For similar reasons reform must be sympathetic, in the sense that it
must be based on a real understanding, an inside view, of the minds of
the people concerned. No social situation is understood until we can see
truly how the several parties think and feel at critical moments, and
see also something of the process by which they come to think and feel
in this way. In these states of the spirit we get the vital synthesis of
the various factors that have been at work, the actual process of life
here and now. If we have this basis we may hopefully take the next step
of imagining something that will help the process on. Of social workers
without imagination it may be said, as has been said of mediocre poets,
that neither men nor gods have any use for them.
Much breath is wasted in discussing the question whether society or the
individual is to be held responsible for social wrong. To clear thinking
no such problem exists. That is, so far as responsibility exists, it is
both social and individual, these terms merely indicating points of
view. The active individual is responsible, and yet he only sums up the
action of society at the given moment. On the other hand, society, which
has provided the antecedents of the wrong, is responsible, but this only
means a large number of individuals. If Sam Clarke grows up a criminal,
and you say society is responsible, you mean that you, I, and others who
might, among us, have provided better influences for him, failed to do
so. And, after all, Clarke himself has his individual responsibility for
what he does, like the rest of us. The essential change which the
organic view calls for is that we should see all these individual
responsibilities not as separable things, but as working together in one
living whole.
Questions involving personal responsibility can always be treated so as
to make it appear that this is the main factor, or, on the other hand,
that the individual is dominated by impersonal causes. If, for example,
we study unemployment with reference to the fluctuating character of
industry, the lack of rational adjustment between demand and supply, and
the inadequacy of vocational education and guidance, we shall come to
see it as a societal condition over which the individual has little or
no control; but if we take statistics of unemployment with reference to
steadiness, foresight, ambition, and thrift, we may find that the
unemployed largely lack these traits. The two sets of facts are not
contradictory; it is merely a matter of emphasizing one aspect or
another of the same organic condition. Unemployment goes up and down
with general conditions, but also selects the less competent.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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