The Deep Issues, and Shopping Too

From Segundo de Chomón, La Maison Ensorcelée (1908).

Shorter David Brooks, "A Question of Moral Radicalism", New York Times, February 5 2016:

Should we be moral radicals, giving our all to others and retaining nothing for ourselves, or should we be more moral moderates, giving and taking and having a beer once in a while and stuff like that, or is there some kind of compromise between these positions? Philosophers have been discussing this kind of issue since like 1982 and they still haven't gotten to the bottom of it, is that heavy or what?

Starting off with a Readers' Digest condensation of the Roddie Edmonds Righteous Among the Nations story (leading a group captured by Wehrmacht troops, he saved Jewish soldiers by telling the captors "We're all Jewish") as told by President Obama at the National Prayer Breakfast yesterday, with link to the official text. Possibly Brooks trying to let us know he was invited again (went last year and gave the president high marks even in the face of disagreement from Andrea Mitchell, which goes to show what kind of courage and originality he himself possesses.)

That kind of moral heroism took place in extraordinary circumstances. But even today there are moral heroes making similar if less celebrated sacrifices than those soldiers were ready to make.

I'd like you to focus on the grammar of that sentence, with its totally unfair implication that the soldiers were only ready to make sacrifices if they were going to be fairly intensively celebrated.

Some editor really should have picked up on "women" for "woman" in this paragraph, too:

And why "the additional money they earned annually" instead of "the rest of their income"? And why the unreadable nesting of

“The evil in this world is the creation of those who make a distinction between the self and other,” one man MacFarquhar writes about says.

instead of "says one man MacFarquhar writes about"?

That equation between the heroism of Obama's anecdote and the saints of MacFarquhar's Strangers Drowning: Grappling with Impossible Idealism, Drastic Choices, and the Overpowering Urge to Help (Penguin, 2015) is exactly wrong, since MacFarquhar begins her introduction by carefully distinguishing the two, the "hero" rising to the moral requirements of a specific occasion, like Sergeant Edmonds, from the "do-gooder" who is just congenitally like that.

Just about all the material of the column, speaking of nested structures, is drawn from MacFarquhar's book, mostly from the first few pages, but splayed out, in the characteristic Brooksian style, to look as if all the references come from his own broad cultivation, in one of those chains of reference meant to suggest to readers that he's read a lot more, in a lifetime of preparing to compose these 800 words, than he actually has.

In paragraph 6, namely, he attributes the concept of the "rational saint" to "the philosopher Susan Wolf" without citing where she employed it, returns to her and the "loving saint" in paragraph 8, and finally links her 1982 essay "Moral Saints" in paragraph 13. But the Talmudic illustration of the rational saint through the case of a man forced to choose between saving the life of his mother or the lives of two strangers (rationally, the latter is the more virtuous, because twice as much is preserved) is actually taken from MacFarquhar's page 1, and Susan Wolf herself shows up on page 5.

He's clearly looked at Wolf's essay, I should say, and it's possible he's also looked at George Orwell's 1949 essay on Gandhi, quoted at length on page 6, to which he lurches in his 12th paragraph out of a seemingly unrelated discussion of love:

Love, by its nature, should be strongest when it is personal and intimate. To make love universal, to give no priority to the near over the far, is to denude love of its texture and warmth. It is really a way of avoiding love because you make yourself invulnerable.

In an essay on Gandhi, George Orwell argued that the essence of being human is in the imperfect flux of life, not in the single-minded purity of sainthood. It is the shared beer, the lazy afternoon, the life of accepted imperfection. Full humanness is in having multiple messy commitments and pleasures, not one monistic duty that eclipses all else.

What Orwell actually said, not "argued" in his 1949 "Reflections on Gandhi", is not about "accepting imperfection" but positively rejecting its opposite, as incompatible, precisely, with love, and in language that doesn't bear any relation to Brooks's idle fantasy of the cheerful, non-saintly life:

The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection, that one is sometimes willing to commit sins for the sake of loyalty, that one does not push asceticism to the point where it makes friendly intercourse impossible, and that one is prepared in the end to be defeated and broken up by life, which is the inevitable price of fastening one's love upon other human individuals. No doubt alcohol, tobacco, and so forth, are things that a saint must avoid, but sainthood is also a thing that human beings must avoid. There is an obvious retort to this, but one should be wary about making it. In this yogi-ridden age, it is too readily assumed that “non-attachment” is not only better than a full acceptance of earthly life, but that the ordinary man only rejects it because it is too difficult: in other words, that the average human being is a failed saint. It is doubtful whether this is true. Many people genuinely do not wish to be saints, and it is probable that some who achieve or aspire to sainthood have never felt much temptation to be human beings. If one could follow it to its psychological roots, one would, I believe, find that the main motive for “non-attachment” is a desire to escape from the pain of living, and above all from love, which, sexual or non-sexual, is hard work...

That last sentence, which he all but quotes, is missing from MacFarquhar's quotation, but clearly bouncing around his brain, But you see how he sticks the thought in paragraph 11 specifically to make it look as if he'd made it up himself.

Bonus:

As Andrew Kuper of LeapFrog Investments put it, sometimes you can do more good by buying that beautiful piece of furniture, putting somebody in Ghana to work.

Chair by Absolute Furnishings, Accra.

That doesn't come from MacFarquhar, and I don't believe Kuper was at the Prayer Breakfast; he is not an importer of West African furniture, either, but a purveyor of microinsurance to developing countries, among other things, and famous for a debate with the philosopher Peter Singer in which he represents investment against Singer's support for cash donations. I don't know where Brooks got it, but he has the quote wrong, naturally, not Ghana but South Africa:

The problem is not even simply that—as in Zimbabwe—I may increase the power and hold of a kleptocratic elite (doing harm). Rather, given the structure of the world as it is, the most serious problem for Singer is that we may do better for South Africans by buying furniture and clothes from ethical manufacturers and manufacturers in developing countries than by donation. Adequate employment opportunities, for instance, are the leading determinant of people's ability to provide for themselves and their families...

And the sentiment wrong, too, as you'd expect, making it not about the important issue of ethical investment but shopping for a cause.