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Illustrations by Bratislav Milenkovic

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Should We Care For Strangers At The Expense Of Our Near & Dear Ones?

LARISSA MACFARQUHAR

 

 

 





For many years, Julia Wise wondered if she would ever meet another person who thought as she did.

Everyone she knew thought her ideas about morality were strange. Some people told her they thought she might be right, but they were not willing to make the sacrifices she made; other people thought her ideas were not only misguided, but actually bad.

All this made her worry that she might be wrong. How likely was it that everyone else was wrong and she was right? But she was also suspicious of that worry: after all, it would be quite convenient to be wrong – she would not have to give so much. Although her beliefs seemed to her not only reasonable but clearly true, and she could argue for them in a rational way, they were not entirely the result of conscious thinking: the essential impulse that gave rise to all the rest was simply a part of her.

She could not help it; she had always been this way, since she was a child.

Julia believed that because each person was equally valuable, she was not entitled to care more for herself than for anyone else; she believed that she was therefore obliged to spend much of her life working for the benefit of others.

That was the core of it; as she grew older, she worked out the implications of this principle in greater detail. In college, she thought she might want to work in development abroad somewhere, but then she realised that probably the most useful thing she could do was not to become a white aid worker telling people in other countries what to do, but, instead, to earn a salary in the US and give it to NGOs that could use it to pay for several local workers who knew what their countries needed better than she did.

She reduced her expenses to the absolute minimum so she could give away 50% of what she earned. She felt that nearly every penny she spent on herself should have gone to someone else who needed it more. She gave to whichever charity seemed to her (after researching the matter) to relieve the most suffering for the least money.

Julia has experienced depression in the past, and even now that she has been happy for several years, and is often funny, the dregs of her sadness still cling to her. You can imagine the doors of her self closing very tightly, to the point where no light at all can enter. Her depression has made her viscerally conscious of suffering in others in a way that most naturally happy people are not.

She is young – 30 – but not so young that her youth accounts for any of her beliefs; she is long past the age when most people forget or distort or reject the terrible simplicity of the rules they learned as children.

Despite her extreme frugality, she is not an ascetic. She loves material things as much as anyone. She loves fireworks and ice cream, and she loves to cook. She loves to sew clothes and to make elaborate, old-fashioned hats out of scraps. She gets pleasure out of things like that; she does not get pleasure out of giving money. To her, giving is simply a duty, like not stealing, so it does not beget a feeling of virtue.

If all were well with the world, she would like to live on a farm somewhere, and keep animals, and grow pumpkins and runner beans and sunflowers in the garden. She would sew curtains and read and bake pies and have children.

But all is not well with the world.

*   *   *   *   *

Julia is a do-gooder – which is to say, a human character who arouses conflicting emotions. By “do-gooder” here I do not mean a part-time, normal do-gooder – someone 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 who is drawn to moral goodness for its own sake. I mean someone who commits himself wholly, beyond what seems reasonable. I mean the kind of do-gooder who makes people uneasy.

A do-gooder has a sense of duty that is very strong – so strong that he is able to repress most of his baser impulses in order to do what he believes to be right. 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 cultivates – care for strangers, a degree of detachment from family in order to care for those strangers, indifference to low pleasures – can seem inhumanly lofty, and separate him from other people.

The usual way to do good is to help those 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 – he might be a priest whose church becomes a refuge in wartime, or a nurse working in a hospital at the start of a plague. He may not know personally the people he is helping, but he has something in common with them – they are, in some sense, his people.

Then there is 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 feels obliged to right wrongs or relieve suffering, but he does not know right away how to do that, so he sets himself to figuring it out. He does not 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.

The do-gooders I am talking about are this second sort of person. They are not better or worse than the first sort, but they are rarer, and harder to understand.

The first sort of person is often called a hero, and does not provoke the discomfort that do-gooders do. A hero of this type comes upon a problem and decides to help; when he is not helping, he returns to his ordinary life. Because of this, his noble act is not felt as a reproach: you could not have done what he did because you were not there.

The do-gooder, on the other hand, 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. This makes him good; but it can also make him seem perverse – a foul-weather friend, a kind of virtuous ambulance chaser. And it is also why do-gooders are a reproach: you know, as the do-gooder knows, that there is always, somewhere, a need for help.

The term “do-gooder” is, of course, often demeaning. It can mean a silly or intrusive person who tries to do good but ends up only meddling. It can mean someone who seems annoyingly earnest, or priggish, or judgmental.

But even when “do-gooder” simply means a person who does good deeds, there is still some scepticism, even antagonism, in it. One reason may be guilt: nobody likes to be reminded, even implicitly, of his own selfishness. Another is irritation: nobody likes to be told, even implicitly, how he should live his life, or be reproached for how he is living it. And nobody likes to be the recipient of charity.

But that is not the whole story.

Ambivalence towards 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?

Is it right to care for strangers at the expense of your own people? Is it good to bind yourself to a severe morality that constricts spontaneity and freedom? Is it possible for a person to hold himself to unforgiving standards without becoming unforgiving? Is it presumptuous, even blasphemous, for a person to imagine that he can transfigure the world – or to believe that what he does in his life really matters when he is only a tiny, flickering speck in a vast universe?

There are powerful forces that push against do-gooders that are among the most fundamental, vital and honourable urges of human life.

For instance: there is family and there are strangers.

The do-gooder has a family, like anyone else. If he does not have children, he has parents. But he holds himself to moral commitments that are so stringent and inflexible that they will at some point conflict with his caring for his family. Then he has to decide what to do.

To most people, it is obvious that they owe far more to family than to strangers; caring for the children of strangers as much as your own, say, would seem not so much difficult as unnatural, even monstrous.

But the do-gooder does not believe his family deserves better than anyone else’s. He loves his more, but he knows that other people love their families just as much. To a do-gooder, 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.

There is one circumstance in which the extremity of do-gooders looks normal, and that is war. In wartime – or in a crisis so devastating that it resembles war, such as an earthquake or a hurricane – duty expands far beyond its peacetime boundaries. In wartime, it is thought dutiful rather than unnatural to leave your family for the sake of a cause.

In ordinary times, to ask a person to sacrifice his life for a stranger seems outrageous, but in war it is commonplace. Acts that seem appallingly bad or appallingly good in normal circumstances become part of daily life.

This is the difference between do-gooders and ordinary people: for do-gooders, it is always wartime. They always feel themselves responsible for strangers; they know that there are always those as urgently in need as the victims of battle, and they consider themselves conscripted by duty.

*   *   *   *   *

It occurred to Julia when she was quite young that she would be hellish to be married to. She was unwilling to compromise on moral questions, which meant, for instance, that she was unwilling to spend money on things that it was normal for married people to spend money on. And yet, when she was 22, having fallen in love with a young man named Jeff Kaufman, she proposed to him and they became engaged. Jeff knew about her principles, but money questions did not come up much while they were still in college, because their food and shelter were taken care of.

And so it happened that the first real moral test of their life together did not arise until after graduation.

It was a sunny day in September, and they were at an apple orchard outside Boston. There were candy apples for sale, and Julia wanted one. Normally she would have told herself that she could not justify spending her money that way, but Jeff had told her that if she wanted anything he would buy it for her with his money. He had found a job as a computer programmer; Julia was still unemployed, and did not have any savings, because she had given everything she had earned in the summer to Oxfam.

That night they lay in bed and talked about money. Jeff told Julia that, inspired by her example, he was thinking of giving some percentage of his salary to charity. And Julia realised that, if Jeff was going to start giving away his earnings, then, by asking him to buy her the apple, she had spent money that might have been given. With her selfish, ridiculous desire for a candy apple, she might have deprived a family of an anti-malarial bed net or deworming medicine that might have saved the life of one of its children.

The more she thought about this, the more horrific and unbearable it seemed to her, and she started to cry. She cried for a long time, and it got so bad that Jeff started to cry, too, which he almost never did. He cried because, more than anything, he wanted Julia to be happy, but how could she be happy if she went through life seeing malarial children everywhere, dying before her eyes for want of a bed net?

He knew that he wanted to marry her, but he was not sure how he could cope with a life that was going to be this difficult and this sad, with no conceivable way out.

They stopped crying and talked about budgets. They realised that Julia was going to lose her mind if she spent the rest of her life weighing each purchase in terms of bed nets, so, after much discussion, they came up with a system. The most crucial element of the system was that henceforth Jeff’s money and Julia’s money would be considered entirely separate. Jeff decided he would give away 50% of his salary and keep the rest for spending and saving; Julia would give away 100% of hers. Out of the remainder of Jeff’s salary, he allotted an allowance to each of them of $38 a week, which they would use to pay for everything other than rent and food – things such as clothes, shoes, transportation and treats like candy apples.

Jeff decreed that this allowance had to be spent on these things: it could not be given away, and it could not be saved. That way, if Julia wanted to spend money on something, she would not be taking that money away from someone who was dying.

Having figured out a system, they stuck to it with rigour. They kept track of every purchase, however tiny, and entered it into a spreadsheet. After a year, they realised that giving away 50% of Jeff’s salary, before taxes (they had forgotten taxes), while paying rent and student loans, and giving away 100% of Julia’s salary, was basically impossible, so they adjusted the amount to 30%.

In 2009, they spent $15,688 on themselves and donated $28,309. In 2010, they spent $20,591 and donated $36,056. In 2011, they spent $17,959 and donated nothing, because Julia was paying for social-work school and Jeff was taking much of his salary in stock options. In 2012, they spent $12,107 (their rent was less, because they moved in with Jeff’s parents) and donated $49,933.

At some point they decided to merge their finances and donate 50% of their joint pre-tax income; they also realised that it made sense to buy a house and rent part of it out, rather than pay rent themselves. Because they earned more, they were now giving away more than ever before, both proportionally and in absolute terms, despite buying the house: in 2014, they donated $127,556.

Once their financial system was in place, they spent some time looking into various organisations, with the goal of finding the charity that relieved the most suffering for the fewest dollars. At first, they settled on Oxfam. They liked that it employed local workers, and that it focused on long-term development rather than splashy but inefficient disaster relief.

Later, they heard about an organisation called GiveWell, which evaluated charities in terms not of how little they spent on overheads – a silly measure, since overhead costs, such as efficacy research, might be money well spent – but of how effective they were at improving lives. GiveWell promoted groups such as the Against Malaria Foundation, which distributed bed nets, and the Schistosomiasis Control Initiative, which administered cheap deworming treatments.

People were always telling Julia and Jeff that they ought to help those in their own community first, before sending money abroad, but they thought that was wrong. For one thing, money went so much further in other countries; and then, why were strangers in some nearby town any more “their own” than strangers in Malawi? It made no sense.

Julia and Jeff knew that development alone was limited at best, and at its worst could be actively harmful: nothing could really change without the action of governments. But they thought that enabling some lives to be less stunted was as much as a regular person could hope to do, even if larger, systemic evils persisted. It was a dull way of giving – writing cheques, rather than, say, becoming an aid worker in a distant country.

There was a moral glamour in throwing over everything and leaving home and going somewhere dangerous that compensated for all sorts of privations. There was no glamour in staying behind, earning money and donating it. But so much depended on money, they knew – it took a callous kind of sentimentality to forget that.

*    *   *   *   *



To Be Continued Tomorrow …

[Courtesy: The Guardian]
September 23, 2015

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