dignity that he mocked earlier, when describing kings and their coronations. “Men may seem detestable as joint stock-companies and nations; knaves, fools, and murderers there may be; men may have mean and meagre faces,” Ishmael muses,
but man, in the ideal, is so noble and so sparkling, such a grand and glowing creature, that over any ignominious blemish in him all his fellows should run to throw their costliest robes … [T]his august dignity I treat of, is not the dignity of kings and robes, but that abounding dignity which has no robed investiture. [It is] that democratic dignity which, on all hands, radiates without end from God; Himself! The great God absolute! The centre and circumference of all democracy! His omnipresence, our divine equality!20
Ishmael’s “faith” is rousing. But how can Melville’s character salvage anointed worth from the overthrown order in which kings and aristocrats acted as the dignified intermediaries between God and everyone else? And if men need robes to hide their blemishes, how can they do without “robed investiture” of some kind? Most important, how could Ishmael appeal so effortlessly to God, and the human dignity based on Him, as if it were not the very premise that Ahab needed to test in his fiery hunt?
Searching for divine certification of our standing may always be appealing, but the liberal interest in dignity seems to follow from less exalted and metaphysical concerns. When the French Revolution and the struggle for the freedoms of blacks, women, and workers were being won across the nineteenth century, no theories of human dignity were required. Human rights in particular were unconnected to dignity, outside Kant, until Catholics yoked them together at mid-century. Today human dignity is a principle chiefly for those who admire judges and want them to have the power to check the state in the name of basic humanitarian values.21 Its currency is a sign that our morality has been redefined around the worst that can transpire in history, rather than some better order that could be achieved through political contest and struggle. A consensus about dignity may have become deep enough for us to insist the state not torture, but it has proved far less helpful when some of us insist that our fellow humans care about one another’s broader welfare or collective emancipation. Isn’t that undignified?
The man across the aisle on the flight home spent thousands of dollars on a European vacation with his family. While killing time in the airport, he unloaded almost all of what was left of his euros—the big notes—on duty-free souvenirs for friends. Now, as the plane begins its descent, he tosses his pocket change into a fund for African children.
The airline launched the charity collection a few years ago, as part of the widespread drive for so-called corporate social responsibility. You have a bout of nausea as you watch the flight attendants collect the donations. What feels revolting is not so much the program itself, as the announcement on the PA earnestly insists, “Change adds up”—which, though a vile piece of marketing, is true enough. Rather, it’s the ritual you have witnessed, with artificial gratitude on one side of the transaction and a passing moment of self-satisfaction on the other.
But then, you are on the same flight. You have also donated your loose change to the cause and perhaps a bill, even a large one, and have shed with it a bit of the complacency that comes with enjoying a world of wealth and privilege. The plane taxis to the gate, and, after clearing customs, you get on with your life. The limo to Manhattan from the airport comes to $100, tip included.
That such a life—a uniquely fortunate one in the annals of history—is essentially unearned in a world of horrors is a truth that our culture keeps at bay most of the time. But disquiet about it erupts all the same, in some people more than others. What if you were so often troubled by the incongruity between your sense of material comfort and the destitution of others, or unable to find routine defenses against it, that you felt you had to change your life entirely?
“It was never a new idea that people are selfish,” Larissa MacFarquhar observes in one of the lapidary aphorisms scattered throughout Strangers Drowning, her masterpiece of a book about those among us who decide to drop everything and become extreme altruists.1 Is their “impossible idealism” a genuine alternative to our self-involvement and smug advantage, abetted by a showy generosity that is all the more grating for being deeply inadequate? More important, who are these saintly few who, refusing to tolerate worries about complacency and complicity, set out to change or even save a life a hundred or a thousand miles away? Their “inhumanly lofty” benevolence sharpens our inevitable but passing doubts about our unprecedented entitlement.2 It pushes our fleeting outrage or rational condemnation of things as they are into an extreme and perhaps extremist ethic, transforming what might be supererogatory duties—things that might be done for extra credit—into necessary, if not militant, demands.
What is most arresting, and troubling, to MacFarquhar about extreme altruists is that, unlike most people, they rank the needs of perfect strangers with those of their own families and friends. An African child can suffer as much as my mother—or me; no one is more or less human than anyone else; foreigners in pain around the world outnumber even the widest group of one individual’s acquaintances, especially for anyone living in a rich nation. MacFarquhar’s do-gooders, by turning the ephemeral fancy of being ethically upright into a whole way of life, substitute a kind of impersonality for the overwhelmingly personal moral relationships that even the most generous people favor.
MacFarquhar herself is intensely interested in the people she gets to know. Most of Strangers Drowning consists of profiles of do-gooders, which are its beating heart and the greatest evidence of MacFarquhar’s extraordinary gifts. “Only actual lives,” she says, “convey fully and in a visceral way the beauty and cost of a certain kind of moral existence.”3 Interleaved among her case studies are more reflective chapters, including a series on possible objections to the single-minded exigency of these do-gooders.
MacFarquhar describes her cast of characters with a kind of sympathetic neutrality, like the ethnographer of a tribe that most of us would never ditch our family and friends to join, but might find interesting or challenging nonetheless—perhaps because we too occasionally feel that our lives are empty or offtrack. MacFarquhar admits early on that she’s not sure whether the radical alternative posed by her “saints” to our ordinary balance of personal commitments is right or wrong; she only wants to investigate what has led to their commitments. Each one has a childhood and a coming of age as a saint; some have a crisis of faith; and a few fall from grace.
There is Dorothy Granada, who moves to Nicaragua in the 1980s to build a health clinic for women. She takes care of victims, whether or not they are part of the armed struggle occurring in the region, and regardless of whether they are Sandinista or Contra; she even has to go into hiding after she’s accused of helping the wrong people. Her husband, Charles Gray, spends his time proselytizing for a “World Equity Budget” that calls for each person to spend no more than $1,200 a year, a sum that reflects the overall global income at the time divided by the global population. The couple also undertakes a nearly fatal fast in response to the “Euromissile” debate of the era. There is Julia, who reads about the World Equity Budget and rejects it on the grounds that it is senseless to reduce personal spending if there’s no guarantee that the unspent money will go to those who need it most. She joins the “effective altruism” movement, which vets charities in the hope of making a difference, and struggles deeply with whether to have a child, on the grounds that it is a misallocation of resources.
As such vignettes suggest, MacFarquhar is fascinated by the sheer extremity of those who, failing to moderate their need to be morally upright, deny themselves all but the bare minimum to survive, so as to give the rest of their income or possessions to
