From Strangers Drowning by Larissa MacFarquhar.

Reprinted by arrangement with

Penguin Press, a member of Penguin Group (USA) LLC, A Penguin Random House
Company. Copyright Larissa MacFarquhar, 2015.
This book is about a human character who arouses conflicting emotions: the do-gooder. I dont
mean a part-time, normal do-goodersomeone

who has a worthy job, or volunteers at a charity,
and returns to an ordinary family life in the evenings. I mean a person who sets out to live as
ethical a life as possible. I mean a person whos drawn to moral goodness for its own sake. I
mean someone who pushes himself to moral extremity, who commits him- self wholly, beyond
what seems reasonable. I mean the kind of do-gooder who makes people uneasy.
This person has a sense of duty that is very strongso
strong that hes able to repress
most of his baser impulses in order to do what he believes to be right. This is a struggle, but one
that he usu- ally wins. He rarely permits himself time off from his work, and spends little money
on himself so he has more to give away. He has his joys and pleasures but they must fitthey

must gain admittance. Because of this, there is a certain rigidity and a focused narrowness to the
way he lives: his life makes ordinary existence seem flabby and haphazard. The standards to
which he holds himself and the emotions he cultivatescare

for strangers, a degree of
detachment from family in order to care for those strangers, indifference to low pleasurescan

seem inhumanly lofty, and separate him from other people.
The life of a zealous do-gooder is a kind of human sublimeby
which I mean that,
although there is a hard beauty in it, the word beautiful doesnt capture the ambivalence it stirs
up. A beautiful objecta
flower, a streamis
pleasing in a gentle way, inspiring a feeling that
is like love. A sublime object, such as a mountain or a rough sea, inspires awe, but also dread.
Confronting it, you see its formidable nobility, and at the same time you sense uncomfortably
that you would not survive in it for long. It is this sense of sublime that I mean to apply to
do-gooders: to confront such a life is to feel awe mixed with uneasea
sense that you wouldnt
survive in that life for long, and might not want to.
The do-gooder is both more and less free than other people. In the usual sense of the
word he is less free, because he believes its his duty to act in certain ways, and he has to do his
duty. But in an older sense he is more free, because he can control himself, so his intentions
arent frustrated by weaknesses that hed rather not have. He knows that if he makes a promise
he will keep it; that if a thing is right he will do it; that he will not turn away because something
seems too hard. Because of this, his life is what he intends it to be.
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 persons job suddenly
requires heroism of him and he rises to the occasionhe
might be a priest whose church
becomes a refuge in wartime, or a nurse working in a hospital at the start of a plague. Either way,
he is taking care of his own, trying to make their lives betterlives

that he understands because
they are like his. He may not know personally the people hes helping, but he has something in
common with themthey

are, in some sense, his people. Theres an organic connection between
him and his work.
Then theres another sort of person, who starts out with something more abstracta

sense of injustice in the world at large, and a longing for goodness as such. This person wants to
live a just life, feels obliged to right wrongs or relieve suffering, but he doesnt know right away
how to do that, so he sets himself to figuring it out. He doesnt feel that he must attend first to

people close to him: he is moved not by a sense of belonging but by the urge to do as much good
as he can. There is no organic, necessary connection between him and his workit
doesnt
choose him, he chooses it. The do-gooders Im talking about are this second sort of person.
Theyre not better or worse than the first sort, but they are rarer and harder to understand. It can
seem unnatural to look away from ones own people toward a moral idea, but for these
do-gooders its not: its natural for them.
The first sort of person doesnt provoke the discomfort that do-gooders do. The first sort
of person is often called a hero, and hero is a much less ambivalent word than do-gooder.
(Im using the word here in a modern, colloquial senseIm

not talking about Achilles.) A hero
of this type comes upon a problem and decides to help. He is moved to do so by compassion for
something he sees, something outside himself. When hes not helping, he returns to his ordinary
life. Because of this, his noble act isnt felt as a reproach: You couldnt have done what he did
because you werent thereyou

arent part of his world. You can always imagine that you
would have done what he did if you had been thereafter

all, the hero is an ordinary person like
you.
The do-gooder, on the other hand, knows that there are crises everywhere, all the time,
and he seeks them out. He is not spontaneoushe
plans his good deeds in cold blood. He may
be compassionate, but compassion is not why he does what he doeshe
committed himself to
helping before he saw the person who needs him. He has no ordinary life: his good deeds are his
life. This makes him good; but it can also make him seem perversea
foul-weather friend, a
kind of virtuous ambulance chaser. And its also why do-gooders are a reproach: you know, as
the do-gooder knows, that there is always, somewhere, a need for help.