Miriam Dinerman

Fundamentalism and Social Work

The editorial board asked me to write on the topic of social work and Fundamentalism, and I, perhaps foolishly, agreed to do so. It is not an area for which I claim any expertise, but a short exploration has led me to some thoughts on the issue. These I gladly share in the hope that they will arouse some response from readers. Let me begin with some clarification of terms as I use them here. First, I separate religion and those who believe and practice it from Fundamentalism. The majority of Americans believe in their religion and practice it daily but do not extend that belief to imposing their faith on others. I call these persons “the devout.” Much of the world’s population are devout as well. In contrast, the Fundamentalist not only believes that she or he possesses the truth and that this truth is based on the strict maintenance of ancient or fundamental doctrines of the religion but “is ready to do battle royal for the fundamentals,” as Curtis Lee Laws, who coined the term Fundamentalism in 1920, put it (see Fundamentalism, 2001). The Fundamentalism that Laws wrote about arose in the United States in the early years of the 20th century as a response to the loss of influence of traditional revivalism, the impact of the work of liberal German biblical scholars, the growth of Darwinian thinking, and the increasing secularization of Western society. These Fundamentalists not only affirmed their religious authority as holistic and absolute, admitting of no criticism, but demanded that specific creedal and ethical dictates that were derived from Scripture should be publicly recognized and legally enforced. In recent years, we have become all too aware that this description of Fundamentalism not only applies to certain Christian denominations but is widely seen in some Islamic societies. Fundamentalism, as used here, refers to those who demand the enforcement of their beliefs on all persons within their reach. We must also remember the history of Fundamentalist-inspired wars—the Crusades or the efforts to exterminate the Albigensians in France in the Middle Ages, for example. The final key term in my assignment is social work. I define social work practice, at least in the United States, as the work of any professionally educated social worker and one who follows the ethics defined by the International Federation of Social Workers (2003), as well as the code of ethics of the

Counting, Costs, and the Value of Caring Work:

In the early years of the 20th century, as economics became more widely discussed, feminists in Europe and the United States complained that the unpaid work that women did—caring for the home, rearing children, and tending to old and frail relatives—was never reflected in economic indicators, such as the gross domestic product (GDP). The GDP is supposed to measure the value of all the goods and services produced in a nation in the course of a year. These early feminists argued that child rearing, home tending, and caring for the old and frail were services of great value to a society and needed to be recognized as such. They proposed a mother’s wage to improve the economic lot of women, place a societal value on the unpaid work that women did, and help to reduce women’s economic dependence on their male relatives. This proposal was never adopted, as we know. This proposal came to mind recently while I was reading comments by Alan Greenspan and several other economists about the wonders of the new information technologies— computers, satellites, lasers, and so forth—which they said had caused the wondrous growth of the American economy in recent years—the great rise in both GDP and productivity. Why are these claims important to feminists? First, because the greater the productivity of a nation, the greater the increase in the standard of living. In the past 5 years, productivity in the United States has risen 2.9% a year. If that rate continues, living standards in America will double in one generation. Halve that rate, and it would take 50 years for a similar improvement to take place.

Is Everything Women's Work?:

A majority of women work. Can the family manage the caring tasks while attaining equity among its members? Can women find equity in the workplace? Social work faces both issues as it deals with women clients and internally as a female-intensive occupation. Dimensions of the problems and an action agenda are presented.

Time for Reform

Among industrialized nations, only the United States defines health care as a market commodity, such as Corn Flakes or detergent, whose production and delivery are governed by concern for profit and loss. Only the United States fails to cover all citizens for health care. We have been told we have the best health care in the world—and that is true, but only for those with unlimited means and know-how to buy the best. For the rest of us, it ranges from OK to lousy—OK for the roughly one third with adequate health insurance, less than OK for the one third with “thin” insurance, and lousy for the one third without any coverage. Although the United States spends more per capita on health care than any other nation, the World Health Organization ranks us as 37th among the nations (U.S. Congress, 2001). To understand this ranking, one has to know that in 2000, the United States spent 13.6% of its gross domestic product (GDP), or

Faith in the Faith-Based Initiative?

4,178 per capita, on health care, whereas other industrialized nations spent between

The Devious Path of Reform

1,461 and

Definitions—and Their Consequences

2,424 per capita, or from a low of 6.7% of the GDP in the United Kingdom to 10.6% in Germany (Organisation of Economic Co-operation and Development [OECD], 2001a). Using the most common measures of the quality of a nation’s health care, one can see that we are clearly not getting our money’s worth. In the United States, life expectancy at birth is 73.8 years for men and 79.5 years for women, but every one of the comparison nations beats these rates by up to 3 1⁄2 years (OECD, 2001b). Infant mortality rates are even worse. In a list of 51 nations, the United States ranked 20th, with 6.76 deaths per 1,000 live births, whereas Sweden ranked first, with 3.47 and

Editorial: The Hidden War on the Poor

One of the first initiatives of the Bush presidency was the FaithBased Community Development Initiative. Little of this new thrust has been spelled out beyond the purpose of promoting access to federal funds for religious-based organizations to provide social services. Furthermore, to date, only the faith-based aspect of the initiative has been talked about; hence, it can be called the Faith-Based Initiative, or FBI. John J. DiIulio, Jr., of the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Research on Religion and Urban Civil Society, who will head this effort, is best known for his discredited theory of predatory teenagers. The FBI has raised a flock of concerns: about First Amendment church-state relations; why it has been proposed; its impact on existing services; and what it portends for users of services, for social work, and for women. Let us first look at some assumptions underlying this proposal:

Truths, Half-Truths, and Nontruths About Social Security

I worked in a state psychiatric hospital, training social work students, when psychotropic drugs were first introduced. Amovement for reform of mental health services swept mental health professionals and the public mental hospitals across the nation. I, too, was swept up in this revolution as a result of my experiences in the state hospital. This is the story of that reform effort. At the state hospital, I saw patients who had been hospitalized for 10, 15, or 20 years—patients who were competent enough to run the institution’s kitchen or laundry or to be in charge of other complex tasks and those who were docile and seemed to pose no threat to the community but were never considered for discharge. In fact, when I and my students tried to prepare such patients for discharge to the community, we were often blocked, not because the staff thought that the patients posed any threat to the community but rather, because the patients’ discharge posed a threat to the smooth functioning of the institution. I saw also the prevalence of another disabling condition among these long-stay patients: institutionalitis. Patients were so habituated to the routines of institutional life that they lost the capacity for independent judgment or action in an enormous range of everyday activities. They did not believe they could turn on the lights, select which socks to wear, decide what to eat for breakfast, or manage the simplest task of everyday living. The vast bulk of the patients in this hospital were these chronic, long-stay patients, although a smaller number remained for a short time and were successfully treated and discharged. Because I was free to select which tasks to assign the students, we developed a program to teach patients who were judged ready for discharge some of the skills needed for living in the community—such simple things as riding alone on a bus, making a telephone call, and making a list and going to a supermarket to buy the items on that list. I and the students also joined the reform efforts that began with a focus on the problems of the public psychiatric hospitals and quickly moved to the solution, which was to get rid of the hospitals and move treatment to a new, community-based treatment system. Attention was focused on the limited or nonexistent treatment provided by the state hospitals, the abuses of this system, and the option for patients to live in the community through the opportunity provided by the new drugs. These new drugs could be delivered in a community clinic and could make it possible for patients to live in a community setting. The hospi-

The Wind at Our Backs

• Bayesian Confirmation Theory (ᴄᴛ) provides a quantitative, as opposed to a qualitative, theory of confirmation. That is, it doesn’t just tell us whether a given piece of evidence confirms a hypothesis, but it additionally tells us how much, or the degree to which, a piece of evidence confirms a hypothesis. • It does this, not by providing a formal inductive logic, as Hempel and Goodman were supposing it would, but rather by using tools from the theory of probability. So, we’re going to have to think a bit about probability theory.