Larissa MacFarquhar’s Strangers Drowning: the do-gooder dilemma

In Strangers Drowning, the author explores our ability — and willingness — to care for those we don’t know.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

“Love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing compared with love in dreams.” This startling line, from Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, features in Larissa MacFarquhar’s Strangers Drowning: Voyages to the Brink of Moral Extremity. MacFarquhar looks at people driven by intense love to take care of strangers or to devote themselves to causes such as helping alcoholics or animal welfare.

Such ‘‘do-gooders’’, as MacFarquhar calls them, are not content merely to donate money to charity. Instead, they give away half or more of their salaries; allow drunks, addicts or refugees to sleep in their homes; adopt orphans; and polemicise for urgent causes.

Truly Dostoevskian in their inability to ignore suffering, or to take lightly their responsibility to the ‘‘other’’ (we are all connected, and all of us should feel the other’s unhappiness, as Dostoevsky believed), they feel not the dizziness but the implacability of love. Harsh, unrelenting and never satisfied — one could wish for such a love to pass one by.

MacFarquhar is fascinated by the personality for whom it is always wartime. If one is aware of suffering, even in the abstract — someone, somewhere, feels acute pain or is at risk of death right now — then one should empathise with it. The do-gooder regards the divorce between detached and involved knowledge as perverse, even evil. It is not just admirable but morally imperative to seek out problems: people to save, animals to rescue, causes to champion.

The book discusses the utilitarianism of Australian philosopher Peter Singer. As Singer has argued, we should care as much about distant strangers as about our own families and friends. This notion, based on a philosophy of trying to bring about the highest possible level of wellbeing in the world, extends to the animal kingdom. As Jeremy Bentham, the founder of utilitarianism, said about animals: “The question is not, Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? But, Can they suffer?”

However, to many people, the do-gooder is suspect rather than admirable. To have the same kind of love for a stranger as for your own mother may at first sight seem virtuous, but it can feel odd if taken to its logical extreme. Would you really save a stranger from drowning rather than your own parents, family or friends? As MacFarquhar notes, there can be something deeply unattractive, even destructive about the do-gooder. One can feel they are “secret hypocrites … or doing these good things for selfish reasons … to appear virtuous, to ascend to heaven, to relieve the discomfort caused by seeing suffering, [or] because they [believe] that a virtuous life [is] a happy life.”

In other words, devotion can mask selfishness; saintliness can hide a will to power. Also, a genuine saint may inspire jealousy or resentment (think of Dostoevsky’s The Idiot, in which Prince Myshkin’s innocence amuses, but then annoys, many of his acquaintances). A meek soul seeking your salvation can appear as a foul-weather friend. Someone to be indulged at best, but avoided if necessary.

Strangers Drowning is structured around individual subjects: people MacFarquhar has met and interviewed, or those she has researched. Mostly they are Americans, but there are also searching chapters about a leper colony in India and the disturbing trend of suicides in Japan. We meet a young man devoted to alleviating the suffering of chickens; a pastor letting the homeless sleep in her church, and then her own home; an elderly foreign aid worker standing up to military and criminals. The book is stuffed to the brim with stories, ethical viewpoints and different types of suffering.

Oddly enough, given its rich source material, Strangers Drowning has an offbeat, even sometimes bored tone. MacFarquhar appears deeply committed to doing her subjects justice and she has investigated their stories at length. Furthermore, she includes philosophical discussions, presenting us with the outlines of Kant’s thought and utilitarianism, for example.

But she lacks a novelistic touch. We do not really see her people: what they look like; how they move and breathe; how they engage with others. Arguably one of the main reasons we still talk about writers such as Dostoevsky and Tolstoy is their uncanny ability to address our intellectual, moral and sensory selves. Anna Karenina’s death comes at the end of long suffering, but it can be feared and remembered on a visceral level.

MacFarquhar, a staff writer at The New Yorker, is too journalistic. She is keen to establish names, places, times and the story, but keeps her own emotions in check and fails to engage us in her subjects’ dark nights of the soul. Their ‘‘love in action’’ is described, not felt.

The book is earnest and principled and written in the best American tradition of high-minded journalism. Yet, ultimately, it is a bit bloodless. One of its conclusions is that although do-gooders may be uncomfortable, they are also beneficial, bringing some goodness into the world. Well yes, true enough, but this is an oddly flat statement to make. Especially when one considers the sense of suffering starting on earth but not finding its resolution here; the mysteries of evil and goodness; fundamental human irrationality; and the deep fear engendered by true saintliness and suffering — all so well represented by MacFarquhar’s guiding light: Dostoevsky.

Andre van Loon is a London-based literary critic.

Strangers Drowning: Voyages to the Brink of Moral Extremity

By Larissa MacFarquhar

Allen Lane, 336pp, $49.99 (HB)