writing I have, more than once, mentioned Dostoyevsky’s depiction of poverty. I might also mention Émile Zola.
And, again, there are the children: Mrs I’s daughter and, in general, the children of the Cape Flats – and, yes, of anywhere in the world. Paul Alberts and George Gibbs’s Children of the Flats images it all. Perhaps readers would look at this work. Many of us pass there every day, the council flats at K-town, Athlone: we drive by, but have we ever really looked? Unicef’s journal “The state of the world’s children” also is helpful in this regard.
So much for children of poverty. There are also children of affluence and well-off households with an array of problems of their own – the evil of drugs being just one of these. Here, too, social work has a duty.
But there are other hell-on-earth destinies of children. On my table is the text, Children of the Ashes, which reports on the heartrending situation of children (and adults ) in the wake of war (like in Goya, but this time concerning the aftermath of America’s dropping of the atom bomb on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945).
For Hiroshima it was like it is for Athlone: we drive by, see it all, but it does not register. Robert Jungk writes: “When I asked Mr Hiraoka, the editor of the Chugoku Simban, Hiroshima’s largest local newspaper, which event had engaged the attention of his readers most during the postwar years, he replied without hesitation: ‘The rise of the Carps, our baseball team, from the bottom to the top of the national league!’”. People look at what is clearly there before their eyes, but they prefer not to see misery, rather the baseball or soccer team’s glamour, as if this is greatly important!
Time and time again, then, imagination seems to fail us. Quoting the Nobel Peace Prize laureate, Philip Noel Baker approvingly, Jungk writes: “Imagination is one of the least developed human faculties. The strongest is that of forgetfulness”. “In Japan”, Jungk writes further, “after the lifting of the allied-imposed censorship of the early post-war years, thousands of poems, personal accounts, photos, films, essays, novels, drawings and paintings were produced, seeking to depict and communicate the atomic horror. Countless public events were held and powerful demonstrations occurred all over the world against nuclear re-armament and the atomic threat”. He speaks of the tragic wounds and suffering of women and children (as does John Hersey in his book Hiroshima). “Has this all been (written) in vain?” Jungk asks.
At least, so far, we have been spared the curse of a third world war. There are other curses, though. As far as Social Work is concerned, if it will impact helpfully on the kind of disasters that might await our world, it will have to keep reflecting hard on how it professes itself.