7
What Is To Be Done?
I came to sociology by way of social work. My first training and
career, that is, was devoted to the business of helping people. In
various ways - with homeless old vagrants, with families coming
to a child-guidance clinic, disturbed adolescents at a youth club,
patients in a psychiatric hospital - I thought that I was doing
good. And I very probably was. Eventually though, in the course
of those usual biographical contingencies we later dignify with
words such as 'conviction', I changed course. It seemed to me
more interesting, more politically worthwhile, even more useful
to start looking at the real causes, the hig questions. So I became a
sociologist.
No one better formulated this move than C. Wright Mills - the
conversion of 'private troubles' into 'public issues'. I was powerfully
impressed by this theoretical agenda, this rype of attack on
purely individualistic approaches to social problems. I remember
also hearing at about this time a parable which Saul Alinsky, the
radical American community organizer used to tell. It went something
like this. A man is walking by the riverside when he notices
a body floating down stream. A fisherman leaps into the river,
pulls the body ashore, gives mouth to mouth resuscitation, saving
the man's life. A few minutes later the same thing happens, then
again and again. Eventually yet another body floats by. This time
the fisherman completely ignores the drowning man and starts
running upstream along the bank. The observer asks the fisherman
what on earth is he doing? Why is he not trying to rescue this
drowning body? 'This time,' replies the fisherman, 'I'm going upstream
to find out who the hell is pushing these poor folks into
the water.'
An impressive message to social workers: as long as you do
nothing about original causes, you will continually just be puIling