A definition of social work: A thesis in sociology

								

conditions but the anticipation of wants. If we are not to have
juvenile delinquency boys must have some chance for wholesome
recreation. If we would avoid bad housing we must arrange betimes a
good city plan preserving open spaces where they will be wanted later
and developing each type of building in a neighborhood where it need
not be soon perverted to a use for which it was not intended and will
not be well adapted.
Dr. Simon Patten contended that the present productivity of the world
was such as to free mankind from any fear of general dearth and cause
all our prospects to be potentially in terms of abundance and not of
want, to rescue us from the old “pain economy” of insufficiency and
give us a “pleasure economy” on a safe margin of sufficiency. Under
these circumstances, he said, “world riches may replace the living
sacrifice and become the social contrivance that lowers human costs
and we must cease to think that the anguish of the sentient creature
is compensated by the development of moral qualities which merely
reconcile man to repeating the experience of suffering.”[44] Social
work has already ceased to think in that fashion and is working in
the spirit of a pleasure economy so that the terminology of need is
no longer pre-eminent. “There are times when self-sacrificing zeal is
demanded and all honor to those who then devote or lose themselves in
service. That is only one side of it. The need of sacrifice is always a
reflection on the men or circumstances calling for it.”[45] That is the
view of modern social work, the frame of mind in which it sets about
its work. It talks about what has to be done as a matter of course and
is chiefly concerned with the best way of doing it. It is beginning
to outgrow “sob stories” even in asking support from an indifferent
public--they set too low a standard of toleration and there are some
modern social workers who turn from them abashed, as from dallying with
an outrage beneath endurance. The battle ground of reform must be on
another plain where the initiated see danger but the complaisant still
need convincing.
“When once the worst is gone the second best becomes intolerable.”
Gray, the historian of English philanthropy, describes the effective
philanthropist as the ideal agitator, “It is his to discover
those larger ends of common welfare which reach beyond the moral
perceptiveness of ordinary men in their ordinary moods. He is, as it
were, an explorer in the unmapped world of the ideal life from whence
he brings back news of an unreached good, such tidings as sound like
travelers’ tales in our ears, but which haunt the mind of men until
they seek to verify the story by a practical policy calculated to
transform the actual. Only it must be observed that the most daring
speculator cannot move very far from his base and the wildest Utopia is
determined by the conditions of its year of publication.”[46]