What separates the do-gooders from the super helpers?

Few doubt that humanitarian work is in itself worthy, but in any life, how much good work is enough?

On a Wednesday morning not long ago a picture emerged online of a dead boy on a Turkish beach. He lay face down in the surf, his little legs folded beneath him, his arms straight back by his sides. A Kurdish refugee from Syria, the boy drowned while trying to cross from Turkey into Greece. His mother died, too. So did his brother. Only his father survived.

For several days the photo captivated Canadians. It brought alive to them, as nothing else had, the horrors of the Syrian civil war. It became, against long odds, a political issue, nudging its way into the federal election and evoking near-universal cries that this country and its people should be doing more to help.

But what does more mean, exactly, in this context?

For most Canadians, it seemed to mean more government action: more aid relief, more military activity, more refugees allowed in. For a smaller set, it meant something more personal: a donation perhaps, or a sponsorship, or even, in the case of specialists or the particularly dedicated, a mission of some kind — to give medical care, to hand out food, or bear witness.

But for a tiny subset, more will have meant something on a completely different scale. If this tragedy is like most that have come before it, at some point in the not-distant future, stories will emerge of people so moved by the photo, and the larger tragedy it signified, that they cast aside their entire lives to help. These people will give more of themselves and their money than they can reasonably afford to give. They will put the needs of distant strangers, in distant lands, ahead of their own and those of their families, and they will do so no matter the personal costs.

In her new book, Strangers Drowning: Grappling with Impossible Idealism, Drastic Choices, and the Overpowering Urge to Help, New Yorker writer Larissa MacFarquhar explores the lives of people who have made that same choice at other times and other places. More than that, though, she explores the idea of that choice, the choice to give, effectively, everything to those in need, to become, as she calls it, a do-gooder. “I don’t mean a part-time, normal do-gooder,” she writes in her opening chapter. “I mean someone who pushes himself to moral extremity, who commits himself wholly, beyond what seems reasonable. I mean the kind of dogooder who makes people uneasy.”

MacFarquhar winds through stories of do-gooder lives great and small, each connected by variations on the larger theme. She opens with Dorothy Granada, a nurse and former anti-nuclear activist who lived and worked for decades in rural Nicaragua, braving violence and abject poverty to operate a women’s health clinic. In one incident MacFarquhar describes, Contra rebels broke into Granada’s house. They destroyed the inside and threatened her with rape and murder. After they left, she chased them into the street. “Wait, I forgot something!” she told them. “Would you like a cup of coffee?”

MacFarquhar goes on to explore “effective altruists,” who dedicate their lives to a hyper-rational form of efficient giving. She details the life and work of Baba, an upper-caste Indian who built a leper colony in the jungle, putting his family at risk of disease, starvation and tiger attacks. She describes, with great empathy and care, the choices that led an American couple, Sue Boag and Hector Badeau, to adopt and raise 22 children, many of whom had severe disabilities or other special needs.

The moral question animating each story is less one of right and wrong — ”What should I do?” as MacFarquhar writes — than of scale: “When can I stop?” In other words, few doubt that the work itself is good, but in any life, how much good work is enough?

A magazine writer for several decades, MacFarquhar operates here at a blurry intersection between essay and reportage; there’s a very particular flow to Strangers Drowning that’s hard to pin down. It doesn’t read like magazine writing, not quite. It’s more openly philosophical. In fact, the effect at times is almost Socratic; as a reader you can feel MacFarquhar in front of you, nudging you to participate.

What she asks is as much about the reader — about us — as about the people portrayed. “An extreme sense of duty seems to many people to be a kind of disease,” she writes. Why is that? Why do radical givers, the people who strip away their own lives to help strangers, rub so many the wrong way?

Perhaps it is because they remind us that giving can have a cost. In our society, we have largely divorced help from true sacrifice. We want governments to do more for people like Alan Kurdi — the boy on the beach. But we don’t want that help to erode our own comforts or lives.