Post-modernism, truth and social work

Brian T Trainor

In this article, I suggest that social workers should be servants and seekers of truth and
that they should do their utmost to re-legitimise the quest for truth in social life and
professional practice. I hold that while post-modernism must be applauded for its incisive
critique of the ‘totalising tendency’ of the quest for truth, especially when fuelled by
passionate ideological conviction, yet its forthright rejection of truth itself has had
disastrous social consequences and serious deleterious effects on professional practice in
social work. Over the last two decades or so, the baby (truth) has been recklessly thrown
out with the bath water (totalistic ideologies) and the consequences have been sorely felt
in society, in the personal lives of individuals, in the human service professions as a whole
and in social work, especially of course in the writings and professional practice of those
who have enthusiastically embraced post-modernism. I also suggest, however, that social
work needs to take full advantage of the insights of post-modernism (and especially of
Foucault) in order to avoid falling into a ‘totalistic chasm’ as the profession pursues its own
quest for truth.

characterising a major paradigm shift that

Keywords
Foucault, post-modernism, truth
Post-modernism, truth and
social work
When Sir Humphrey Appleby in the BBC
series ‘Yes, Prime Minister’ was told that he
(Sir Humphrey) was suspected of being a
spy, his response to the Prime Minister was
that he couldn’t possibly be guilty because
‘a spy believes in things . . . in “good
causes” and I don’t believe in anything!’ His
response provides us with a useful way of
22 Burke Street, Adelaide 5008, South Australia
Email: brian.trainor@unisa.edu.au
Dr Brian T. Trainor is an Adjunct Associate Professor at
the Whyalla Campus of the University of South Australia
and a part-time tutor at Flinders University.
has recently taken place in western culture.
In the 1960’s and 70’s it was still
intellectually permissible, and even
commendable, to believe in ‘good causes’,
in socialism or feminism for example, but in
the 80’s and 90’s, due in the main to the
increasing intellectual ascendancy of post-
modernism, relativism and social
constructionism, ‘good’ causes rapidly lost
their intellectual respectability. They were
generally portrayed by post-modern critics
as hopelessly enmeshed with totalistic
‘truth-revealing’ meta-narratives, as
attempts to foist rigid conceptual grids
upon the living richness and diversity of
social reality, and as the work of ‘masters
of truth’ whose spurious knowledge claims
merely reflected their own ‘will to power’.
In the present ‘post-modern’ climate, it has
become increasingly difficult to seriously

204 Australian Social Work/September 2002, Vol. 55, No. 3

believe in anything or to entertain a
social vision of any kind, for one thereby
exposes oneself to the charge of
harbouring truth-inspired, totalistic
tendencies towards one’s fellow human
beings.
Against this backdrop, I wish to suggest
that social workers should be servants and
seekers of truth and that they should do
their utmost to re-legitimise the quest for
truth – that is, for the ‘good and true’ – in
social life and professional practice. I hold
that while post-modernism must be
applauded for its incisive critique of the
‘totalising tendency’ of the quest for truth,
especially when fuelled by passionate
ideological conviction, yet its forthright
rejection of truth itself has had disastrous
social consequences and serious
deleterious effects on professional practice
in social work.1 Over the last two decades
or so, the baby (truth) has been recklessly
thrown out with the bath water (totalistic
ideologies) and the consequences have
been sorely felt in society, in the personal
lives of individuals, in the human service
professions as a whole and in social work,
especially of course in the writings and
professional practice of those who have
enthusiastically embraced post-modernism
(Trainor & Jeffreys 2002). Hence, in
this article I will (i) outline some key
post-modern tenets; (ii) provide an example
of the way in which post-modernism
has adversely influenced social work;
(iii) suggest that social work needs to
keep the quest for truth at the heart of its
professional practice and to entertain
an attitude of ‘ecumenical graciousness’
towards all truth-meta-narratives (Trainor
et al. 1998a)2 and finally (iv) suggest that
social work needs to take full advantage
Australian Social Work/September 2002, Vol. 55, No. 3
of the insights of post-modernism (and
especially of Foucault) in order to avoid
falling into a ‘totalistic chasm’ as the
profession pursues its own quest for truth.
(i) Post-modernism and
truth
Post-modernists either outrightly reject, or
exhibit an extremely sceptical and
unsympathetic attitude towards, what they
term ‘modernity’, which is usually
understood as embracing a belief in
science, in the usefulness, productivity and
reliability of the empirical method and,
finally, in progress, individuality and
universal rights. Regarding themselves as
‘post-metaphysical’ or ‘post-philosophical’,
they reject the notion that truth (again in the
sense of ‘the good and the true’) orients our
thoughts, that it is the origin and end of
human thinking and that it exercises a kind
of constant ‘gravitational pull’ on the human
intellect as ‘its other’. Reality is deemed to
be socially constructed and reason, truth,
science are viewed as cultural constructs or
biases. What is sometimes deferentially
referred to as ‘science’ should, they hold,
be more appropriately described as
‘western’ or ‘eurocentric’ science, since
it is a cultural construct of the West.
Post-modernists are firm in their belief
that there is no outside world beyond
the reaches of the mind which is better
grasped or understood by the concepts
of Western science than in any other way.
In whatever way we grasp the world (social,
external, legal, etc.), we do so – and only
can do so – by means of the cultural
concepts available to us. Thus our
concepts only have ‘truth-value’ within
205
our cultural milieu; any suggestion that
our language and thoughts might ‘truly’
correspond to a world that lies beyond
our thoughts and words is firmly
rejected. Reality is linguistic through
and through; there simply is no
extra-discursive, extra-linguistic reality
existing beyond thought and which lies
‘out there’, waiting to be grasped, so
to speak, by our thoughts and words.
We should, post-modernists hold, no
longer think in terms of the centrality of
the ‘knowing, thinking subject’, which
exercises a kind of mastery over the world
it subjects to its ‘knowing gaze’. Rather,
we should acknowledge the centrality and
reality of the culture which encircles and
immerses us, and which, in a sense, is us,
for it constitutes us as the individuals
(more properly, the assembly of diverse
subject positions) that we are.
It is, I think, unfortunate that
post-modernists refuse, on post-modern
principle so to speak, to consider the
possibility that culture might itself be a
prism of truth. Foucault, for example, was
intrigued by what he called ‘the games
of truth and error through which being is
historically constituted as experience’
but these ‘games’ are not of course for
Foucault dialectical moves in and towards
truth, and he certainly did not regard the
historically conditioned (for him, only
historically conditioned) ‘truths’ of a
particular time and place as social or
cultural expressions of truth itself (Foucault
1985, p 6). Rather, his ‘truths’ and the
‘games of truth’ that produce them are the
socio-linguistic mechanisms through which
various ‘wills to power’ operate in the world;
206 Australian Social Work/September 2002, Vol. 55, No. 3
indeed they are, for Foucault, the major
normalising means through which the
disciplinary power of the human service
professions (social work, psychiatry,
education, law, etc.) ‘manufactures’
individuals (Foucault 1977).3 He would
insist that social work and the other human
service professions do not deal with
pre-existent, ‘real’ individuals; rather, the
‘individual’ is socially and professionally
‘constructed’ by means of the terms,
techniques and categories employed by
the professional disciplines. This is the full
force and major consequence of Foucault’s
claim that the disciplines manufacture or
make individuals. Though far too strong
and extreme, it is a claim which certainly
has a core of truth, for just as there is a
power in ‘positive thinking’ to engender or
construct human beings of a particular
type (fulfilled, well-adjusted, with a positive
self-concept, etc.), so too there is
undoubtedly an element of self-fulfilling
‘creation’ or ‘suggestion’ in the professional
employment of certain categories (‘client
strengths’, ‘positive self-concept’, ‘individual
responsibility’, ‘growth’, ‘development’,
‘client self-determination’, etc.) and a very
real, hopefully benign, power of
‘construction’ in their judicious, reflective,
developmentally orientated application
to professional practice. It is to be
hoped – obviously, there are no
guarantees – that the use of professional
concepts serves to both elucidate in
some sense what really and already exists
(the individual client or group prior to
professional intervention) and also to
ethically inform, or further develop in a
constructive manner, what already exists.
However, it is precisely this hope that a
Foucauldian post-modernism undermines
by regarding a society’s way of life as only
a social construction (which of course, in a
sense, it obviously and tautologically is)
and not also as the prism of truth or the
societal-cultural medium through which
truth finds expression with varying degrees
of adequacy in different cultures. Again,
this hope is dashed by the post-modern
a priori conviction or assumption that
cultural expressions and beliefs are to be
understood solely in terms of the ‘will to
power’ of dominant groups whose interests
they always and only represent, for it
renders futile the effort of social workers
to distinguish as best they can between
those cultural expressions which reflect,
to whatever extent, the ‘will to power’ of
dominant groups and those which reflect, in
the main, the collective ‘will to truth’ of a
political community; indeed, in post-modern
terms, the very attempt by the social work
profession to make these distinctions when
formulating social policy is itself no more
than an expression of its professional ‘will to
power’.
(ii) The impact of post-
modernism on social work
and the need for truth
meta-narratives
Needless to say, all of this has had a
profound impact upon the social work
profession, not only upon its theory and
practice but also upon its very ‘self-
concept’. What post-modernism means in
terms of social work’s self-understanding is
Australian Social Work/September 2002, Vol. 55, No. 3
vividly portrayed by Peter Leonard who
holds with the early Foucault that the
‘modernist’ social work values of
universalism, rationalism, justice and
individualism serve as a mask for the subtle
operations of power and that ‘the origins of
social work’ are to be found in ‘structures
and practices of domination’ (Leonard
1994, p 20). What it means in terms of
social work practice is portrayed by Carol
O’Brien’s post-modern approach to teenage
sexuality and procreation. One might have
thought it unexceptionable to suggest that
social work practice in this area should be
guided both by sound empirical studies
and by prolonged reflection on the part of
all those concerned (especially social
workers) on what really is to the benefit,
or what really is to the detriment, of sole
teenage mothers (O’Brien et al. 1999).
However, O’Brien, as a matter of ‘post-
modern principle’, so to speak, is positively
opposed to any quest for the ‘real truth’ of
the matter or what ‘really is the case’ and to
the arduous professional endeavours of
social workers to discover (and be informed
by their best, though fallible, judgement
concerning) what ‘really is the case’
(O’Brien 1999, p 136). She regards the
kind of empirical inquiries necessary to
establish ‘what is the case’ as positively
dangerous and repressive. O’Brien
provides us with the following quote from
J. M. Stafford as an example of the
kind of empirically based generalisations
she regards as suspect and dangerous.
Health risks increase for both the mother
and the child both before and after delivery.
Babies born to teenage mothers are
more likely to have a low birth weight, be
207
premature, and suffer from congenital
defects. Teenage mothers are more likely
to have troubled marriages and some
studies have reported that they are more
likely to abuse or neglect their children
than are older parents. These findings may
relate to the fact that teenage parents are
very likely to suffer form severe financial
difficulties and associated emotional strain
(O’Brien 1999, pp. 132–133).
O’Brien actually upbraids the social work
profession for being informed by these
studies, pointing out that
in social work publications about your and
sexuality since the mid 1980s, the authors
typically constitute sexuality as an object of
scientific knowledge and themselves as
experts in that knowledge (O’Brien 1999,
pp. 136),
That they ‘frequently employ statistics
concerning the sexual activities of young
people’ (O’Brien et al. 1999, p. 133) and
that the end result is that ‘the procreative
activities of teenage women are constituted
as dangerous, both to themselves and to
society ’ (O’Brien et al. 1999, p. 136). The
key question here, of course, is whether or
not the procreative activities of young
women that are ‘constituted’ as dangerous
through the empirical inquiries of those
authors really are dangerous, but with
their strong anti-truth convictions, this
typical ‘professional question’ is one which
post-modernists refuse in principle even to
ask, let alone to try to seriously answer.
Clearly, however, the social work profession
must continue to be ‘truth-oriented’ or
‘reality-determined’ and to persevere in its
endeavours to ascertain, as best it can and
208 Australian Social Work/September 2002, Vol. 55, No. 3
while fully acknowledging its fallibility, the
kind of health or other risks that accompany
the behaviour of client groups.
The cultural ‘vacuum of truth’ that we are
experiencing at the present time is having
profound personal as well as professional
effects, especially in the lives of our young
people. The high incidence of suicide and
mental depression in young people is
mainly due, I wish to suggest, not to their
failure to respond to societal norms and
ideals but, rather, to the vertiginous
sensation that accompanies their futile
endeavours to live life in the absence of
such ideals, in ‘empty’ social space, and to
their disenchantment with a world without
meaning, meta-narratives and grand (truth)
theorising. This suggestion presupposes,
but also goes beyond in a significant
respect, Durkheim’s (Durkheim 1953)
insistence that the suicide rate is a social
fact requiring a social explanation. It is at
one with Durkheim in acknowledging the
need in all of us for a sense of social
integration in our lives, but goes further in
suggesting that we all, but most especially
our young people, also need the social and
political groups and institutions to which we
belong to be (or at least to seriously claim
to aspire to be) worthwhile, sound, good
and true, to be vital sources of meaning in
our lives and to provide cultural pathways
to truth. ‘Social integration’ is certainly
important for human health and happiness
but so too – again, for our youth especially
– is ‘truth integration’ or the sense that our
lives as individuals, family members,
professionals, citizens, etc., are
meaningfully related to ‘the good and the
true’ and, though culturally unique, are
nevertheless defensible from the standpoint
of our common humanity. Interestingly,
the study of suicide notes indicates that
non-depressed suicides may be more
susceptible to a lack of ‘truth integration’ in
their lives, for a lack of ‘social integration’ is
certainly more keenly felt by depressed
suicides who are more likely to
communicate their difficulties in developing
attachments. See O’Connor et al. (1999).
Also, it is widely acknowledged (Perret-
Catipovic 1999; Ottino 1999) that despite
the growing interest of health and welfare
workers in youth and adolescent suicide
attempts in recent years, the frequency of
suicide among the young has not
decreased and all efforts to improve the
compliance of adolescents with psychiatric
treatment have failed to date. Perhaps this
is because, as well as psychologically
orientated strategies aimed at preventing
suicide, we also need to consider the extent
to which a society provides, or fails to
provide, its younger members with a truth-
orientated way of life and challenging social
visions. In this regard, we can hardly fail to
be struck by the invidious comparison to be
drawn between the anomic state of youth at
the present time (the condition of
normlessness induced by the current
vacuum of truth) and the strongly truth-
orientated youth movements of the sixties
and seventies. Thus, it is important that
social work decisively rejects the anti-truth
stand of post-modernism, both in its own
professional interests as a truth-orientated
discipline, and in the interests of our youth.
It must resist the present anti-truth cultural
climate induced by the powerful intellectual
force of relativism and post-modernism and
Australian Social Work/September 2002, Vol. 55, No. 3
encourage, as far as it can, the revival of an
intellectual scene where truth-meta-
narratives (Marxism, Feminism, Liberalism,
etc.) flourish once again. If, as I would
suggest, a meta-narrative is a story which
intertwines the humanity of each of us with
the humanity of all of us, then we need
more of them, not less. However, as well
as cultivating a sense of ‘ecumenical
graciousness’ toward all meta-narratives,
we also need to critically analyse the truth
claims of each in turn in order to pinprick
their pretensions and exaggerated claims,
and in order to distil the precise aspect
of truth that each contains. Curiously
enough, it is in the performance of this
critical role in relation to meta-narratives
(as distinct from an outright, anti-truth
dismissal of the latter) that post-modernists,
and especially Foucault, are able to offer
the profession invaluable assistance and
real insight.
(iii) Foucault, ‘masters of
truth’ and social work
If post-modernism may be justly accused
of throwing the ‘baby of truth’ out with the
bath water (totalising ideologies), we need
to make sure that our search for truth
doesn’t bring the dirty water back into the
bath tub. We must acknowledge that truth
is a collective quest to be pursued, most
certainly, with passion and enthusiasm but
at the same time the social work profession
must be careful not to succumb, in the
course of this pursuit, to the ‘totalising
temptation’ to set itself up as a ‘master
209
of truth’. The greatest antidote to this
temptation is the cultivation of a self-critical
spirit. Now, no-one has done more to foster
such a spirit and to undermine the false
pretensions of ‘masters of truth’ and ‘grand
theorists’ than Foucault (Trainor 1996).
His withering critique of ‘experts’ – those
who ‘know it all’ and can confidently and
‘scientifically’ show us the way – certainly
helps us to become humble ‘servants of
truth’ and to endeavour to eradicate from
ourselves the intellectual traits (arrogance,
and a false sense of certainty) of these
discredited ‘masters’ and ‘experts’. A
seeker and servant of truth must constantly
resist the temptation to act as a ‘master of
truth’, whereas the latter has the illusory
assurance of false certainty and is, in a
sense, ‘beyond temptation.’ In my
Radicalism, Feminism, Fanaticism; Social
Work in the Nineties (Trainor 1996), I make
a similar attempt to undermine the
pretensions of radical grand theorists of
both the right and the left who have a
fanatical obsession with the realisation of a
single absolutised value (‘liberty’ in the
case of the radical right and ‘equality’ in the
case of the radical left), as distinct from
an entirely wholesome (non-exclusive)
preference or attachment to a particular
(non-absolutised) value and its realisation.
In his critical review of this book in
Australian Social Work Hart (1996) makes
the point that those who espouse grand
totalistic theories of the kind that Foucault
so forthrightly condemns make analyses
that are sometimes ‘accurate and useful to
students and clients’. (p. 67) This is of
course perfectly true but misses entirely the
point (my point and Foucault’s point) that
whether or not analyses based on such
210 Australian Social Work/September 2002, Vol. 55, No. 3
theories are sometimes accurate, they are
on the whole dangerous, misleading and
oppressive in their effects. Curiously,
Hart does seem to readily concede that
totalistic theorists are dangerous, but
assures us that we need not be concerned.
He says that our fears in this regard
can be appreciated but put aside as ivory
tower concerns. The influence of such
theorists on day to day social work is
diluted by the good sense of students and
their experience of the field. (p. 67)
It is difficult to believe that Hart really
subscribes to the view that we (or we in
the academy) have no reason to be
concerned when totalistic forms of
academic theorising emerge on the
intellectual scene, and that we should
simply leave it to the good sense of the
field to deal with any dangerous forms of
theorising that might arise in the academy
at any particular time.
The kind of professional ‘humility’
that is appropriate for social workers
as ‘servants of truth’ is well described in
Foucault’s portrayal of his own role as
an intellectual.
My role is to address problems effectively,
realistically: and to pose them with the
greatest possible rigour, with the maximum
complexity and difficulty, so that a solution
does not arise all at once because of the
thought of some reformer or even in the
brain of a political party. The problems
that I try to address, these perplexities of
crime, madness and sex which involve
daily life, cannot be easily resolved. It
takes years, decades of work carried out
at the grassroots level with the people
directly involved; and the right to speech
and political imagination must be returned
to them . . . I carefully guard against
making the law. Rather, I concern myself
with determining problems, unleashing
them, revealing them within a framework
of such complexity as to shut the mouths
of prophets and legislators; all those who
speak for others and above others. It is
at that moment that the complexity of the
problem will be able to appear in its
connection with people’s lives; and
consequently, the legitimacy of a
common enterprise will be able to
appear through concrete questions,
difficult cases, revolutionary movements,
reflections and evidence (Foucault 1991,
pp. 158–159).
Foucault here offers the social work
profession what might appear to be a
‘conservative’ formula for resisting the
simplifying and totalising tendencies of
radical ideologies but his commendatory
reference to ‘revolutionary movements’
indicates that his work is conservative in a
true Burkean sense (Edmund Burke’s
(1981), conservatism of ‘real experience’
led him to support the American Revolution)
rather than in a reactionary sense or in a
way that opposes beneficial social change.
At any rate, whether ‘conservative’ or not,
the benefits to be gained from the kind
of full immersion in the real problems of
everyday life that Foucault commends
are surely beyond dispute and his critique
of the ‘knowing gaze’ of experts and
‘masters of truth’ certainly paves a
humble pathway along which social work
practitioners may walk side by side with
(and for), rather than above (and in the
‘scientifically’ assessed interests of) their
Australian Social Work/September 2002, Vol. 55, No. 3
clients. Moreover, just as the absoluteness
and unassailable certainty of the ‘knowing
gaze’ must be set aside, Foucault would
insist, to be replaced by the provisionality
and tentativeness of the genuinely ‘attentive
ear’, so too professional knowledge and the
data (or truths) of the human sciences,
though important and relevant, must not be
allowed to operate in social work practice
as premises in a syllogism from which ‘what
is to be done’ in the lives of clients can be
scientifically ‘deduced’ by social workers
as professional ‘masters of truth’, but must
be treated, instead, as background factors
whose influence and meaning in the lives
of clients needs to be assessed on a case
by case basis.
(iv) Conclusion
Because Foucault is the leading theorist
who, perhaps more than any other, has
contributed to the current ‘anti-truth’ cultural
climate, his work constitutes the intellectual
‘main danger’ to the health and wellbeing
of our society in general but most especially
of young people seeking meaning and
significance in their lives. However,
although he has thrown his full intellectual
weight against the very notion of ‘truth’
(most forcefully against ‘masters of truth’),
he is at the same time the theorist who is
most valuable and insightful in providing us
with the kind of practical orientation
necessary for a ‘servant and seeker of
truth’. My own view is that Foucault is
substantively and theoretically ‘wrong’
concerning ‘truth’ but methodically and
practically ‘right’ concerning how we should
proceed in practical terms towards what he
211
would regard as legitimate (his expression)
personal and political ends and what I
would further regard as the Truth of
ourselves and our political community
(Trainor 1998b). In brief, and in conclusion,
my suggestion is that social work should
decisively reject the substantive and
theoretical Foucault who takes his stand
against ‘truth’ and warmly embrace the
practical and methodical Foucault who
recommends a full professional immersion
into the real personal and social problems
of everyday life.
Notes
1 Some post-modern authors have claimed that
the central (modernist) assumptions underpinning
social work are so misguided that they should be
rejected outright, while others insist that the arrival
of post-modernism minimally requires a substantial
and radical reconceptualisation of many of social
work’s basic assumptions and practices. It is true
that others again see post-modernism as actually
broadly consistent with, and even as reinforcing in
certain respects rather than opposing, the traditional
ideals of social work (see especially Fook & Pease
1999) and that this viewpoint has certain affinities
with the position espoused in this article. However,
while the various authors in this collection of essays
hold (as I do) that social work ought to use post-
modernism to effect emancipatory social change, I
would suggest that, in general, they fail to consider
a very real problem with the position they wish to
adopt, that is, that a commitment to emancipatory
social change involves a commitment to and belief in
truth (to the possibility of formulating policies and
procedures which really and truly are beneficial for
clients and not merely expressions of social work’s
professional ‘will to power’) whereas post-modernism
in general is strongly anti-truth.
2 I present a more ‘social work friendly’ and
‘grand (Truth) narrative friendly’ version of
post-modernism in Trainor (1998a) Chapter two.
I there argue that the current antipathy towards
meta-narratives is a feature of ‘late modernism’ rather
than of ‘post-modernism’.
3 In Foucault (1977), p. 170, Foucault states that
‘discipline “makes” individuals; it is the specific
technique of a power that regards individuals both as
objects and as instruments of its exercise.’
212 Australian Social Work/September 2002, Vol. 55, No. 3
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