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Subject: Why Tamil 'Servanthood' Is Bad
Date: Sun, 26 May 2002 15:16:53 +0530
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From: "Bala Pillai"
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http://www.nazcompassion.org/lifeeducation/vol1iss9sept_pg3.html
"Why 'Servanthood' Is Bad"
by John McKnight
Reprinted from "The Other Side", April 1988
In a small, relatively isolated community on Martha's Vineyard, about every
tenth person used to be born without the ability to hear. Everybody in the
community, hearing and non-hearing alike, spoke a unique sign language
brought from England when they immigrated to Massachusetts in 1690. In the
mid-twentieth century with increased mobility, the people ceased to
intermarry, and the genetic anomaly disappeared.
But before the memory of it died - and the sign language with it - historian
Nora Groce studied the community's history. She compared the experience of
the non-hearing people to that of the hearing people.
She found that 80 percent of the non-hearing people graduated from high
school, as did 80 percent of the hearing. She found that about 90 percent of
the non-hearing got married, compared to about 92 percent of the hearing.
They had about equal numbers of children. Their income levels were similar,
as were the variety and distribution of their occupations.
Then Groce did a parallel study on the Massachusetts mainland. At the time,
it was considered to have the best services in the nation for non-hearing
people. There she found that 50 percent of non-hearing people graduated from
high school, compared to 75 percent of the hearing. Non-hearing people
married half the time, while hearing people married 90 percent of the time.
Forty percent of the non-hearing people had children, while 80 percent of
hearing people did. And non-hearing people had fewer children. They also
received about one-third the income of hearing people. And their range of
occupations was much more limited.
How was it, Groce wondered, that on an island with no services, non-hearing
people were as much like hearing people as you could possibly measure? Yet
thirty miles away, with the most advanced services available, non-hearing
people lived much poorer lives than the hearing.
The one place in the United States where deafness was not a disability was a
place with no services for deaf people. In that community all the people
adapted by signing instead of handing the non-hearing people over to
professionals and their services. That community wasn't just doing what was
necessary to help or to serve one group. It was doing what was necessary to
incorporate everyone.
I've been around neighborhoods, neighborhood organizations, and communities
in big cities for thirty-six years. I have never seen service systems that
brought people to well-being, delivered them to citizenship, or made them
free.
When I'm around church people, I always check whether they are misled by the
modern secular vision. Have they substituted the vision of service for the
only thing that will make people whole - community? Are they service
peddlers or community builders? Peddling services is unchristian - even if
you're hell-bent on helping people. Peddling services instead of building
communities is the one way you can be sure not to help.
We all know that at the Last Supper Jesus said, "This is my commandment;
love one another as I have loved you. There is no greater love than this; to
lay down one's life for one's friends." But for mysterious reasons, I never
hear the next two sentences. "You are my friends if you do what I command
you. I no longer call you servants, because servants do not know the
business of the one they serve. But I have called you friends because I have
made known to you everything I learned from God." It is not right to be hung
back by service and servantry. The goal is to be a friend.
I'm consistently impressed by how dangerous people are who want to serve
others. The service ideology and its systems don't work for three reasons.
First, they constantly steal money from people who are poor. At the center
where I work, we've added up how much money the four levels of government -
federal, state, county, and city - specifically target for low-income people
in Cook County. It adds up to about $6,000 for every person with an income
below the poverty line. (That figure is low; not everyone below the line
participates in low-income programs.) For a mother with three children, that
is the equivalent of $24,000. Three years ago, the median income in Cook
County was $23,000. In one sense, we spend for every poor person more money
than half the people in Cook County make. But Chicago still has poverty!
So I asked our researchers, "Of the money appropriated for low-income
people, how much did they get in cash and how much in services?" They
replied, "They got 63 percent in services and 37 percent in income." Now, if
you are a family of four, that means your servants walked away with over
$15,000 of the money appropriated for you while you got less than $9,000.
Bureaucracy is not the problem. (Bureaucracy eats only about 6 percent.) The
money goes to health- and human-service professionals: nurses, doctors,
psychologists, psychiatrist, social workers, public-housing administrators,
land-clearance officials, welfare workers. It doesn't go to the poor.
The second problem with service systems is that they base programs on
"deficiencies." I fight whenever I can - in legislatures and before
policy-making bodies - against "needs surveys" in low-income neighborhoods.
Here is why.
I was organizing block clubs in West Side neighborhoods. I wasn't very good.
But people responded. They understood what I was saying. Then the
antipoverty program came, and within three years organizing became
incredibly difficult.
The antipoverty program sent people out to interview people this way:
"Mrs. Jones, we're from such-and-such. We're doing a survey. Can you tell me
how far you went in school?"
She looks down a little and says, "Well, I just got through tenth grade." So
they write on the clipboard, "Dropout. Two years. " Not "educated ten
years," but "dropout two years."
Then they say, "I wonder if you could read this to me."
She looks at it, embarrassed. "No. I can't read."
"Illiterate," they write. Then they say, "Just now you squinted your eyes.
Do you have trouble seeing?"
"Yes. I think I need glasses." "Visual deficit," they write.
"Do you have any children?"
"Three daughters, ages fourteen, sixteen, and eighteen."
"Do any of them have children?"
"The fourteen-year-old has a child, and the eighteen-year-old has a child."
"Teenage pregnancy," goes on the clipboard.
Then they say, "We're going to get you some help. Just wait. We're going to
make a service center here." And they cash in their needs inventory for a
GED dropout training center and three people who work there, for an
illiteracy program with four staff people, for a neighborhood optometrist
who is responsive to the community, and for a new teenage-pregnancy
counseling program that gets the schools more money. This poor woman is a
gold mine. That's how she ended up getting one-third what the service system
got.
When I go back to this woman, organizing, I say, "Mrs. Jones, I'm organizing
for the local neighborhood organization, and your neighbor told me to talk
to you. She told me that when her daughter was hit by an automobile down at
the corner, you took charge while she took her daughter to the emergency
room. And when the tree fell down across the street, you're the one who came
out and told people who to call, what to do about the tree. She told me
you're the leader on this block. People trust you. People believe in you.
People follow you. That's one of the most wonderful things in the world,
because you have the opportunity to join with other people like yourself in
the neighborhood to being to do more things than just deal with the tree and
the crisis with the little girl. So would you come with me to a meeting
tonight?"
"No," she says, "I'm waiting for the people in the white coats."
Service systems teach people that their value lies in their deficiencies.
They are built on "inadequacies" called illiteracy, visual deficit, and
teenage pregnancy. But communities are built on the capacities of drop-out,
illiterate, bad-scene, teenage-pregnant, battered women like Mrs. Jones. If
the church is about community, not service, it is about capacity, not
deficiency.
Third, the service system displaces the capacity of people's organizations
to solve problems. It says, "Don't form a community organization. Sit and
wait for the white coat to come save you." The proliferation of an ideology
of therapy and service as "what you need" has weakened associations and
organizations of citizens across the United States.
Many churches and pastors have become the agents of systems. They themselves
may not understand whom they represent, but they refer people to systems.
Instead of building community, they help take responsibility away from the
community and give it to professionals. People who do this in the name of
the church and of Jesus are community busters. They are not agents of
Christ.
Here are five rules to protect yourself from being the agent of the devil in
the middle of a church. (I could give you ten if I had more space.)
Saul Alinsky referred to the first rule as the "iron rule": Never do for
others what they can do for themselves.
Second, find another's gifts, contributions, and capacities. Use them. Give
them a place in the community.
Third, whenever a service is proposed, fight to get it converted into
income. Don't support services. Insist that what poor people need is income.
There is a point where things called services can be useful. Most low-income
communities are well beyond that point. If you improve the professional
credentialing of big-city school teachers and systems, knowing and wisdom
will decrease in direct relationship to the increase in that system's poor.
The increase in medical resources in Chicago is now decreasing the health
status of poor people.
The fourth rule is a sort of subhead of the third. If those in power are
hell-bent on giving poor people services rather than income, then fight for
those services to come in the form of vouchers. That way the persons who
must be served at least have a choice as to who will serve them. And there
may be some competition.
Fifth, develop hospitality. Abraham, the head of a tribe, decided to follow
a God who claimed to be the only God. That made Abraham and his people
strangers in their own land. They journeyed as strangers through the world.
And they developed some unique ideas about responsibilities to strangers
because they were strangers themselves.
Jesus' disciples were also people who decided to become strangers - in their
own land and in others. They built communities based on their decision. That
renewed their understanding of obligations to strangers, and hospitality was
renewed.
In every household, in every tent, the door was open - to the stranger, the
outsider, the enemy, or potential enemy. And the stranger was one with whom
one acted, not in service, but equality. Then a terrible thing happened in
third-century Italy. At the side of a monastery, they built a little room
for strangers. And they called it a hospice. The church took over
responsibility for the stranger. And Christians forgot what had been unique
about their community - how to welcome the person who was outside and
hungry.
The hospice hook hospitality out of the community. "Hospice" became
"hospital." The hospital became Humana, a for-profit corporation buying up
church hospitals. Communities and churches have forgotten about hospitality.
Now systems and corporations claim they can produce it and sell it and that
you can consume it.
You must struggle with all your might to reclaim the central Christian act
of hospitality. You will have to fight your local hospitals. You will have
to fight Humana. You will have to fight the social services. They have
commodified hospitality and called it a service. They have made a market of
the temple. And you know what you're supposed to do the money changers: get
'em out! Or bring into the church the hospitality that is at the center of
understanding a relationship as a friend not a servant. A church's response
to people without should be hospitality, not services.
Bala Pillai
"Networking Minds in Halls Without Walls Since 1995"
Founder, The Asia Pacific Internet Company
Sydney, Australia
