BEYOND COMPASSION

Larissa MacFarguhar, Strangers Drowning: Grappling With Impossible Idealism, Drastic Choices, and the Overpowering Urge to Help (New York: Penguin Press, 2015) ("The usual way to do good is to help those who are near you: a person grows up in a particular place, perceives that something is wrong there, and sets out to fix it. Or a person's job suddenly requires heroism of him and he rises to the occasion . . .  Either way, he is taking care of his own, trying to make their lives better--lives that he understands because they are like his. He may not know personally the people he's helping, but he has something in common with them--they are, in some sense, his people. There's an organic connection between him and his work." "Then there's another sort of person, who starts out with something more abstract--a sense of injustice in the world at large, and a longing for goodness as such. This person want to live a just life, feels obligated to right wrongs or relieve suffering, but he doesn't know right away how to do that, so he sets himself to figuring it out. He doesn't feel that he must attend first to people close to him; he is moved not by  sense of belonging but by the urge to do as much good s he can. There is no organic, necessary connection between him and his work--it doesn't choose him, he chose it. The do-gooders I'm talking about are this second sort of person. They're not better or worse than the first sort, but they are rarer and  harder to understand. It can seem unnatural to look away from one's own people toward a moral idea, but for these do-gooders it;s not: it's natural for them." "The do-gooder . . . knows that there are crises everywhere, all the time, and he seeks them out. He is not spontaneous--he plans his good deeds in cold blood. He may be compassionate, but compassion is not why he does what he does--he committed himself to helping before he saw the person who needs him. He has no ordinary life: his good deeds are his life. This make him good; but it can also make him seem perverse--a foul-weather friend, a kind of virtuous ambulance chaser. And it's also why do-gooders are a reproach: you know, as the do-gooder knows, that there is always, somewhere, a need for help." Id. at 4-5.).