The Personal and the Political (RLE Social Theory)

Social Work and Political Action

Paul Halmos

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317651444
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Sociologie

Are human misery, poverty and despair a result of personal inadequacy or social injustice? Therefore is the solution to these problems psychotherapy or political action? In one of the most important books on social work for a decade, Paul Halmos tries to resolve a dilemma which many social workers experience acutely – the conflict between a desire to help those in need and a fear that, by doing so, they merely support a political system which should, itself, be changed. Such a dilemma was highlighted during the sixties when 'casework' and personal counselling became discredited by the 'rediscovery' of widespread poverty and inequality in western society. To many the only solution seemed to be urgent and radical political action. For Professor Halmos the realities are more complex – an exclusive preoccupation with either personal or political solutions is unlikely to prove fruitful – what is needed is a dual sensitivity and balance. Yet for the author it is the political solution which carries within it the greater risk and he warns of the dangers inherent in the total politicization of social concerns. He argues that social action can become political action and ultimately political control.

1 Introduction

DOI: 10.4324/9781315763491-2

Indecision, caution and equilibration

Diligent caution tends to be viewed as indecision, and indecision tends to be regarded as a failing in virtue. This bias possibly comes from our notoriously martial past: ‘He who hesitates is lost!’ It is time to invent and make popular new moralizing tags for an un-martial future. ‘He who hesitates is saved’ might do for a start. But, perhaps, this would go a little further than we intended, for all that we need is to reassert the moral respectability of caution – not the caution which conceals indecisiveness and incapacity, but one which signifies strength and resistance to the temptation of a rushed verdict and premature action.

Of course, I know that the dictionary is well able to distinguish ‘indecision’ from ‘caution’, but many of us, when in fear of the first, throw the second to the winds. I say reassert the virtue of caution, because there has been abroad a full-throated exasperation with social thinkers who profess chariness and vigilance in the face even of the most pressing moral discontent, and whose professions, understandably enough, seem to their critics declarations of indolence or complacency. After all, people will say, contemporary man has urgent and terrible grievances: cultivating a stance of prolonged judiciousness is a bourgeois nicety.

I hold no brief for a procrastinating rearguard, shoring up against the flood of change. I merely hold the entirely unoriginal view that flooding a land is not the same thing as irrigating it.

The chapters which follow do not argue against ‘radical’ change; they only challenge some radical oversimplifications and cavalier styles. I have no quarrel with the radical critic so long as he includes himself among his targets. I commend in these essays a ‘radical sociology of radical sociology’, and – before we squirm from the brink of the abyss of infinite regress, ‘a radical sociology of a radical sociology …’ – I plead that we get a grip of the parapet and have a long and leisurely look.

In the face of radical and peremptory invitations to the sociologist that he too should be more peremptory, I plead for a rehabilitation of caution. I speak of ‘rehabilitation’ and ‘reassertion’ because the culture of the past has some distinguished and attractive testimonials to the effect that an unmade-up mind is not necessarily of an unmindful make-up. The most quoted is in Keats. He praised the condition he called ‘negative capability’, a condition in which ‘… a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason’. Browning's ‘honest thief’, ‘tender murderer’, and ‘superstitious atheist’ represent all of us, sociologists included:

We watch while these in equilibrium keep

The giddy line midway.

Of course the sociologist is committed to look for facts and apply reason, yet all great theoretical sociologies transcend both, especially by steadying the ‘giddy line midway’. The last chapter of this book will furnish some evidence that this is so.

On the other hand, we might say that it is all very well for the poet: he can sit back and let his inspiration take over. He need make no moral-political decisions – it is generally held that the fewer he makes the better his art. The social scientist, on the other hand, is expected to be definitive, both morally and politically, to be informative, authoritative, and to provide conclusions of use to others who wish to act for society in practical ways.

All of us, sociological scholars included, prefer clear-cut answers to impartial vacillation; even if not the scholars themselves, other people certainly prefer sociological intelligence to be supplied to them unambiguously, and not shrouded in doubts, mysteries, and uncertainties. People embrace the radical critic who speaks as if certainty were a virtue and uncertainty villainous. The stark truth, that mostly it is impossible for us to secure lastingly unambiguous social intelligence, is challenged by radical impatience. For radical sympathizers the sturdy affirmations not only have a strong appeal but also depend on their sturdiness for a sense of unqualified validity: ifs and huts and reservations have no place. Intellectual humility and dilatoriness are necessary to intellectual honesty but not to radical activism.

When faced with contradictions in their diagnostic, the radical critics tend to elevate the grand irreconcilables into a unitary theory of ‘dialectics’ and thus relieve themselves of the duty of accounting for holding views or for entertaining hypotheses which are equally plausible but are in contradiction. Those sensitive to the internal dissension of almost everything around us often speak of the ‘paradoxical nature’ of the world, and those who view the painful fits and bloody starts of the social process often speak of its ‘dialectical nature’. One is not certain whether ‘paradoxical’ and ‘dialectical’ are intended to be true of the ontology of the world and of the history of its social process, or whether they are mere slogans to conceal our incomprehension of a puzzling world. The terms do not themselves disclose any superordinate principle with the help of which we could exact some human sense from these contradictions.

After all, what is so supremely human about a ‘dialectic’ rhythm? Or so obviously superhuman? Whenever we are lost for directions, whenever we cannot but affirm and deny at the same time, we exclaim, ‘ “Paradoxical” and “dialectical” is the nature of the world’, and it is not surprising that our diagnoses reflect this. We make a virtue out of our necessary ignorance and bring indecision to an end by claiming that we have had a vision of a superordinate principle. Whereas it is more likely that we have brought indecision to an end by firmly deciding that a kind of ‘theorized’ indecision shall be the law.

There have been attempts at creating unifying explanations for contradictory accounts: either through Hegelian structuring of a dialectical series – making meaningful continuities out of meaningless discontinuities, and reaching for a reconciliation between contradictory propositions about successive events in Hegelian syntheses – or, like Niels Bohr, through attempts at subsuming incompatible accounts of reality under the principle of complementarity – making meaningful syntheses out of the incompatible accounts about the same or simultaneous events. Both approaches are rebellions against discordance and indecision. They are heroic acts of defiance, not conclusive victories. They are intellectual formulae attempting to regiment the historical or contemporary disorder of events. They are also intellectual recipes for an ineffable perception of balance and design, and not radical pointers towards revolutionary initiative. The regimen of equilibration, on the other hand, is a prescription to avoid effecting closure in the theories of change and a technique of comporting oneself in the face of the facts and of the theories. Unlike the Marxist fusion of theory and practice – where the closure in theory merges with determined action, action without reservations – in my case the fusion of theory and practice will consist of practising the rejection of intellectual closure.

Hypotheses or doctrines of a dialectic or complementary design are entirely legitimate except when they are allowed to silence the pluralism of principles which they have been allowed to knit together. If these principles are permitted to ruin our ideas about the ‘many-sidedness of things’¹ they become rigid doctrines, not aids to a balanced vision. Just as love and hate are real, whilst ‘ambivalence’ is our abstraction of their relationship, so in dialectics or complementarity the parts are real whilst the abstractions are merely our own attempts to order and understand the relationship of parts. If these abstractions, these general theories about dialectics or complementarity, cease to encourage equilibration and doctrinally stop inquiry, they are to be repudiated. So long as they underpin the psychological exercises of equilibration, which is a perception of contradictory and irreconcilable propositions, they are useful, though provisional, intellectual instruments.

Alas, equilibration is essentially unheroic, though, of course, the jeers of the radically impatient and the missiles of their activists are making the stance hazardous. In an age in which ‘tolerance’ can be saddled with the adjective ‘repressive’, the tolerant person may be persecuted and repressed and his tolerance punished.² Herein may lie its rehabilitation: a martyred caution may become, once again, more attractive and accumulate more charismatic prestige in the end than any amount of radical rhetoric. And all the time, it has the advantage of prudence on its side: reason and reasonableness dictate that by equilibration we should retain the maximum number of options to intervene in society.

In cultivating a bi-focal or multi-focal sociological perspective, I am not advocating an opportunistic, a forever wait-and-see attitude to social intervention. Let the moral fervour and the intuitively adopted priorities of the citizens express themselves in action, but the social scientist qua scientist must maintain an equilibrating stance when faced with unresolved contradictories. There is nothing opportunistic or cowardly in this refusal to be impetuous; his self-control will certainly not earn him the applause of the active, the restless and, therefore, of the more fashionable and conspicuous in society. But there are some compensations, chiefly a greater depth and reliability of perception.

This book identifies two polar and distinct manners of intervening in society, the personal and the political modes. In due course I shall explain the nature and uses of this polarization, but already here, at this earliest opportunity, I must say forcefully that I do not regard these two modes as mutually exclusive alternatives or options. This is not a matter of choosing one and dispensing with the other. Nor is it a matter of making a new ‘mix’ of the two contrary principles. Many write as if the politicization of the personal would create an aromatic blend like whisky and soda or coffee and cream. They believe that a halfway compromise between the two extreme positions can be achieved through hybridization. They do seem to think that the truth lies somewhere between. I will argue that the politicizes of the personal and the personalizers of the political both end up by seeking new legitimations either for total politics or for total personalism; I will argue that the solution lies in recognizing that there are no halfway solutions, that a constant equilibration between incompatible polarities is the sole response we can justify both by logic and by a humanistic moral philosophy.

The personal–political dichotomy

Every citizen is a change-agent of society, for every citizen makes a difference to the society in which he participates. Already this participation amounts to intervention and action. Of course, not all citizens work directly to bring about social changes. A great many active and inventive citizens work on goods, on the physical environment, on art-objects, on scientific theory, on mathematical formulae. These citizens are often responsible for social changes but these changes are incidental and mostly unintentional. In this book I shall be concerned with the true social change-agents, that is to say, with those who are resolved to change either the rules of conduct in societies at large, or the personalities of individuals, one by one. I shall deliberately polarize these two, and shall refer to them respectively as the ‘political’ and the ‘personal’ change-agents of society.

When I polarize the personal and the political and make them face each other as distinctly different and ideologically incompatible forms of thought, sentiment and conduct, I have in mind all radical forms of the political. But what meaning are we to attach to my use of the label ‘radical political’? Whenever there is a demand for a prompt and total systemic change, broadly according to the universalistic ethic of Marxist–Leninist teaching, even when this demand is couched in language which is not Marxist–Leninist, we are faced with a radical political advocacy. I have no formal ‘definition’ of the ‘radical political’ and I let this concept emerge as I go along. I should, however, mention that the positions and views which I include share a total rejection of all social systems which are not predominantly socialist or revolutionary.

It would not be at all incorrect – even if unusual – to speak also of the ‘radical personal’, for both in Jesus and in Freud the regimens of personal renewal have been spectacularly radical Both have aimed at digging up the roots of sinful or neurotic personalities and at replanting them in salvation or sanity.

Of course, liberal, conservative, fascist, and other ideological variations each and all express themselves in political terms and claim to root their respective doctrines in some theory or other about the species qualities of man. But the liberal and the conservative either are indifferent to the ideology of the personalist or are willing to support the personalist, for he makes no obvious political threat to their positions. In fact, the moral philosophy of both liberalism and conservatism has much in common with a personalistic bias. The fascist, whether clerico-fascist, paramilitary fascist or military fascist, explicitly subordinates personalistic initiatives to his own interests. A politically free personalism is damned by all fascist-type systems, for it encourages too much independence. The clerico-fascists frown upon personalists for their condoning of sinfulness through clinical tolerance and therapeutic acceptance. The paramilitary and military r嶲imes charge personalists with weakening the martial fibres of the citizens. Naturally, in these instances, there is an obvious polarization between the personal and the political. Nevertheless this polarization is of comparatively limited concern today, and was or is of interest only in places like Franco's Spain, the colonels’ Greece, Chile, and a few others. The form in which we of the advanced western industrialized communities experience this polarization is in its two extremes, the left-radical political change-agent and the personalist change-agent. It is to this that my personal-political dichotomy relates.

Of course, left radicalism does not escape traces of personalism. Even radicals aspire to excellence. On this Hannah Arendt shrewdly commented,‘… politics was precisely a means by which to escape from equality before death into a distinction assuring some measure of deathlessness.’³ And even a left radical's bid for immortality is a bid for elitism, for a celebration of the person. In the unashamedly elitist past, eternity was reserved for the pharaohs and the powerful through the luxury of expensive embalming and monumental entombment; now it is the most depersonalizing and radically collectivist of all creeds which confirms the unique excellence of the most radical of all ideologists of equality in his mausoleum in Red Square. Uniqueness and matchless individuality are vouchsafed through the political credo which has no place for them. This canonization of the triumphant tribunes cannot fail to leave the impression in those with a personalist bias that the political promise to do away with elitist notions of personal excellence will not be fulfilled. The personalist, therefore, continues to feel that man's fundamental weaknesses of flesh and spirit are not susceptible to ideological and political correction. The personalist continues to feel that weaknesses which can be corrected by determined political intervention are, in the not-too-long run, of secondary importance. The inhumanity of social systems can – at least in principle – be rectified, whilst the inhumanity of the universe and of man's cosmic isolation cannot be. The revolutionary critic of society evades the eternal anomalies of the human condition. His judgements of society are often presented as if they were judgements of total reality. Perhaps the revolutionary critic rages against society, because raging against the cosmos would be pointless.

The personalist is suspicious of this. When he is neither hungry nor cold, neither humiliated nor enslaved, he tends to regard unceasing political fuming as creating a smokescreen which obscures the unchanging tragedy of human destiny. This suspicion also engenders in the personalist an aversion to unceasing political restiveness and a downright hostility to the idolization of action. The personalist is, at times, reminded of Gunther Grass's ‘action is evasion’, which, for the personalist, has an ominous ring of truth about it, especially when ‘action’ is wrapped in an aura of political omniscience and arrogance.

The cult of tempered judgement

We are accustomed to derogatory comments on any diagnosis or prescription which takes the form ‘on the one hand … on the other hand …’ – hence the story about the advertisement for a one-armed sociologist. Of course, there is no virtue in vacillation, but there is even less virtue in rashly deciding, just because we must urgently make up our minds and do something. It is at least probable that we shall reduce the risks of traumatic surprise if we keep our cognitive options open even when proceeding on reasonably certain assumptions. We shall certainly not increase our chances of achieving our social objectives by effecting premature closures or even by making our closures ever anything but tentative. Merely to pacify our anxiety about our irresolution is an imprudent ground for decision.

Man's condition is, after all, ambiguous and paradoxical. A true account of this condition cannot but partake of the ambiguous and paradoxical. An equilibrating view happens to be congruent with the actual nature of the world. We do not seek equilibration because it frees us from having to choose or because it allows us to be eclectic and relativistic, but because in facing the eternally divisive world the only reasonable thing to do is to keep our judgements in some tenuous touch with the facts of that w...