Political forces.—The political forces have to do with the more formal control of public opinion and law. Neighborhood work is concerned with political forces whenever social action is desired. Our whole scheme of social work may be regarded, from this standpoint at least, as social politics. But has the social worker, who is the social politician, the same intimate knowledge of his neighborhood that the professional politician possesses? A minimum of information which he needs is a card catalogue of, plus some direct contact with, all the local dynamic personalities, including gang leaders, pool hall proprietors, leaders of all the neighborhood organizations, and of all professional persons, like representatives of social agencies, physicians, lawyers, clergymen, at work in his locality. More than that, he needs to know the basic interests, the driving wishes, and the vital problems of the men and women, the youth and the children, living in the community.
The knowledge of these forces in neighborhood life will suggest feasible projects and programs. Too often, however, attempts at social control rise from ignorant good will rather than from the facts of the situation. This is particularly true of the many futile efforts to impose neighborly relationships upon areas which are no longer neighborhoods.
What, then, is our answer to the question, Can neighborhood work have a scientific basis? It can have a scientific foundation if it will base its activities upon a study of social forces. But the social forces of city life seem, from our studies, to be destroying the city neighborhood. Is the neighborhood center to engage in a losing fight against the underlying tendencies of modern urban society? This question should be squarely faced: Is neighborhood work prepared to base its justification for existence upon facts rather than upon sentiment?
There are those who are convinced that the function of the neighborhood center is passing with the decay of the neighborhood in the city. For myself, I am not so certain. Surely the work of the neighborhood center must now be conceived and planned in terms of its relationship to the entire life of the city. The work of neighborhood centers, like that of all other social agencies, must increasingly be placed upon the basis of the scientific study of the social forces with which they have to deal. Especially are studies desired of the actual effect and rôle of intimate contacts in personal development and social control.
A feasible way for neighborhood centers to place their work upon a scientific basis would be to stress the impulse to research that has always been associated with the settlement movement. Thirty years ago Mr. Robert A. Woods read a paper on “University Settlements as Laboratories in Social Science.” The argument for research in its relations to neighborhood work is contained in that article. He conceived the advantage of research both to social science and to the settlement. The growing fluidity and complexity of urban life has but increased the force of his argument.
Neighborhood work, by the logic of the situation, if it is to evolve a successful technique, will be compelled more and more to depend upon research into the social forces of modern life.
Ernest W. Burgess
CHAPTER IX
THE MIND OF THE HOBO: REFLECTIONS UPON THE RELATION BETWEEN MENTALITY AND LOCOMOTION
In the evolutionary hierarchy, as Herbert Spencer has sketched it for us, the animal series occupied a higher position than that of the plants. But in spite of all the progress represented in the long march from the amoeba to man, it is still true that the human creature is a good deal of a vegetable. This is evident in the invincible attachment of mankind to localities and places; in man’s, and particularly woman’s, inveterate and irrational ambition to have a home—some cave or hut or tenement—in which to live and vegetate; some secure hole or corner from which to come forth in the morning and return to at night.
As long as man is thus attached to the earth and to places on the earth, as long as nostalgia and plain homesickness hold him and draw him inevitably back to the haunts and places he knows best, he will never fully realize that other characteristic ambition of mankind, namely, to move freely and untrammeled over the surface of mundane things, and to live, like pure spirit, in his mind and in his imagination alone.