Article archive / December 1, 2015
Originally published: . Volume 6, No. 12. Source pages: 14, 15.
Strangers Drowning by Larissa MacFarquhar
Imagine this: You’re an American woman who has for many years worked as a nurse. But, feeling that this wasn’t enough, you became a social activist, protesting poverty and nuclear weapons. After a number of years, however, you moved to Nicaragua following its bitter civil war, to train women in impoverished rural regions to become midwives. But in addition to the everyday hardships of life there, you had to move out of your house and into the village, because the Contras were going to rape or kill you. Even now, in your elder years, long after your husband left and went back to America, you’re still in Nicaragua, working for the disadvantaged. Things are better in that country now, and life is much more comfortable for most people. Which makes it feel to you oddly empty, much like life in the United States. You gave up your life in the U.S., and lost your husband and your once-strong religious faith, but you never abandoned your mission.
And is that a good thing?
This is the question Larissa MacFarquhar considers in this unorthodox book, which profiles people she calls “do-gooders,” with all the ambivalence that term implies. The title refers to a dilemma posed by the utilitarian philosopher Peter Singer: If you walk past a shallow pond and see a child drowning, would you save the child? Most people would answer “yes”, of course. Singer’s response was that since children (and adults, and animals) are dying all the time, how is it morally defensible to not respond to them? How many mosquito nets could you buy with what you’d spend for a single meal at a fancy restaurant? And is there any reason to believe that your family members deserve preferential treatment over total strangers? MacFarquhar raises the question of just how far that line of reasoning can remove one from what most people think of as being human. As she puts it, “For do-gooders, it is always wartime.” The people she profiles have done a wide variety of things in their pursuit of extreme altruism, often with unanticipated results. One couple adopted twenty-two children, including many handicapped or troubled children. All of the girls eventually got pregnant, despite the couple’s efforts at sex education and contraception. Another man donated a kidney to a complete stranger, a woman a good deal older than himself. He didn’t want to meet her because he knew she might feel compelled to respond to him in a maternal manner afterwards. Which she did, in a far more positive way than his own drug-addicted mother ever had.
MacFarquhar discusses how these “extreme altruists” have been thought of—often pejoratively–in both mental health and literary fields. These side discussions are interesting but are a bit afield from the subject profiles, some of which appeared in the New Yorker. I found these stories to be both gripping and deeply strange. A thought-provoking book, for certain.
This article is part of a historical newspaper archive. Read the original issue for its original layout, photographs and graphics.