Love Thy Neighbor as Thyself? Let's Not Get Carried Away Peter Heinegg Strangers Drowning: Grappling with Impossible Idealism, Drastic Choices, and the Overpowering Urge to Help. By Larissa MacFarquhar, New York, NY: Penguin Press,2015. 320 pp. $27.95 Larissa MacFarquhar is a longtime staff writer at The New Yorker, where she has profiled major public figures like John Ashbery, Barack Obama, and Noam Chomsky. In Strangers Drowning, she takes on a group of mostly obscure “extreme altruists,” and paints arresting sketches of them. There is Dorothy Granada, a nurse and peace‐activist who left the United States in her mid‐fifties and spent twenty years in a remote Nicaraguan village, constantly dodging death from the Contras and heroically serving poor peasants night and day, until her clinic was privatized and she was kicked out. Murlidgar Amte, later known as Baba, was a rich, romantically impulsive Brahmin “princeling” who gave up everything to found a leprosarium in the jungle of central India. With help from his wife, sons, and grandchildren (many of whom became M.Ds), he ultimately built a vast St. Jude's Hospital‐like community named Anandwan, which in turn spawned a solid medical facility among the Madias, a tribal people living in an even more untamed wilderness—and all of this at the price of unspeakable sacrifice, suffering, and danger. Ittetsu Nemoto is a Japanese Buddhist priest who turned a suicide hotline blog into a wildly popular social network, whose night‐and‐day demands all but killed him, but which has saved many lives. Sue Hoag and Hector Badeau are devout Christians who started adopting unwanted children, and eventually turned their house into a home for dozens of desperate—and often incorrigible—youngsters. Kimberly Brown‐Whaler is a United Methodist pastor who worked as a missionary under nightmarish conditions in Mozambique and Senegal, before being transferred to east Baltimore, where she all but drowned in the flood of crime, drugs, and human misery of her congregation, but where she still soldiers on. Apart from these faith‐based heroes, MacFarquhar also introduces us to the founders of Alcoholics Anonymous, to people who donate their kidneys to strangers (a more common procedure than it used to be) and to some fierce young idealists, couples just setting out on the road to utopian altruism. They have determined to own and spend no more than the absolute minimum and give everything else to various charities, but intensity of the (in most cases) male, partner's commitment to stripping away all superfluities borders on obsession, if not madness. In the end, MacFarquhar gives a tepid benediction to these strenuous spiritual athletes, who seem to have made the world a better place, despite the bruising pressure to which they sometimes subject their partners, coworkers, and clients. The accounts MacFarquhar gives of today's apprentice or full‐time saints (why not call them that?) are powerful, colorful, and intriguing, but when it comes to analyzing and understanding their vision, she fails almost completely. For starters, she insists on calling them “do‐gooders,” as if she could not hear the contempt the term has always conveyed (like the other smug conservative put‐down, “bleeding heart”). She herself plainly finds her subjects both absorbing and off‐putting. “When people heard that I was writing about do‐gooders, many of them said, But aren't they mentally ill?” Like her friends, MacFarquhar suspects that anyone with “an extreme sense of duty” is likely a masochist. She quotes approvingly the absurd sentimental dictum of E.M. Forster, “I hate the idea of causes. If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.” Take that, utilitarians! MacFarquhar just does not have a coherent historical, philosophical, or theological framework to deal with the “problem” of altruism. (She never even raises the commonsensical question of whether radical altruists make people feel uncomfortable simply because they remind us what slackers we are.) In a book with no footnotes, page references, or index, she tosses in sloppy, impressionistic summaries of thinkers like Nietzsche, Freud, and, above all, Peter Singer, whose position she consistently distorts. She sees Nietzsche...
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Feb 1, 2024
Sarah J Conway + 2
Open Access
