Sinful trades

How you identify yourself is important. My mathematician big brother identifies as an engineer, even though to my knowledge he has never taken a single engineering class, per se, and has no such identification in terms of letters he can put after his name to impress you. But he actually is an engineer, you see. Builds things and makes them work and all that.

Me, well academically I identify as an Anthropologist (in spite of all the Lit and Phil credentials I amassed getting there), and to a degree, professionally too. But mostly I identify as a social worker, even though I have never taken a single Social Work class from a Faculty of Social Work. Though I have taught a few. A few years back, I looked at returning to school to formally get my MSW: the upshot of it was, of the classes I would have to take, about half of them were ones I could (and have) taught, probably at a far better level than the current instructors, and many of the others were very very useless to any real practise in the trade. And it was a lot of money and time, for dubious gain.

Anyway, what I love about my two ostensible professions, is that both have known egregious and terrible sin. A lot of racism, eugenics, and (pace Godwin's Law), nazism flowed pretty directly from early adventures in anthro theory. And as a Canadian, I should never ever forget, that the whole Residential Schools catastrophe flowed directly from what we would today call Best Practises in Social Work. These days, you will find very few Anthropologists and Social Workers that are comfortable with absolute prescriptions and one size fits all solutions, and most of us are very very skeptical about over-reaching claims. Perhaps only Phycists (post Almagordo) are as acutely conscious of the damage we can do, from the best intentions and at the highest currently known state of the art.

For example.

The drug wars. I have made little secret here or elsewhere of my attitude towards the War on Drugs, and it is an attitude that I am pretty sure most in the Social Work profession, and serious Anthropologists, would agree with. But you surely don't see a lot of competent social workers or anthropologists on the political barricades on the issue. We are happy to tell you what we think and experience, but very few of us are comfortable with taking any kind of solid position, which amounts to prescribing a universal nostrum. We've done that before, and horror resulted. To be Rumsfieldian, we now know that we don't know what it is that we don't know. We understand that; why don't the rest of you professionals?

(And, incidentally, when will your profession know great sin?)

Anyway.

What all this is a preface for, is that in my late 40s I am thinking pretty hard about going back to school. Not for a graduate degree in Anthro or to get that coveted MSW after my name. No, I am thinking really hard and considering my opitions and routes towards getting a professional accounting designation (there are several options kicking around out there, but the alphabet after your name seems to mean something). Not that I have any intention of working directly in the field, but it stems from my recognition that a) I already understand and am very good at this stuff, b) apparently the formal designation matters, and c) this is yet another profession that has known vast amount of sin (just doesn't let itself recognize it yet). I'm particularly comfortable with that last one, been there, done that, know much better now. Maybe I can share.

I don't want to be an accountant, but I do want to be able to fight accountants on their own ground. Where I see, and they so often do not, the massive sin in their rules. (I was at a session the other day, where you could introduce yourself to the fellow attendees by various categories of facts about yourself; one of them was best book you had ever read. I chose that, and said "Catch-22" because it was not so much an indictment of war, or of rampant capitalism, though it is both those and much more, but because it was such a scorching criticism of the insanity of humans working in rules-based and personal responsibilty-free hierarchies. Nobody got the point I was making, the rules based accountability free session continued.)

OK, this is weirding me out too, but just like dentistry, nobody goes into accounting because they like catching expense claims that are a few bucks out, any more than dentists like looking at diseased teeth. It is all about making a respectable highly paid living, really, no matter the cost to those around you. And for status (the old anthro guy coming out here), it is all about status really, painting your belly blue and how many feathers in your headress. I'm down with that. I think more anthropologists should make every effort to join the accounting lodge, along with the peyote one they tend to so enthusiastically join up for.

Anyway, that's my story, and I'm stick'n to it.