Book review: Larissa MacFarquhar explores the quandaries of kindness in Strangers Drowning

The image of a drowned boy has motivated thousands to help Syrian refugees, but a new book provokes a debate about whether ‘do-gooding’ enriches our lives for the better or worse

  A migrant at Keleti train station, Budapest, Hungary. Jeff J Mitchell / Getty Images
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Two weeks ago, when a picture of a tiny Syrian child, washed ashore off the coast of Turkey, swept around the world, I thought again about what it means to be a decent person. We live in a world in which despots and fanatics conspire to hold an entire population hostage, condemning the desperate to put their trust in human traffickers with appalling results.

The world is corrupted. And yet, we also live in a world in which a handful of people in south-east England, moved and enraged by the desperate conditions of mostly Muslim refugees trapped in northern France, started an Amazon wish list and pledged to deliver all the goods they received directly to Calais. They set out to raise £1,000 (Dh5,653) and, at last count, Kent for Calais has reached 5,501 per cent of their goal.

The world is corrupted, but the burning desire to help those in need is as real a human passion as lust or avarice.

Strangers Drowning by Larissa MacFarquhar approaches the thorny and complex subject of individual morality from a particular, peculiar angle: that of the "do-gooder". The New Yorker staff writer is talking here about the "person who sets out to live as ethical a life as possible" and she is unapologetic in expressing her own intellectual quandary when confronted by these ascetics of assistance: "Ambivalence toward do-gooders also arises out of a deep uncertainty about how a person ought to live. Is it good to try to live as moral a life as possible – a saintly life? Or does a life like that lack some crucial human quality?"

MacFarquhar puzzlingly begins in a sceptic's crouch, her introduction intended to waylay our presumed hostility towards her subjects with her own doubts. The attitude is off-putting, as if the author were inclined to have us pre-emptively judge her subjects before we had even met them. But Strangers Drowning ascends from its dispiriting beginnings through MacFarquhar's deft, skilled portraiture.

There is much here, indeed, that challenges, or flat-out contradicts, our safe collective assumptions about what morality might consist of.

The book is a series of lengthy profiles interspersed with philosophical, historical and literary interludes offering some context on the phenomenon of the do-gooder. I was particularly unsettled by the founder of a medical clinic in rural India who insisted that his wife give birth on their settlement, even though a stalled birth might mean that he would have to dismember his own unborn child, and the young woman whose devotion to charitable giving led her to feel that “children would be the most expensive non-essential thing she could possibly possess, so by having children of her own she would be in effect killing other people’s children”. (Children, and the do-gooders’ relative disinterest in the fate of their own compared to that of people as a whole, appears to be the reef on which many moral ideologues capsize in the eyes of others.)

Each profile is a story of moral awakening, discovery, crisis and eventual redemption. The do-gooder discovers his or her conscience, and a cause to match it, then struggles with the limitations of the self, and the world. This all makes for a more bittersweet book than its subject matter might prepare you for.

Animal-rights activist Aaron Pitkin wonders whether he can carve out time to care for his father, mistakenly placed in hospice care years before his time, when so many suffering animals demand his attention.

Pastor Kimberly Brown-Whale, who would occasionally remind her husband that they had been married for 10 years (or 15, or 20) and had never owned a couch, struggles with the question of whether she could leave a posting to Senegal while her daughter was going through a full-blown psychological crisis.

Hector Badeau, who selflessly adopted dozens of unwanted children together with his wife, takes to drinking when his wife’s advocacy work keeps her away from home, and their children disappointed him with unplanned pregnancies and arrests.

These moral strivers’ stories are not happy ones, generally speaking, because as MacFarquhar depicts, they are driven by a single overriding passion that crowds out all pleasures, large and small: “For do-gooders, it is always wartime.”

Even the pleasure of service was to be forsworn; Julia Wise chooses to become a social worker instead of her preference, aid worker, because the higher salary will enable her to donate more money to charity. MacFarquhar is superb at capturing both the fervour and the confusion of her subjects, devoted to ideals they know they can never match.

This is the point where most people, even those naturally inclined to assist others, peel off from the do-gooders. For Julia and Aaron and Dr Prakash Amte, serving the Madia Gond tribe in western India, logic triumphs definitively over sentiment in determining their course of action.

Their efforts may be worthy, may be more successful than our hesitant stabs at kindness, but without sentiment, how many others would be moved to act?

We may collectively prefer that it did not require the searing photographs of 3-year-old Aylan Kurdi to spur western action on behalf of Syrian refugees, but better that it was still able to.

While we may not love any of these people, even as we admire much of their accomplishments, there are lessons to be learned from their work. “To a do-gooder,” MacFarquhar observes, “taking care of family can seem like a kind of moral alibi – something that may look like selflessness, but is really just an extension of taking care of yourself.”

The therapeutic language of codependency, as MacFarquhar points out, only underscores this learned helplessness in the face of suffering, arguing that codependency “was about anyone who offered advice when it wasn’t wanted, anyone who felt responsible for others, anyone who felt pity for other people’s problems, anyone who felt obliged to help when he didn’t really want to”.

We may reject this belief while still acknowledging that for all of us, personal and familial responsibilities too often serve as a convenient excuse for failing to heed the call of our moral duties.

The faint distaste we might feel for MacFarquhar’s do-gooders is as much about our buried awareness of having failed to acknowledge our burden to others, be they a Syrian refugee in the Jungle of Calais or a neighbour with her own private store of pain.

The moral calculus of the do-gooder can only take us so far. As MacFarquhar’s subjects amply demonstrate, often the most meaningful actions come about as a matter of blind chance.

Pastor Kimberly would regularly call her congregants in her parish outside Baltimore, or send them notes, just to check in: “And every now and again she would find that she had called someone just when he most needed it, or said hello to a person whose marriage was falling apart, or sent a birthday card when nobody else had mentioned the birthday.”

Decency, as Pastor Kimberly and the organizers of #KentforCalais both demonstrated, often consists of remembering those struggling in silence. It should not take the tunnel vision of the do-gooder to be able to see them.

Saul Austerlitz is a frequent contributor to The Review.