A Few Thoughts on Metaphors of Service, Excerpted from Several Sources

A few thoughts on metaphors of service, excerpted from several sources.

To consider: many metaphors for service offer a useful way to think about the ultimate aims and goals of service. Each has a positive core message, but metaphors are often an overly simplistic way to think about something as complex as community-based work for the public good. Think about the other metaphors or proverbs you know about service, such as “Service is the rent we pay for living” (Marian Wright Edelman), or “Don’t do for others what they can do for themselves.” What is the core intent of the message? What complexities about service does it not adequately address?

- Wendy Wagner

Reading 1:

Author unknown

Once a man was walking along a beach. The sun was shining and it was a beautiful day. Off in the distance he could see a person going back and forth between the surf's edge and the beach. Back and forth this person went. As the man approached he could see that there were hundreds of starfish stranded on the sand as the result of the natural action of the tide.

The man was stuck by the apparent futility of the task. There were far too many starfish. Many of them were sure to perish. As he approached the person continued the task of picking up starfish one by one and throwing them into the surf.

As he came up to the person he said, "You must be crazy. There are thousands of miles of beach covered with starfish. You can't possibly make a difference." The person looked at the man. He then stooped down and pick up one more starfish and threw it back into the ocean. He turned back to the man and said, "It sure made a difference to that one!"

Reading 2: Starfish Hurling and Community Service

Morton, Keith (1999). Starfish hurling and community service. In Campus Compact Reader, May 2000, p. 23.

One of the most popular stories in community service events is that of the starfish: a person is running, hurling starfish deposited on the beach by a storm back into the sea. “What are you doing,” asks another person, “you can’t possibly throw all the starfish back. Your effort makes no difference.” “It makes a difference to this one,” replies the first person, who continues off down the beach.

The usual conclusions drawn from this hackneyed tale are about the importance of making a difference where you can, one person or problem at a time; about not being put off by skepticism or criticism or cynicism. The story acknowledges the relief that comes when we find a way to relieve suffering. A somewhat deeper reading is that there is merit in jumping into a situation and finding a way to act - the first step in determining what possibilities for action might exist.

But the tale is, ultimately, mis-educative and I wish people would stop using it. First, it is about a problem - starfish cast up by a storm - that is apolitical (unless you stretch for the connection between pollution and el Nino that might have precipitated the storm). There is seldom any hesitancy or moral complexity in responding to a crisis caused by natural disaster. It is the one circumstance in which charity can be an unmitigated good. The story suggests that all problems are similarly simple - that there is a path of action which is right and can avoid the traps of politics, context, or complex and contradictory human relationships.

Second, the story is about helping starfish and not about helping people. It avoids, therefore, the shadow side of the service, the sticky problem of who deserves our help. The starfish are passive; they have no voice; they cannot have an opinion about their circumstances, at least not that we can hear. This one is much like that one. Their silence coincides with the fact that they can have done nothing (the story suggests) to deserve their fate. In most of the situations where this story is told, service is about people working with people: people with histories, voices, opinions, judgment, more or less power.

Third, the story avoids the possible complexity of ecology: it might be that the starfish are part of a food chain that is being interrupted as they are thrown back - birds might go hungry at a critical time of year, for example; or it might be that the starfish have been released by a storm from the ocean bottom because they have outgrown their habitat. It is never smart to intervene in an ecosystem without understanding how all of its parts are interrelated.

Fourth, the tale suggests that we should work from emotional response and not our heads, even though the problem is, in this case, a knowable one. As “overwhelming” as the miles of beach seem, the dilemma of the starfish is finite and knowable - this many starfish on this stretch of beach; a bit of advance organizing could result in enough volunteers to return all the starfish to the sea.

Fifth, the story privileges random, individual acts of kindness. It avoids questions of community (and we claim “community service” as our ground after all). It avoids questions of working with others. It polarizes the relationship of the two actors: how different would the story be if the second person joined in with the first? In short, the story does nothing to teach us about community or service. This in itself is not necessarily a problem; it could be an entertaining tale, and that could be enough. What makes it a problem, however, is that the tale of the starfish pretends to teach us something about community service, even as it misdirects our sympathies, our intellects and our sense of purpose.

Don’t go charging out to help. Talk, listen, build relationships, know your self, your environment; work with others where they and the situation itself can teach you how to act with more and more knowledge and effectiveness. Stop hurling starfish.

Reading 3: Fishes and Babies: Re-examining the Treatment of Charity as Inadequate Action

This is a response to the above piece by Keith Morton, written by Charles Straint (excerpted from a longer article):

Straint, Charles R. (2006). Moving like a starfish: Beyond a unilinear model of student transformation in service learning classes. Journal of College and Characer 8(1), p. 1-12.

Framing service learning transformation as a trajectory from charity to social justice implies

more than a critique of a self-regarding, condescending attitude. It also entails a critique of

the inadequacy of charitable actions. Faced with systemic injustice, we perceive charitable

service as “band aid” solutions. The stories we tell in our service-learning classes are frequently

the most obvious tip-offs to what we have assumed within our frame of reference about

effective moral action. So, from the standpoint of Morton’s second paradigm, service as

capacity-building action, the story most frequently told is that which contrasts feeding others

fish and teaching them how to fish. Here the seeming inadequacy of charitable action is made

plain: Feed a fish and people eat for one day; teach them how to fish and they feed themselves

every day.

However, capacity-building service is not without ambiguity which may be criticized

from the standpoint of both Morton’s charity and social justice standpoints. Teaching someone

how to fish takes time. If people are starving, they need fish to eat while we engage in “capacity

building.” Moreover, there will always be those members of a society, the most deeply

vulnerable—the terminally ill, for example—for whom the simple expression of compassion is

most required. Should our students not be engaged with those whose capacity for autonomous

growth has been compromised? Are there not transformative lessons to be learned at the

bedside of the dying?

From the standpoint of the social justice advocate as well, teaching someone to fish

presumes that the person a) has access to a lake, b) that a corporate conglomerate has not fished out that lake and c) that our industrial waste has not poisoned all of the fish. Teaching someone to fish, in other words, presupposes a redistribution of power within a society or, at least, sufficient unexploited nooks and crannies (untapped lakes) where new fisheries can be

established. Capacity building, in other words, requires both compassionate service and social

justice advocacy.

In terms of the social justice model, the same reciprocity with compassionate service and

capacity building is required. The story that I most often tell to encourage the development of a systemic, social justice-perspective is that of the babies in the river. You’ve heard of it, I’m

sure. Two persons see a baby in the river and rush in to rescue her. To their dismay this baby is

followed by another. Then another and another. In each case the two moral heroes dive in to

save the baby. Finally, one person does not rush back into the river but heads upstream. Her

partner asks, “Where are you going? I need help rescuing these babies.” To which she replies,

“I am going to find out who is throwing the babies in the river.”

This story, certainly, represents a truly important lesson on the necessity to seek out the

roots of suffering and oppression. However, I usually add a coda to the story. The person

headed upstream discovers not an evil individual but a baby factory. Most of the workers are

dimly aware, if at all, of the consequences of their actions. The factory, in turn, is part of an

entire social system. It will not be dismantled and rebuilt in a single day, or quarter or semester. Meanwhile, those babies keep coming. “Aren’t you glad,” I ask my students at this point, “that someone has stayed behind to rescue those babies?”

Unconditional love in the present moment demands (a categorical imperative, if you will) that we not neglect those suffering here and now while searching for the roots of injustice. “Besides which,” the capacity-builder will chime in, “baby factories are not dismantled and rebuilt by single individuals nor can one person rescue all of those babies. We need someone who will train more rescuers and more dismantlers.” A case in point: Dr. Paul Farmer and his organization, Partners in Health, have combined direct medical service to the Western hemisphere’s poorest people in rural Haiti with a global campaign to eradicate tuberculosis. When accused of merely treating symptoms, they offered to “make common cause” with anyone sincerely trying to change the “political economies” of countries like Haiti. But it didn’t follow . . . that good works without revolution only prolonged the status quo, that the only thing projects like Partners in Health really accomplish is the creation of “dependency.” The poor were suffering . . . . Partners in Health believed in sending resources from the United States to Haiti, down the steep gradient pf inequality, so as to provide services to the desperately poor—directly, now. They called this “pragmatic solidarity.” (Kidder, 2003, 100-101)

Simply stated, social justice work alone can end up sacrificing the present generation for

the sake of a utopian future. Each form of service presents an opportunity for transformative

learning and praxis, for “pragmatic solidarity.” Each requires other forms of praxis to overcome

its own ambiguities.