Is Knowing Essential to Caring?
How does knowing relate to caring? Can social workers engage in one without the other? What happens when we care without knowing? Do social workers often make this mistake? And with this mistake how do we (or can we) avoid causing harm? To address these questions, we turn to the very important work of David P. Levine: The Capacity for Ethical Conduct, Chapter Nine, Knowing and Caring.
Levine, David P. (2013). The capacity for ethical conduct: On psychic existence and the way we relate to others. New York: Routledge.
Levine writes, “Both knowing and caring are ways we can connect to, and indeed, take in, objects in our world. Both knowing and caring encompass objects, one within an intellectual world, the other within an emotional world. To know is also to comprehend, which means to grasp, to catch hold of, to seize. To care means to have custody over and responsibility for, to have an interest in, and possibly to love” (Levine, p. 109).
For Levine knowing and caring cannot be disconnected or split off without consequences. Moreover, connecting caring with knowing produces psychic and social realities essential to hope and to imagining alternative social worlds. A truly caring practice or critical social work science must understand that knowing and caring form a whole and any separation undermines the mode of caring (see our modes of caring, ongcaring.org). When schools of social work (or methods and theories of practice) disconnect knowing from caring practices there are clear and negative consequences (see our post on the scholastic fallacy).
Knowing and caring are not separate projects. Each are essential to a more complete and holistic understanding of and taking action on our singularity: our unique psychic and social worlds. Levine writes,
Yet, while we may only concern ourselves to think about things in which we have some sort of investment, thinking about an object does not imply that we care about it in the sense that we desire its well-being or even preservation. We may think about it without loving it, or feeling responsible for it. In this sense, thinking does not imply caring. Rather, it may express our interest in an object for which we do not much care about. When this is the situation, thinking represents an alternative to caring, a connection with an object we do not care about. Indeed, we can say that for some people not caring about an object is what they have an interest in. Alternatively, we may care about an object without understanding it. We may make an intense emotional investment in something we cannot grasp (Levine, p. 109).
On Caring | The Project has turned to Levine to help us think about this complexity. The separation of knowing from caring has many possible consequences. Perhaps foremost among them is indifference. Levine writes,
When caring is too dangerous, yet we desire a connection with an object, we can have that connection, we can encompass the object, without the danger caring about it holds for us. When the object we care about is dangerous to us, knowing it can also be a way of taking vengeance on it for its inaccessibility, or for the fact that it has disappointed us. When we know but do not care, we can lose the object without feeling any sense of loss; after all, we did not have it, and do not in any case want it. Then, the point of knowing is not caring. When we separate caring from knowing, nothing really matters to us except our indifference toward objects… (Levine, p. 110).
Think of the earth. Perhaps we know all about it. But we don’t care about it. We can then destroy it. We can lose it without a sense of loss. Take another example. Should social workers care about government? (one of our modes of caring). Most would answer: “sure we care.” Some would not care. And many who do care know little about government, its dynamics and contradictions, or the many ways social work represents competing interests in research conducted on behalf of government and business. Take, for example, social work scholars who conduct research (for government) on gambling and so-called gambling addictions. Gambling will soon make its way into the nosology, DSM, as yet another disorder: not of society and government. It will become a disorder of self. The contradiction: the state approves and regulates gambling, then funds social workers to conduct research on the compulsion to engage in gambling with money produced by the gambling addiction industry. Not knowing here has remarkable implications: for social work research, social work practice (i.e., addictions), and society. The reduction of gambling to a disorder of self obscures and misrecognizes the disordered society which produced the conditions and the technology for gambling.
Many social workers, scholars and practitioners know little about the history of neoliberalism (see our blog on anti-government) or social work’s relationship to it. See the recent piece in the flagship journal, Social Service Review, by Gray et al., 2015. We find it remarkable that this piece (excellent, thorough, compelling) appears for the first time in the flagship journal only in 2015. We find it also interesting (and troubling) that it’s not written by scholars in the U.S. Do scholars here have less interest in governmentality or do they simply NOT KNOW. And why is it left to Aussies and Brits to educate us on the whys and wherefores of neoliberalism: the central dynamic and logic of government for decades? Here’s one possible answer: in Europe and the U.K. the effects of neoliberalism and managerialism have been felt and debated in society and across the disciplines for decades. Not here. Another possible answer: WE DON’T CARE ABOUT THE EFFECTS OF NEOLIBERALISM.
Atomic Cloud over Nagasaki
Many in social work, practitioners and scholars (see our forthcoming blog on neoliberalism and CBT), each day engage in technocratic interventions and research without fully understanding government: they do not know what government is. When we do not know something we can be unwitting (or witting) parties to its destruction or to its tragic and unnecessary continuation (i.e., reproduction). Please take some time and listen to the Revisionist History podcast series on the atomic bomb and science. There are 3 episodes worth listening to but this one fits at this point in our discussion of Levine’s work on caring. Why? Here we learn about science, physics (and chemistry) in particular, and how we can KNOW but altogether fail to CARE about what we know: the enormous and destructive power of the thing we know.
We’re living in an era of increasing anti-government sentiment, social movement and action, even though most in some way benefit from government. Recall that Levine writes, “When the object we care about is dangerous to us, knowing it can also be a way of taking vengeance on it for its inaccessibility, or for the fact that it has disappointed us.”
All our modes of caring require knowing and caring and an understanding of the dynamics between them. And most important, knowing requires more than asserting a belief. “When we do not know something we care about, we are free to imagine that it is whatever we wish it were or need it to be” (Levine, p. 109). Without a critical social science to generate knowledge, we are left only with social work beliefs; and these are generally energized by emotional investment! (see William Davies lecture and book Nervous States and our post on Anti-Government).
Take yet another example from our current moment. If we don’t know what the coronavirus is, then it can be whatever we wish it to be. Science, then, is essential to a caring practice. And when we value an object like social justice, then we need to know what social justice is; otherwise, our caring about oppression will not result in emancipation (read Levine’s review of the Gillo Pontecorvo’s film, Burn!, starring Marlon Brando, for illustration of separating knowing from caring: pages, 103-113).
We value what we care about (see below a webinar with Andrew Sayer’s on his very important book, Why Things Matter to People: Social Science, Values and Ethical Life and his many essays on this subject). In a future post we’ll be looking at how Sayer conceptualizes the relationship between care and concern.
We have emotional investments in what we value. Yet where do our values come from? Or, what should we care about? The answers to these questions must come from knowing, not just belief or assertion: “…belief is not a form of knowing but a way to avoid knowing” (Levine: 112). Caring and knowing must go together. To do otherwise leads to burning: We will burn what we don’t care about. And what we don’t know doesn’t exist, so in other words, it too is destroyed. Choosing to not know is a form of destruction. Knowing our values and what we care about is essential to any project on caring.
Postscript
It is important to be aware of the important thinking in anthropology and sociology on cooperation. For example, the biological anthropologist, Tomasello (2009), writes about the origins of and biological imperative for human cooperation. We believe it is important to link caring and concern to this deeper biological imperative. Here’s the question: how do we do that without risking fatal forms of reductionism? We can begin to imagine that caring and concern are rooted in but not reducible to the biological imperative for cooperation; otherwise, we’d see common and predictable expressions of caring and concern among and between people and cultures. Also important to these considerations is the work of Richard Sennett, a sociologist whose written a very important and interesting book, Together: The rituals, Pleasures and Politics of Cooperation. Take the time to listen to this short interview:
References
Gray, M., Dean, M., Agllias, K., Howard, A., & Schubert, L. (2015). Perspectives on neoliberalism for human service professionals. Social Service Review, 89(2), 368-392.
Tomasello, M. (2009). Why we cooperate. Boston: MIT press.
Sayer, A. (2011). Why things matter to people: Social science, values and ethical life. Cambridge University Press.
Sennett, R. (2012). Together: The rituals, pleasures and politics of cooperation. New Haven: Yale University Press.