Oxford University Press's Blog, page 584

The hijab can be a feminist act

Feminism and Islam are rarely considered to be complimentary to each other or even capable of coexisting.  A mere cursory glance of any major media outlet and one can find endless articles, newscasts, and videos of radical Islam waging war against the West and systematically oppressing women.  The image of the veiled Muslim woman has become emblematic of the patriarchal control Islam seems to yield unrelentingly over female followers of the faith.  Yet many Muslim women who wear the veil, or practice hijab as it is correctly termed, are speaking out not only in defense of this garment but are also outright rejecting the notion that all women who wear hijab do so out of coercion.  There is very little literature in the social sciences that examines Muslim women who practice hijab from a place of empowerment, receptive to the idea that the hijab can be a feminist act.

A study I conducted which has recently been published in Social Work set out to explore how Muslim women living in America who willingly chose to practice hijab responded to questions about feminist identity, female empowerment, and body image.  Do Muslim women who choose hijab embrace values at odds with feminism or have we as a society merely bought into a limited image of what feminists look like?  The answer was unanimous amongst participants-such women may indeed challenge the image of feminism but are not in contradiction of its core philosophy of gender equality and personal autonomy.  Moreover, many women voiced the opinion that the hijab was not only a refusal to be defined by their physical bodies, but that it also demands others focus on the quality of their intellect and personality.

There is no doubt that radical Islam and authoritarian regimes have exploited the practice of hijab to exert patriarchal control.  Many Americans were horrified by the conditions Afghan women endured under the Taliban and rightfully so. After 9/11, politicians and feminist groups alike repeatedly cited the image of the burqa-clad woman as evidence of the need to send troops to the Middle East.  This was not a new strategy.  Western women’s rights groups were also employed during colonialism in North Africa to rescue Muslim women from Muslim men and from Muslim veils.  Never mind the fact that local Afghan women, such as the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA), have been boldly fighting fundamentalism since the late 1970s.  The message became clear- if the hijab was present then women’s voices were absent.

Has Western feminism been too limited both in understanding the motivations behind why Muslim women wear hijab, as well as in constructing the image of a feminist?  The women in the study would certainly argue that it has.  None of these women fit into the image of the downtrodden and disenfranchised Muslim woman in need of rescue.  All were well educated and most were pursuing post-graduate degrees including PhDs in engineering, medical professionals, and teachers.  One woman owned and operated her own successful business completely independently.  Some were married, some divorced, others single and focused on furthering their education and professional careers.  In both native born and immigrant groups, several were the only women in their families to wear hijab and some did not begin the practice until their late twenties, forties, or even fifties.

Politicians are not the only ones to use the image of Western feminism to their advantage.  Capitalist ventures have modified marketing campaigns to appeal to women as female empowerment became more mainstream.  Ads that glorified the domestic housewife of the 1950s have since been replaced by shampoo, fashion, and feminine hygiene commercials using the rhetoric of choice, freedom, and liberation to sell their products.  Women’s bodies are constantly on display and more often than not portrayed by impossible standards of beauty.  A number of women in this study found such images to be against feminism and argued that through limiting the exposure of their bodies in the public sphere it reduced, if not altogether removed, the pressure to be defined by the beauty industry.

So what does this have to do with social work specifically?

Muslims constitute one of the largest minority groups in America and their numbers are only expected to grow with the rapid expansion of Islam as a religion, as well as the growing refugee crisis from the Middle East.  They are also repeatedly the victims of hate crimes and the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) has found that Muslim women who wear hijab are more often the targets than their male counterparts.  Muslim student groups have been wiretapped on college campuses, Muslim men and women have been violently attacked and even murdered in public, mosques are repeatedly vandalized, some countries have criminalized the hijab, and there is growing sentiment that Islam is simply incompatible with the West.  Studies have even found prejudicial behavior in mental health services, citing examples of clinicians who demanded women remove their hijab during therapy sessions or focusing on the goal of removing the hijab instead of the intended reason the client sought services.

Social work by its very definition seeks to bring attention to prejudicial belief and practices that lead to both poor public policy, as well as poor mental health.  It is incumbent upon all social workers to engage in culturally competent education and advocacy work that embraces diversity rather than establishes fear and distrust in the other.  Muslim women, regardless of if they wear hijab or not, must not be assumed victims of oppression but rather valuable assets to learn from and work alongside with, in our quest for gender equality and a more inclusive America.

Image Credit: Photo by Wahyucurug. Public Domain via Pixabay. 

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On Adapting Emile Zola: Notes from a BBC script writer

Internationally award-winning playwright Oliver Emanuel writes exclusively for the OUP blog about the process of adapting Zola for BBC Radio 4. 

Why adapt Zola? What’s he got to say to us today? If the novels are so good why not leave them as they are – as novels – and forget it?

These are the questions I started with when asked if I’d be interested in adapting not one, not two, not three but twenty novels by Emile Zola, the Rougon-Macquart cycle. I didn’t know Zola well. Like most people, I’d read his first book Therese Raquin and I’d studied J’Accuse at school. And being a playwright, I knew that he was the granddaddy of naturalism. When I thought of Zola I thought of rigorous truth-telling, a darkness beneath the surface, violence, Paris and love-triangles. Of course, I said yes.

Since then Zola has occupied a huge amount of my waking life. The team of writers – Dan Rebellato, Martin Jameson and myself – decided early on that we weren’t interested in doing a ‘straight adaptation’. Dan calls it ‘the river’, a river of stories, with different narrative strands pulled from different books and brought together in dramatic form. That means we take a little bit from The Belly of Paris, another part of His Excellency and a chunk from L’Assommoir. We are making new plays from Zola’s world rather than simply trying to cut them down to dramatic size. It’s a wonderful, irreverent, daring way to adapt but it means we have to dive deep into every novel and that has taken a lot of reading and discussion and dreaming.

When you’re adapting a book, you read it very differently. I’m not just reading Zola. I’m trying to get inside his characters, locate his images and themes, explore his ideas. It’s fully immersive and a bit like wearing someone else’s clothes. Sometimes it’s comfortable and sometimes you wish you’d never borrowed these clothes in the first place.

But then there are the moments when you find it, the way of telling that is surprising and new and exciting yet faithful to the original. I’ll give an example. My radio producer, Kirsty Williams, and I were trying to figure out a way to do Zola’s breakthrough novel L’Assommoir, a story of working class hardship, alcohol addiction and suffering. It’s the novel that made Zola rich and the one that defines the whole cycle. The central character, Gervaise Macquart is brilliantly drawn – both tragic and tough.

Image used with permission. © BBC Radio 4 Productions.

The challenge for us was two-fold: firstly there had been a recent radio version; secondly we didn’t have very much money for actors. Limitations can often sound like complaints but creatively they can be very useful. If you can’t do it that way, you are forced to imagine something new. I remembered that Zola’s original title for the novel (which roughly translates as The Drinking Den) was The Sad Life of Gervaise Macquart and at once the answer seemed obvious. It would be a biography of Gervaise but, more than that, it would be an autobiography. None of Zola’s books are written in the first person but this would allow me to tell the story from a new point of view whilst drawing everything from the original. Gervaise would tell her own story in her own words.

There’s something intimate about radio. The story is close to the listener, it’s in their ear, their kitchen or car. This helped me when I was thinking about how Gervaise might speak. She was talking to a friend, an old friend, and she was remembering her life, telling secrets and speaking of moments of transformation. Zola doesn’t write as much dialogue as, let’s say, Dickens but there were plenty of clues to the roundabout way she thinks and speaks. I’d read the novel many times and so I knew the story by heart. I put it to one side and just let Gervaise talk to me.

What has Zola got to say to us? I come back to this every time I start a new script (and I’m on numbers four and five at the moment!) and it’s not an idle question. To adapt a book, personally I have to believe there’s something worth saying and it has to be urgent. What has Zola got to say to us on this day? There are lots of answers, I believe.

Ultimately Zola’s novels are books about a family. Why do we look back at our own families and tell their stories? Because we want to find out who we are and how we got here. It’s not always easy to hear the answer. In this case, the 104 year old Dide (as played by the amazing Glenda Jackson) finds there’s a lot more to her family than she bargained for.

 

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How fair are criticisms of the ICC?

It has become topical to say that the International Criminal Court (ICC) is in crisis. For some, the ICC has stepped from crisis to crisis. Even before its existence, the Court has been for criticized for its selectivity, statutory limitations, and potential overreach. In practice, critiques have arisen in relation to almost each situation: impartiality and peace and justice dilemmas in Uganda, evidentiary and performance problems in relation to the DRC (e.g., provider confidentiality, intermediaries), enforcement dilemmas in Darfur, politicization and sustainability issues in Libya, inaction critiques in relation to Colombia, and evidence and cooperation problems in Kenya. As Iain Macleod and Shehzad Charania rightly point out in their post, the ICC faces serious challenges in relation to credibility, legitimacy, and expectations. I would like revisit some of these critiques. Looking back at the past decade, it seems that both the work of the ICC, and some of its criticisms, deserve further scrutiny.

ICC practice and critique

The Court is fallible, like any institution. ICC practice is characterized by overreach and under-reach. Preliminary examinations of the Court have turned into one of the most significant instruments of Court practice. The use of ICC intervention as political or hypothetical argument plays an important role in institutional politics and peace negotiations. In environments such as Ukraine, Palestine or Syria, there is a risk that the ICC turns into an instrument of lawfare. The Court’s strong virtual presence contrasts with the more limited trial record of the Court and some of the unintended or contested effects that ICC intervention produces. The Court struggles to meet some of the expectations that it faces. Concerns have been raised in relation to the expeditiousness and fairness of proceedings and the treatment of victims (participation, reparation). It has become doubtful whether the Court should too easily proclaim that its goal is to strengthen domestic jurisdiction or that the absence of cases is a success.

But it is also key to critically examine critiques of the ICC. Critique is often a reflection of deeper frictions that the Court itself is unable to solve: historical inequalities, geo-political frictions, or tensions between global, regional, and local interests. Political violence in many ICC cases has complex causes and origins. Treating the Court like a tool that can be turned on and off like an electronic device to fix accountability dilemmas is likely to result in artificial quick-wins, or long-term failure.

A balanced assessment of the Court requires a fresh look at fair and unfair critique. There is first a need for a certain sense of modesty. The ICC isn’t the solution to all accountability problems, nor is international criminal justice in itself suited to ‘solve’ or fix deeper societal divides. It might be counterproductive to present it as a source of salvation.

Second, it is becoming clear that whatever international justice institutions do, the ICC is likely to disappoint one constituency or another. Where they act, they may criticized for interfering with political priorities, such as negotiations or political settlements. Where they are absent, such as in Syria or North Korea, their absence is deplored.

Third, what is presented as a tension might not always be a ‘negative’ tension. The Statute is full of ambiguities and dilemmas that cannot be solved in the abstract. Ultimately some of these tensions may be ‘positive’ rather than ‘negative’ tensions. Take the debates on ‘peace and justice’ for instance. Intervention in ongoing conflict remains a problem for the ICC and is likely to remain a challenge in the future. It is necessary to refine risk assessment, sequencing, timing, and modalities of Court action. But without the ICC, would there not be a piece of the puzzle missing (e.g., Colombia)?

Similar considerations apply in relation to the role of victims. While there are many valid criticisms of ICC action (e.g., epistemic, capacity, and sociological critiques), the tension seems ultimately to be a ‘positive’ one. It forces international criminal justice to re-think its identity, and articulate its space in the context of mass violations, also vis-à-vis human rights law and transitional justice strategies.

Some lessons learned

Historically, much focus has been placed on ‘grand’ decisions in international criminal law. This trend may be shifting. There have been relatively few ‘signature’ decisions in the ICC context: decisions on the ‘policy’ element of crimes against humanity; the interpretation of modes of liability or reparations; and contested ones, such as on head of state immunity or the power to compel witnesses to testify. But they mark only a tiny fraction of Court activity. It seems that the many of the core issues are developed through practices, policies, and procedural decisions that aren’t in the limelight. In that sense, ICC practice may be emblematic of the transformation of international law, which develops increasingly bottom-up, rather than top-down.

Structurally, international criminal justice in The Hague is somewhat introverted. In some fields, such as sexual- and gender-based violence, the Rome Statute and its procedure are still way ahead of domestic law, and might set important examples. But international criminal justice should be weary of the ‘export of global justice’. In the ICC context, there is sometimes a drive for emancipation, rather than structural openness. Some ICC intervention have been perceived as stifling domestic or local responses, or creating local inequalities (e.g., funding). One of the challenges is to mitigate the risk that Hague justice promotes predominantly global justice, rather than regional or local justice.

Second, the docket of the ICC has been full and rich in terms of crisis situations. There may be sometimes an attempt to try to do too much at the same time. In some respects, less may be more. A few better prepared cases might leave a larger imprint.

Third, there is a certain degree of duplication in terms of procedures. This applies in particular in relation to pre-trial and trial. Sometimes, different Chambers seem to re-invent the wheel. The destiny of the defendant might largely depend on what Chamber he or she faces. This is unsatisfactory on the long term, and will need to be looked in the future.

More fundamentally, there is the existential question: How can the ICC leave a lasting impact although it has to be selective by definition? Should it carry out ‘thematic’ investigations and prosecutions, that signal that certain contemporary forms of atrocity violence, such as electoral violence (Kenya), gender-based and sexual crimes, destruction of cultural property (Mali), or certain types of human tracking are outlawed? Or should it adopt an approach in which it goes deeper into specific conflict situations?

The first approach is appealing. It keeps the ICC at the heart of contemporary challenges, such as ISIS or migration dilemmas, and may enhance its expressivist function on a global scale. But it also has certain risks and drawbacks. Practice in Kenya and the DRC suggest that a few thematic investigations and prosecutions alone may not suffice alone for the ICC to build a strong case and evidence base, or leave a sustainable impact. In some cases, withstanding public pressure to become involved without a might be a legitimate choice, or at least a feasible technique of damage-control, given that other situations under ICC scrutiny won’t simply disappear from the docket.

Featured image: Windows: International Criminal Court, The Hague. Photo by Roman Boed. CC BY 2.0 via Flickr.

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Wine ‘made in China’

Wine ‘made in China’ has gained increased attention around world in recent years. Splitting my time as I do between Europe and China, I have the opportunity to assess the health and potential of the Chinese market with a good degree of objectivity. There are five things I would like to stress:

Firstly, domestic wine transaction has changed. In the past it was skewed by governmental purchase and the ‘gifting’ market. But it is now going through self-adjustment to concentrate on consumption-driven behaviour. Well-educated younger generations are becoming increasingly important, growing into Key Opinion Leaders (KOLs) or knowledgeable and passionate consumers. However, given the massive country and the fragmented market segmentations, this development is uneven. Sophistication still lies mainly in the coastline cities — especially the culturally paramount metropolitan Shanghai. Wine education, therefore, has never been more critical than it is now.

Secondly, inside the winery the focus is shifting from mass production of purchased grapes to estate-owned plantings. Two factors are driving this: 1) Chinese enologists and winemakers who trained in classic wine regions elsewhere in the world have now returned to their homeland and are ambitiously exploring the market potential, and the opportunities for innovation. 2) A small number of winemakers who stayed in China ploughed on with their local domains since the very tough years of the late 1990s. Their forward-looking work in terroir and vineyard management is now respected worldwide.

Table sorting at CITIC Guo An Wine Co. Photo courtesy of Young Shi.

Thirdly, some flagship wine regions now receive local government support in a variety of ways; the industry is seen as a high priority that stimulates peripheral industries and the local economy. Many different initiatives have been introduced to incentivize owners, including ‘flying winemakers’ (experts brought in from abroad), competitions, and even new classifications similar to ‘Bordeaux growth’.

Fourthly, although the most available Chinese wines on the market currently are still made of Cabernet Gernischt, Cabernet Sauvignon or Merlot grapes, there is a clear trend for growers to experiment with more varieties such as Rhine Riesling, Aglianico, and Pinot Noir. The understanding of different varieties in relation to the local terroir is still at infant stage.

Last but far from least, the Chinese market for imported wine has grown enormously. But it is also fiercely competitive. In my view, European producers have had an over-optimistic view of the market’s potential; in truth they are competing with wines from Chile, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and elsewhere which offer excellent value-for-money alternatives.

How to stand out from the crowd with sustainable business growth is the burning question facing everyone seeking long-term success in China, for domain-owners both home and abroad.

Featured image credit: Barrels in De Long winery. Photo courtesy of Young Shi.

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Is there an evolutionary advantage to religion?

Few deny the sheer significance of religious belief to human society, a topic of study that has provided much insight into how we lived previously, how we live today, and how we will live in the future. However, for what purpose, exactly, did religion originate? Is religious belief just an accidental outcome of human civilization? Or does it affect people’s behavior in a way that is evolutionarily advantageous? We spoke with Dominic Johnson, author of God is Watching You: How the Fear of God Makes Us Human, who suggests science and religion, two spheres thought to be in perpetual conflict, actually evolved together for mutual human benefit.

Image Credit: Original image by latvian. CC BY 2.0 via Flickr. Derivative work by Connie Ngo.

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Why Henry George matters

What value does the story of Henry George, a self-taught economist from the late nineteenth century, hold for Americans living in the early 21st century? Quite a lot, if we stop to consider the ways in which contemporary American society has come to resemble America in the late-nineteenth century, a period popularly known as the Gilded Age. As in our times, that era was marked by a dramatic increase in income inequality. It also witnessed a sharp and disturbing rise in the numbers of Americans living in poverty, even as Wall Street boomed and overall productivity soared. The Gilded Age was also marked by a surge in the size and power—and political influence—of large corporations and banks. And the politics of late-nineteenth century American society were characterized by extreme partisanship and paralysis. Indeed, the parallels between then and now are so striking that many contemporary progressive reformers, activists, and commentators have taken to referring to the era in which we now live as the Second Gilded Age.

If we are indeed living in a Second Gilded Age, then we can gain important insights into potential solutions to our economic, social, and political problems by taking a close look at the first Gilded Age. In particular, it is instructive to examine the people who emerged in this period to demand reforms—many of which were enacted in the subsequent Progressive Era. Henry George was one of these figures and he gained an enormous following among a wide cross section of American society.

George was a little-known journalist living in California in the 1870s when, moved by the aforementioned troubling trends of the Gilded Age, he began to study economics and history with an eye toward writing a book. The result of this effort was a book published in 1879 titled Progress and Poverty. The book is still in print and available in many languages. As its title suggests, George focused on a vexing question: why, amidst so much material and technological progress, was poverty increasing? This was, George warned, “the riddle which the Sphinx of Fate puts to our civilization, and which not to answer is to be destroyed.”

The book became a best seller and launched George as one of the era’s best-known and most influential reformers. The solution George proposed—a “single-tax” on land values—appealed to some of his followers. But far more were drawn to and inspired by the broad claims he made regarding American’s republican heritage and values. And here we see where George speaks to the concerns of our age.

First, George explained in clear and compelling terms how inequality threatened to destroy American democracy. Just as in our age, many prominent figures in the Gilded Age like Andrew Carnegie argued that inequality was not a problem. The free market, they argued, would provide enough for all who were willing to work hard, make sacrifices, and play by the rules. But George dismissed such assertions as naïve. Inequality was produced by structural flaws in the economy and if unchecked it would inevitably transform the United States into a Dickensian nation of haves and have nots, a society where a small cadre of aristocrats lorded over the impoverished masses. “In our time…” wrote George, “creep on the insidious forces that, producing inequality, destroy Liberty.”

Henry George (1839-1897) at 26, American political economist. Image is a daguerreotype. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

Political equality alone was no longer sufficient to ensure republican citizenship in the modern age of factories and wages. “It is not enough that men should vote; it is not enough that they should be theoretically equal before the law” said George. “They must have liberty to avail themselves of the opportunities and means of life.” In other words, there was an economic dimension to republican citizenship and democracy. Social reforms were necessary to ensure that all people enjoyed a decent standard of living.

Second, George called for a renewed commitment to the common good. As in the early 21st century, where Ayn Rand and libertarianism have enjoyed a boom in popularity, the Gilded Age saw wealthy and successful Americans celebrate individualism as the supreme republican ideal. George was no socialist and he acknowledged the importance of individualism. But he also argued that there were other republican ideals like the common good that could not be ignored. The framers of the Constitution, after all, justified it as a means to promote “the general Welfare” of society.

Attending to the common good, argued George, was especially important in a modern industrial society where people’s lives were increasingly interconnected. In such a society, wrote George, “the well-being of each become[s] more and more dependent upon the well-being of all—the individual more and more subordinate to society.” A true republican society was one in which the greatest number of people had access to good jobs, decent wages, humane housing, and effective schools. As George claimed: “We all might have leisure, comfort and abundance.”

And finally, George argued that the government needed to be empowered to enact measures that would limit inequality and promote the common good. George acknowledged that the Founding Fathers believed limiting government power was essential for the preservation of republican liberty. But he contended, they thought as men living in a small-scale, rural society. In a modern industrial society of massive corporations and banks, laissez-faire government allowed the greedy and the unscrupulous to oppress the people. The power of the government needed to be increased to protect and promote democracy and republican ideals. For George, this meant instituting the single-tax. But understood more broadly, George (along with many other early progressive thinkers) was helping to make the case that the government was no longer a threat to liberty but its protector.

These three points articulated by George about the dangers of extreme inequality, unchecked individualism, and laissez-faire government posed to democracy and republican citizenship remain relevant today in this Second Gilded Age. They formed the basis of a progressive movement in the early 20th century that reined in many of the excesses of the first Gilded Age and lay the groundwork for subsequent reform eras in the 1930s and 1960s. Whether a similar movement animated by similar ideals of equality, democracy, justice, and the common good remains to be seen.

This article originally appeared on the Columbia University Press blog.

Featured image credit: “A close-up of the front of the bust in the monument to journalist and economist Henry George” by Mattercore. CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

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Can institutions care? An analysis of Pope Francis’ call to care

On his recent trip to the United States, Pope Francis made an appeal for caring before a joint meeting of Congress: “A political society endures when it seeks, as a vocation, to satisfy common needs by stimulating the growth of all its members, especially those in situations of greater vulnerability or risk, is always based on care for the people.” At various points on his trip the Pope expressed concern for poverty, immigration, incarceration, and capital punishment. He was clearly suggesting that the United States could do so much more to care for its citizens and the world’s citizens. Pope Francis also invokes the language of care in his 2015 encyclical, Laudato Si’, Care for Our Common Home, where he addresses the environment and environmental justice. The issues of care that the Pope is confronting have implications for individual morality but they are also systemic concerns that need social and political responses. He appears to be claiming that institutions, particularly developed nations like the U.S., should care. In many ways, this is a strange and provocative question. Can institutions care?

On the one hand, the vision of Thomas Hobbes who described the state of nature as a cruel battle pitting everyone against everyone else is fading. Emerging anthropological, historical and neurological evidence indicates that it is indeed care that has been, and will continue to be, a prerequisite for human survival and thriving. In this respect, the Pope is correct that care is necessary for humanity to endure, but what is the role of “political society” for this endurance? In the last several decades, political theorists and others have begun to take up the issue of the role of public policies and practices in care. One of the challenges is that care is experienced at the individual level between human beings. For people, care is experienced as a hug, an offering of food, medical attention to one’s body, or the attentive listening of a friend. Institutions do not hug, smile, listen, or touch. People do those things.

Pope Francis Celebrates Concluding Mass in Philly by Aleteia Image Department. CC BY-NC 2.0 via Flickr

Beginning in the 1980’s theorists began addressing a new, relational approach to morality referred to as “care ethics.” At first, in the process of defining this moral approach, much of the theorizing focused on relational dyads—the care between two people—because humans perceive of care on that basis. However, quickly concerns about the role of social institutions such families, companies, municipalities or nation states in establishing policies and practices that either foment or restrict care arose. To be sure, care is a powerful human force that is capable of overcoming social restrictions. For example, even in prison, inmates can exhibit kindness and care for one another. Yet, we know that there can be larger forces at work in the delivery of care. In Germany, federal law allows parents to take up to 156 weeks of leave to care for a newborn at full and then partial pay. In the United States, federal law limits parents to 14 weeks of unpaid leave each. In the family, the care is experienced by the child as coming from the parents and other participants but national policies are not insignificant to how that care is delivered. Care is indeed personal, and political.

So Pope Francis’ call for care and compassion would seem to be a humane request that should enjoy widespread appeal. In fact, the Pope has enjoyed tremendous popularity among progressives and environmentalists for his humility and efforts to place a caring spotlight on issues historically overlooked by leaders of the Roman Catholic Church. However, there is an intriguing twist to the Pope’s efforts as we respond to the question of whether institutions care. The Pope explicitly places his call for care in a Christian tradition of care, but Christian notions of care are not exactly the same as those developed by modern care theorists. One of the essential claims of contemporary care theorists is that rich authentic care is one that is responsive to the other. As such, caregivers must listen and respond to the one needing care with what will best allow the one cared-for to thrive and flourish. Such an approach precludes ideological restrictions. As progressive as the Pope has been, he is still the leader of a dogmatic institution. Papal care does not include the possibility of someone needing an abortion, marrying someone of the same sex, or women being allowed into leadership positions of the Catholic Church. As long as such ideological restrictions exist, the Pope can be a champion for only a limited range of caring possibilities. As useful as the Pope’s call for greater care is, the limitations placed on caring falls short of the moral ideal developed by care ethicists.

So can institutions care? Well, not really. Only people can care. However institutions can provide the social structure to support caring if they do not allow ideological limitations to get in the way.

Feature image credit: Embrace Sculpture by Eric Kilby. CC BY-SA 2.0 via Flickr.

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Suicide in Nazi Germany in 1945

When the US Army took the Saxon city of Leipzig in April 1945, a gruelling scene was revealed inside the town hall. The Nazi treasurer of the city, his wife, and his daughter had all committed suicide. But these suicides were not isolated cases. In the spring of 1945, Nazi Germany went to its end in an unprecedented wave of suicides. Not only Hitler and other leading Nazi officials ended their lives amidst Nazi Germany’s total defeat, but also thousands of lower-ranking Nazi officials and ordinary people.

Suicide at the Third Reich’s end almost became a routine phenomenon, despite the strong Christian taboo on killing oneself.

It is tempting to interpret these suicides as direct reflections of the Hitler cult and years of Nazi propaganda that had glorified a notion of heroic self-sacrifice. While there was indeed a suicidal atmosphere at the end of the Third Reich, when people believed that everything was coming to an end, by no means all suicides in this context were directly related to Nazi ideology.

To be sure, for most Nazis, the Third Reich was unimaginable without Hitler, and it is therefore no coincidence that many Nazi leaders killed themselves immediately after they heard of Hitler’s death, reported on the wireless as heroic self-sacrifice. Fear of Allied retribution was a frequent motivation for Nazi and military leaders to kill themselves as well as the determination to maintain control over their lives and bodies. For these Nazi leaders, killing oneself was a final, masculine stand and a reaffirmation of the Nazi creed. Surrender was not an option, invoking memories of the German surrender in 1918, a black date for the Nazis.

 For many Germans living the war experience of 1945, politics, the war, and everyday life came together in a lethal cocktail in which for many, there was a complete lack of a future perspective.

What about ordinary people’s suicides? Five times more people killed themselves in 1945 in Germany than in previous years, according to official statistics. This figure is likely an underestimate given the administrative defeat that accompanied the German defeat. Still, these were the highest suicide levels ever recorded in modern German history.

While statistics give us a rough overview of the extent of the suicide wave they completely disregard individual fates and circumstances. A number of suicide notes and police investigations, compiled by the Berlin criminal police, allows glimpses into the micro-level of suicide and approach the motivations of ordinary people’s suicides. Nervousness and depression featured as the most prominent suicide motives in these documents, although we must bear in mind that Nazi propaganda also had an impact on the ways in which ordinary people represented their suicides to those they left behind. In suicide notes left by women, fear of being raped by Red Army soldiers was a significant suicide motive. In Berlin, many women even carried razor blades in their handbags for the eventuality, while members of the Hitler Youth are said to have distributed capsules of potassium cyanide to the audience of the last concert of the Berlin Philharmonic before the end of the war. While such stories may be exaggerated they nevertheless capture the atmosphere of the time in which everything was coming to an end.

For many Germans living the war experience of 1945, politics, the war, and everyday life came together in a lethal cocktail in which for many, there was a complete lack of a future perspective. The destructive energies of the Third Reich which had brought violence, genocide, and destruction to Europe on an unprecedented scale finally reached the home front and found their most extreme expression in a wave of self-destruction. It would be a long time until the consequences of this suicide were overcome.

Headline image credit: Ruins of the Reichstag in Berlin, 3 June 1945. By No 5 Army Film & Photographic Unit, Hewitt (Sgt). Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

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Does the meat industry harm animals?

Should we eat animals? Vegetarians often say “No, because the meat industry harms animals greatly.” They point to the appalling conditions in which animals are raised in factory farms, and the manner in which they are killed.

Meat-eaters often reply that this objection is ill-founded because animals owe their very existence to the meat industry. The meat industry cannot be said to harm animals, because without this industry these animals would not have existed at all. Implicit here is the idea that something can harm a being only if it makes her worse off in some way than she would otherwise have been. Without the meat industry, these animals would not have been, and so would not have had a level of well-being at all.

But the meat industry does not harm these animals by bringing them into existence. It harms them by giving them worse lives than they might otherwise have had. These animals are harmed by the fact that, once in existence, they are treated so badly, rather than given happy lives.

Defenders of meat might concede this point. Still, they might insist, it is only factory farming that gives animals worse lives than these animals might have had. There is no objection here to free-range farming, which gives animals plenty of green space to roam around in, good quality food, contact with each other, and then kills them painlessly in their sleep without their anticipation.

I disagree. Even animals raised in these sort of conditions would be better off living longer lives in such conditions. Free-range farming harms animals by giving them shorter lives than they might have had.

Now, some dispute that cows, pigs, chickens, etc., have anything to gain by extra days, weeks, years, etc. Since these animals have no future-directed desires—and certainly no long-term projects or plans—they cannot be harmed by a painless death.

“Gertie”, by Ben Bramble. Image used with permission.

But I think this is a mistake. One doesn’t need future-directed desires in order for more life to be good for one. It is sufficient, I think, that this extra life would involve qualitatively new pleasures (i.e., pleasures that bring something qualitatively new in terms of pleasurableness into one’s life).

Consider a family dog, Gertie, running around today in the local park, chasing sticks, meeting new dogs, having new olfactory pleasures, and exploring parts of the park she has never been to before. It seems clear to me, and I hope to you, that it was a good thing for Gertie that she lived on until today. If she had died peacefully in her sleep last night, this would have been bad for her, since she would not have lived on to experience all these wonderful qualitatively new doggy pleasures.

Likewise, it seems to me, cows roaming free in a green paddock with plenty to eat, even if they have no future-directed desires, may have evolving social lives with each other that are a source of qualitatively new pleasures for them as time goes on, slow dawning realizations about their lives or vague increments in understanding that are pleasurable in various ways, different or deeper appreciations of the field in which they are grazing as it undergoes changes during the shifting seasons, or experiences of watching their offspring grow into adulthood and reproduce that involve pride or satisfaction. To kill them when they are young or middle-aged would be to rob them of these qualitatively new pleasures.

I suspect that many who think these animals have nothing to gain by extra years believe this only because they think that the pleasures available to such animals are ‘just more of the same’. This, however, seems to me false.

Suppose it is granted that animals on free-range farms would be better off living into old-age than being painlessly killed in their sleep during youth or middle-age. Defenders of meat might object that there is no objection here to free-range farming in which animals are allowed to live into old age or until they die of natural causes.

This is true. But would there be much of a market for such meat? This is unclear given that many meat-eaters seem to be of the opinion that the flesh of older animals is tough and tasteless.

Suppose that all I have said is right. Free-range farming that kills animals prematurely harms them by depriving these animals of qualitatively new pleasures. It still does not follow that we shouldn’t eat animals. To establish that, we would need to show in addition that this harm is greater than the net benefit to humans of getting to eat animals. But this is a topic for another day.

Featured image credit: New Zealand cows, by jeffjuit. Public domain via Pixabay.

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Should social work be evidence-based?

Health care reform in the United States has promoted policies and practices that are evidence-based. Prevention, diagnoses, and treatment decisions are to be guided by the best available empirical evidence. Decisions about what treatments are to be provided are to be informed by findings of randomized, controlled, research studies when such evidence is available. When more than one treatment option is available, choices are to be based on comparative effectiveness research, which examines the relative costs and benefits of these options. This view of evidence-based policy and practice (EBP) now influences decisions of funders, insurance plans, policy-makers, and individual practitioners. The evidence-based framework now dominates decision-making in the major health and mental health professions in the United States as well as in many other countries. The evidence-based framework is influential not only in health care but also in education, criminal and juvenile justice, international development, and many other discipline and professional practice areas. Yet, this framework has not yet permeated social work professional practice. Should it?

In “Evidence-based Social Work Practice: Issues, Controversies, and Debates,” I have reviewed both arguments for and arguments against using the evidence-based framework in social work. In this blog I focus on one issue which I think is basic, and depending on one’s point-of-view, the relevance of EBP to social work stands or falls. I would phrase the question: “Is social work practice fundamentally an art form in which change is achieved through establishment of a personal relationship between a practitioner and a client relying on interpretation of the meaning-carrying expressions of others or; is social work practice better viewed as a scientific discipline in which change is achieved through specific intervention methods and technologies subject to verifiability through empirical research?”

From the earliest days of the field, social work scholars have viewed the core social work method (i.e., social casework) as an art based on relationship. After examining definitions proposed by a wide range of scholars through the mid-20th century, Swithun Bowers described social casework as: “an art in which knowledge of the science of human relations and skill in relationship are used to mobilize capacities in the individual and resources in the community appropriate for better adjustment between the client and all or any part of his total environment.” And, building upon the views of eminent social work scholars such as Mary Richmond and Gordon Hamilton—a most influential social work educator of the mid-twentieth century—Florence Hollis, wrote: “Casework is in essence an experience between two people—a totality that rests upon the feelings of both and upon delicate nuances of interaction that can only be described as art rather than science.—The art comes largely by intuition—intuition called forth by concern.”

Indeed, in many European countries social work education is located within the humanities and it is viewed as a hermeneutic discipline. One of the most prominent European social work scholars, Walter Lorenz, expresses this view forcefully when he observes:

Wiping out the historical frame within which a form of social work takes place capable of engaging with issues of identity and culture would mean wiping out the possibility of understanding clients as persons in a hermeneutic sense. It would make social work clinical and functional as a means of turning people into objects through the helping process and losing essential parts of their personhood. This is why the current language of management and efficiency, the preoccupation with rules and procedures, the advance of a positivist evidence-based practice model and the focus on risk reduction are all threats to the central mandate of social work which is not to repair situations of need and deficit but to accompany and assist people in coping with their lives appropriately and competently. (p. 610)

As Streiner and I observed, citing Stephen Webb (p. 57):

EBP is criticized as being a positivistic and mechanistic application of technical rationality, serving new managerialist strategies seeking to advance a performance culture that strips practitioners of their professional judgment and discretion… In contrast to EBP “real” practice decision making in this view is seen as “—indeterminate, reflexive, locally optimal at best and based on a limited rationality,” and that “—cognitive heuristic devices are the determinants of decision making and not evidence,” such that “real practice” decision making relies more on common sense than scientific, rational processes…”

In spite of these criticisms, I have been a strong advocate for infusing the EBP framework into social work. This is because I view social work practice, like other health and mental health professions, as accountable to society and to its clients for outcomes that can stand the test of “effectiveness,” as determined by high quality outcomes studies meeting scientific criteria of quality, strength, and relevance. In the early days of the social work profession it may have been true that scientifically-validated intervention methods were not yet available to the profession and, consequently, decisions about how best to help clients necessarily relied on common sense reasoning, authoritative opinion, and tradition. In such circumstances providing a personalized, friendly relationship to those in need was a reasonable and more than likely helpful thing to do. However, thanks to advances in the social and behavioral sciences and intervention research, considerable evidence is now available pointing the way to intervention methods, technologies, and techniques that have specific beneficial effects.

These interventions do not negate the importance of the artful use of relationship and interpretation as common, powerful components of any effective social work intervention but, rather, they build upon these components. To be an accountable and ethical profession, social work needs to make use of these interventions for the benefit of its clients and to join the other helping professions in adopting the evidence-based practice framework.

Ed Mullen reflects on 5 years as Editor in Chief of Oxford Bibliographies in Social Work and the future of digital research:

Featured image credit: “Restorative Justice at CivicSummer” by Daniel X. O’Neil. CC BY 2.0 via Flickr.

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