The Prophet Muhammad said, "The neighbor has more right to be taken care of by his neighbor (than anyone else)."

 It is mainstream belief that welfare institutions are no substitute for closely knit families and that electronic networks do not even come close to interactive communities of warm bodies. Most people may also agree that professional care providers are not able to fill the social vacuum created when neighbors become strangers to each other. Granted that there are, at times, complicated or messy circumstances that warrant the call for professional help, it is also absolutely necessary for our communal wellbeing that we give each other a generous hand. The following article argues that we’ll lose ground in the neighborhood if we don’t.

The Experts

 They’ll tune your car, choose your art, handle your money, fix your marriage, ease your pain. But what does it mean when a whole society can’t move without paying a consultant? John McKnight author of The Careless Society: Community and its Counterfeits, believes that every time we turn to a professional, we lose a bit of ourselves – and our community.

By Allan Casey

From Adbusters, October/November 2000 Issue - No 32.

 Around my neighborhood, people are talking in whispers about the problem at the school. A teacher has been caught sending his eight-grade students pornographic email. Down at the coffee shop on Mitchell Avenue, Greg tells me the teacher has been emitting danger signals for years. The man apparently once told one of his young female students that she had “nice legs.” The girl reported this ‘to her parents, but nothing came of it.

 On the way home, I pass the school - a handsome 90-year-old brick building behind spreading spruces that looks like a Norman Rockwell backdrop - and meet Martha coming out. You don’t want to cross Martha when she’s mad, and today she’s furious. The fallen teacher is actually best friends with the principal, and she smells a cover-up. Lest the whole scandal be swept under the rug, Martha says, the community must rise up in action.

 But in fact, the community members will hardly lift a finger. And why should they? Though Martha (lacking an economics back-ground) may not realize it, this whole painful episode is actually good for the economy. An elementary school full of potential sexual abuse victims creates demand for well-paid counselors and lawyers whose high salaries will of course contribute to the local tax base and the gross national product.

 So what happens instead is this:
The next morning a team of counselors descends on the school, exorcists in business suits. They meet with the principal, and he writes to all the parents, assuring them their “needs” will be identified and addressed in a professional way. The students are shown a sexual harassment video and later briefed by their homeroom teachers. Downtown, school system lawyers make sure the full weight of justice is brought to bear on the offending teacher and more importantly, that the school is safe from expensive lawsuits.

 When police question the perpetrator, he confesses to everything. Greg says the teacher left such a trail of clues it was as if he wanted to be caught. If this was “a cry for help,“ professionals are only too eager to answer. The teacher will get the counseling he needs, and so too will his poor wife and kids. A week later, things seem to have calmed down, but when I talk to Martha on the phone she’s still raging. The community has yet to organize a meeting to discuss the issue. No one is talking. Greg says there isn’t much left to talk about since the police Victim Services people held their own meeting at the school for the “affected” families.

 That’s when the media arrive. Martha says it wasn’t she who tipped them off, but she is glad to see them anyway. Their colorful news vehicles fill the parking lot while reporters with masters’ degrees in journalism do their stand-ups on the lawn. “Did you read the paper?” Martha asks with a self satisfied tone She’s pleased the media has brought everything out in the open, something the community couldn’t do for itself.

 Welcome to what John McKnight might call the New Economy of Need. In his book, The Careless Society: Community and its Counterfeits, the Chicago-based author observes that the days when North Americans produced goods - wheat, lumber, steel - are over. McKnight calculates that 90 percent of the employed provide what can be broadly defined as “services.” To supply the growing ranks of professional service providers with work, you and I must have ever more physical, spiritual or emotional shortcomings.

 In an economy driven by service, the only path for fiscal growth is to find new markets for need. As surely as the auto industry depends on steel, the service industry needs human problems.

 “When there is a tragedy, an airplane crash, murders at a high school,” says McKnight, “a flock of people who had never been seen before appears. They descend on victims and families, and the newspapers tell us about it, as if this was a good thing.”

 These professional helpers don’t just appear in desperate times. They are always available, like a mother’s embrace. They give us legal advice, diagnose our children with learning disabilities, prescribe drugs for us, help us kick drugs, teach us to use computers, mediate our divorces, rub our backs. You and I need a lot of help, and our “unmet needs” drive the North American service economy.

 All of this, McKnight says, comes at a cost to our sense of community. In an ever-expanding market of professional services, neighbors have fewer reasons to care for one another, more reason to remain passive receptors of services. Citizens have become “clients.” The cost probably cannot be measured in dollars. It’s a much simpler equation: Why bother to cook a hot meal for the old widower next door when he’s got Home Care coming in every day’? Let the pros handle things.

 “The basic issue is professionalism itself, which is dependent upon the manufacture of need and the definition of new deficiencies.”

 McKnight lists some of the rarer gems of deficiency that professionals have strip-mined on the margins of human frailty: tired housewife syndrome; six-hour retardation; bereavement deficit; litigative incapacity. Or how about recluse management? At least one Canadian city pays professionals to seek out lonely souls who have lost contact with society.

 “If I had used the term ‘bereavement counselor’ 40 years ago, no one would have known what I was talking about,” McKnight says. For him, bereavement counseling is an especially irksome example of professionals getting paid to give people what communities once provided. It is now possible to attain a master’s degree in the field. Thanks to strong lobbying, grief counselors have persuaded life insurance companies, employers and government agencies to pay for their services to us, whether we need them or not. And, McKnight argues, we don’t.

 “Every culture has developed ways of dealing with sorrow, grief, death, the afterlife. In fact, that’s the very heart of most cultures. I think of my own family on the Irish side where they had wakes and a whole series of traditions for dealing with the death of someone in the family. In the service industry, no more than 40 years ago, someone decided, based on university research, to invent a new profession to meet a need the community had always filled – a grief counselor. “The name for the process by which we sell a community what it already has is ‘commodification of need,’ to make into a commodity what has been a cultural condition.”

 Yesterday, an ambulance came and took our 85-year-old German neighbor Greta back to the hospital. She fell a week ago, broke a bone in her shoulder and bruised herself up. The main problem is that she can’t take care of herself, can’t get into the bathtub on her own. A young nurse has been coming over but Greta has been too embarrassed to ask for what she needs. (Tearfully, she told all this to my partner Marlene a few days ago). After sitting in the same clothes for a week, Greta finally calls an ambulance, saying she’s having trouble breathing, and they take her away. She’s not really sick, we know. She just needs to be cared for. Marlene and another neighborhood woman had been bringing food over, but they wonder if they could have done more for Greta.

 McKnight’s critique of professionalism is actually a sideline to a lifetime fascination with American neighborhoods that he can trace back to boyhood. Growing up in small-town Ohio in the late 1940s, he lived half a block from the local library, and spent his time there when it got too dark to play baseball. “All the books looked interesting, so when I was a sophomore in high school, I just decided to read the whole non-fiction shelf, starting at ‘A.’ Fortunately, Saul Alinsky’s name started with ‘A.”

 Alinsky was a legendary neighborhood organizer, and his book Reveille for Radicals - chronicling his work 60 years ago in Chicago’s Back of the Yards neighborhood - is still a bible for grassroots activism. Reveille offers a blueprint for radicalizing neighborhoods by tapping into mainstream community organizations: labor union locals, ethnic associations, political party offices and especially churches, which funded the bulk of Alinsky’s work. “I probably read that book in 1948. I thought, ‘Boy, that’s what I’d like to do.’ It sounded like a wonderful adventure.”
 
 McKnight won a scholarship to Northwestern University in Chicago. He went eagerly, knowing Alinsky was there, and soon followed his mentor into neighborhood organizing. “Most of the neighborhood organizations of consequence in the US are based on Saul’s ideas. I was there in Chicago when the whole thing was being defined and fashioned. All of us were young, and Saul was the guru.”

 McKnight eventually helped found the Affirmative Action program and stayed with it through the Kennedy-Johnson years. Then in 1969, at the age of 40, Northwestern recruited him back to work in its newly created Center for Urban Affairs and Policy Research. Now 68, he’s still working there.

 To the inevitable accusation that he - a university professor employed by an important academic research center - is just another professional telling communities what they need, McKnight offers a chuckling, self-deprecating defense. “I’m not a real professor. I made it through college with a bachelor’s degree. When they asked me if I would help them start an urban center, I had been working practically all my life in neighborhood organizing and civil rights. They wanted someone who had been involved in the world outside the university, so they made me a professor with my bachelor’s degree. I am the only one at Northwestern.”

 McKnight describes himself not as a teacher or researcher, but as a storyteller. “Universities and corporations learn from studies; communities learn from stories,” he says. Stories provide the core material for a growing collection of practical handbooks he has co-authored with colleague John Kretzmann. The books offer down-to-earth strategies for community building, mostly in the form of hundreds of tales of success the authors recorded at neighborhood meetings around the continent.

 These tales are often the simplest vignettes: Three Chinese seniors volunteer to help with classroom activities at a daycare centre... Local companies donates supplies for young artists to paint murals in the community... Three public housing residents create a garden in a vacant lot beside their building…

 Building Communities from the Inside 0ut, the most comprehensive of the handbooks, starts from the novel premise that beleaguered neighborhoods aren’t defined by their problems and failings. Following the Alinsky model, it offers a step-by-step guide for citizens first to find what particular capacities or skills can be found locally, and then to find ways of using those assets to make life better.

 McKnight and Kretzmann argue there is really no good alternative. Reliance on outside, professionalized help is, at best, a game of mere survival for poor communities, a system for the treatment of symptoms only. And in the foreseeable future, the chances of large-scale, rejuvenating employment moving back into old neighborhoods seem slim.

 Published eight years ago, Building Communities is an eminently practical cookbook for neighborhood self-improvement and has become a widely copied standard and recently surpassed 70,000 copies sold. “It’s certainly the largest-selling book in America on its topic,” says McKnight. “Our consciousness has been so affected by the idea that well-being means to be a client or a consumer. That a book that reminds people of what they have and don’t need to buy can become a bestseller — I think that is almost a commentary in itself.”

 Since Saul Alinsky wrote Reveille for Radicals, North America’s poorer neighborhoods have changed drastically. Today, church attendance has bottomed out, ethnic groups have dispersed, and Labor unions and political groups, their centers of power moved downtown or to Washington, have become professionalized. The glue that once held these communities together has dried up.

 The erosion of vibrant community relationships is only the first difficulty with professionalized care or service. Our helping institutions often don’t help very much - or they make things worse. McKnight calls this the iatrogenic effect - literally, medicine that hurts more than it helps. In 1999, The Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Science calculated that close to 100,000 deaths a year were the result of medical treatment. McKnight observes that during doctor strikes in Canada, Israel and the USA, mortality rates actually went down.

 Whether we buy the iatrogenesis argument, we don’t need research to tell us that our service institutions have serious efficiency problems. Does anyone believe that increasing the number of American lawyers by 25 percent - something that happened in the early 1980s - will bring more justice? Do welfare systems address pover-ty? In 1976, Americans spent $1.38 billion on health care, and life expectancy was 72 years. Today, health costs approach $1.75 trillion - more than 18 percent of the GNP - yet life expectancy has increased only marginally to 76 years.

 Profits, of course, fuel such bloated professional systems. Interestingly, spreading professionalism and poverty are inextricably linked. “Almost all our research is about poorer urban communities,” says McKnight. “On the other hand, the essays in The Careless Society were about the question of professional dominance. You have to look at the relationship between the two.”

 McKnight’s research center studied an impoverished American neighborhood where 60 percent of the residents draw welfare. For every dollar these people received in cash income, $0.57 was spent for their medical care. “One dollar for the poor and $0.57 for doctors, nurses and hospitals? Who needs whom in that kind of economy?” McKnight writes. “That is not a poor neighborhood; it is a serviced neighborhood.” He notes that straight cash assistance programs increased by 105 percent between 1960 and 1985. During the same period, non-cash programs for services provided by professionals increased by 1,760 percent.

 If all the money spent on services to the poor of Cook County, Illinois - McKnight’s home turf - was simply given to them as cash income, everyone below the official poverty line would nearly achieve America middle income level. Treaty Indians on impoverished Canadian reserves could be transported overnight into upper-income brackets if the program and service money spent on their behalf was simply handed out as income. This familiar pattern is the great postmodern irony of the welfare state.

 In developed nations, especially America, service is the economy. The US Bureau of Labor Statistics projects that 95 percent of new jobs created in the next few years will come out of the service industries, and three out of four jobs will be service by 2008. The bureau defines “service” very narrowly and doesn’t include any government, retail, or financial industry service jobs, for example.

 John McKnight puts the figure at 90 percent, which is probably conservative, too. Of these, fully two-thirds of these service providers do work that is mostly “caring”: teachers, nurses, social workers, police, psychologists, child care workers, those in the burgeoning elderly industry, doctors, lawyers, jailers. People who “care” for a living now make up most of the work force. In The Careless Society, McKnight argues that care is an unstoppable force in North American society. Care is a democratic equivalent for love. “Since love is not a political issue,” writes McKnight, “care is not a policy question, and service becomes the one business that is an unlimited, unquestionable, and non-political ‘good.’” And so our care institutions have spread unhindered while the communities they replace wither.

 The problem is, true caring cannot be manufactured. Love refuses to behave as a proper economic good. So in its place we posit measurable quanta. We have units of service, psychological inputs and family outputs. The objects of institutional love become consumers or markets. The lovers’ caresses become products.

 “Care is the most deeply held value of all. People want more than anything else that somebody will care about them. Care is freely given. It develops spontaneously. Nobody can tell you to do it. It cannot be mandated or managed. To say the government is going to produce it is an obscenity. To say that professionals are going to manage it is an outrage. They can only provide services.”

 McKnight believes we cannot build institutions that produce care. But what about the individual professionals who actually do care? They have his sympathies. He speaks regularly to professionals about the limitations of institutional caring, and they are surprisingly patient with his prickly views. “Instead of argument, I find professionals consistently giving me examples of their own useless and iatrogenic activities.

 “I have observed over five decades that people on the front lines are almost universally frustrated. The perversion is that they are drawn to their work out of a deep sense of caring only to find they are in the wrong place to do that. They just get slapped in the face by an industrial organization, the form corporations created and human service systems now imitate.”

 Marlene and I and our two kids have discovered a real community. It has changed our lives for the better. It is a small community-run school. You don’t have to be rich to attend. The school is part of the government system, and so takes it’s funding from the tax base like any other classroom in the city. The parents hire their own teacher and help him everyday in the classroom. We must contribute one half-day per week at the school, plus take a share of the committee workload. There are field trips to organize, car pools to arrange, food to buy. The parents recruit interesting visitors to the classroom - an Indian elder, a solar-oven builder, a nature book author.

 Until we came here, we probably understood community only as a word. Community takes a lot of work. When we parents disagree on some aspect of the curriculum — fewer swimming lessons versus more math, more study of Islam and less of Christianity - our meetings can become heated. Resentments bloom easily where your child’s education is involved.

 There is no boss to heap problems upon. Concerns have to be dealt with face to face, and not everyone is comfortable with this. Almost every year, some family becomes frustrated enough to quit. In the beginning, we wondered at times if we shouldn‘t go back to the regular, one-size-fits all school system. There is no one here to make decisions for you.

 But our kids love it. They are as excited about school in June as they are in September. We know all the other children well - which one loves dinosaurs, and which one hates vegetables. And their parents have become our good friends. At some point, we realized that school has become vital to our happiness. We take care of it; it takes care of us.

 For John McKnight, communities can only be built from a web of friendships and acquaintances. “Community is a word about relationships among people. In strong communities, those relationships are dense and rich, and they magnify the contributions and capacities of each resident.” By contributions and capacities, he means things individual community members are good at. One person has a genius for running productive meetings; another has had fund-raising experience. Finding such resources within a community means getting to know individuals, so by definition, communities as he understands them are small.

 “Scale has a lot to do with the nature of community. At the point where the number of relationships in a person’s life becomes larger than their ability to know the names and capacities of the other people in the group, then I think you are leaving the core idea of community. When you move beyond that scale, you will have to cre-ate some way of managing the relationships among people, and that’s how hierarchies are created. It’s the difference between 20 people and 2,000 people.”

 When the French count Alexis de Tocqueville visited the United States in 1831, he observed that human associations among set-tlers in the New World were different than in Europe: groups organized to solve problems. Such problem-solving groups became the building blocks for communities, then nations, the true focus of citizenship power. Somewhere that pattern broke down, and the question is whether it can be restored. “Our roles as citizens and our communities have been traded for the right to clienthood and con-sumer status,” says McKnight. “Many of us have come to recognize that as we exiled our fallible neighbors to the control of managers, therapists and technicians, we lost much of our power to be a vital center of society.

 “We all know that community must be the center of our lives, because it is only in community that we can be citizens. It is only in community that we can find care. It is only in community that we can hear people singing.”