KAREN GOTTSTEIN Page 8 RAIN September/October 1985 to deal with guilt and grief. And the grieving daughter will know that it is the bereavement counselor who really cares for her because only the bereavement counselor comes when death visits this family on the Prairie of the Sauk. Shredding the Fabric of Community It will be only one generation between the time the bereavement counselor arrives and the community of mourners disappears. The counselor's new tool will cut through the social fabric, throwing aside kinship, care, neighborly obligations, and community ways of coming together and going on. Like John Deere's plow, the tools of bereavement counseling will create a desert where a community once flourished. And finally, even the bereavement counselor will see the impossibility of restoring hope in clients once they are genuinely alone with nothing but a service for consolation. In the inevitable failure of the service, the bereavement counselor will find the desert even in herself. There are those who would say that neither John Deere nor the bereavement counselor have created deserts. Rather, they would argue that these new tools have great benefits and that we have focused unduly upon a few negative side effects. Indeed, they might agree with Eli Lilly whose motto was, "A drug without side effects is no drug at all." To those with this perspective, the critical issue is the amelioration of the negative side effects. In Eli Lilly's idiom, they can conceive of a new drowsiness-creating pill designed to overcome the nausea created by an anticancer drug. They envision a prairie scattered with pyramids of new technologies and techniques, each designed to correct the error of its predecessor, but none without its own error to be corrected. In building these pyramids, they will also recognize the unlimited opportunities for research, development, and badly needed employment. Indeed, many will name this pyramiding process "progress" and note its positive effect upon the gross national product. The countervailing view holds that these pyramiding service technologies are now counterproductive constructions, essentially impediments rather than monuments. E.F. Schumacher helped clarify for many of us the nature of those physical tools that are so counterproductive that they become impediments. From nuclear generators to supersonic transports, there is an increasing recognition of the waste and devastation these new physical tools create. They are the sons and daughters of the sod buster. It is much less obvious to many that the bereavement counselor is also the sod buster's heir. It is more difficult for us to see how service technology creates deserts. Indeed, there are even those who argue that a good society should scrap its nuclear generators in order to recast them into plowshares of service. They would replace the counterproductive goods technology with the At what point does the economics of a service technology consume enough of the commonwealth that all of society becomes eccentric and distorted? service technology of modern medical centers, universities, correctional systems, and nursing homes. It is essential, therefore, that we have new measures of service technologies that will allow us to distinguish those that are impediments from those that are monumental. Professional Services: Weighing the Costs We can assess the degree of impediment incorporated in modern service technologies by weighing four basic elements. The first is the monetary cost. At what point does the economics of a service technology consume enough of the commonwealth that all of the society becomes eccentric and distorted? E.F. Schumacher helped us recognize the radical social, political, and environmental distortions created by huge investments in covering our land with concrete
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy NTc4NTAz