Dorothea Brooke as an example to follow

I once read a post by an effective altruist about how Dorothea Brooke, one of the characters in George Eliot’s Middlemarch, was an EA. There’s definitely something interesting about looking at the story like this, but for me this reading really missed the point when it concluded that Dorothea’s life had been “a tragic failure”.^[1] I think that Dorothea’s life was in many ways a triumph of light over darkness, and that her success and not her failure is the thing we should take as a pattern.

Dorothea dreamed big: she wanted to alleviate rural poverty and right the injustice she saw around her. In the end, those schemes came to nothing. She married a Radical MP, and in the process forfeited the wealth she could have given to the poor. She spent her life in small ways, “feeling that there was always something better which she might have done, if she had only been better and known better.” But she made the lives of those around her better, and she did good in the ways which were open to her. I think that the way in which Dorothea’s life is an example to us is best captured in the final lines of Middlemarch:

“Her finely touched spirit had still its fine issues, though they were not widely visible. Her full nature, like that river of which Cyrus broke the strength, spent itself in channels which had no great name on the earth. But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.”

If this was said of me after I’d die, I’d think I’d done a pretty great job of things.

A related critique of EA

I think many EAs would not be particularly pleased if that was ‘all’ that could be said for them after they died, and I think that there is something worrying about this.

One of the very admirable things about EAs is their commitment to how things actually go. There’s a recognition that big talk isn’t enough, that good intentions aren’t enough, that what really counts is what ultimately ends up happening. I think this is important and that it helps make EA a worthwhile project. But I think that when people apply this to themselves, things often get weird. I don’t spend that much time wi

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