I’ve been thinking lately about the word ‘do-gooder’. About how we all instantly understand it to be a derogatory term with a bunch of related implications.
It is usually used to refer to particularly naive or impractical attempts by liberals to ‘do good’ (evaluations made by conservatives of course), but it can be and often is applied more generally.
One of the things that bugs me about it is that it implicitly undermines the whole project of attempting to ‘do good’. Such attempts are always misguided – good can only be achieved indirectly by maximising individual freedom. In Lakoff’s account of the morality underlying conservatism (I’m reading Lakoff right now), it actually becomes immoral to attempt to do good.
We have thoroughly internalised a conservative value system. I can’t think of any term that shows our culture has internalised a liberal value system – but there must be one, right? Any suggestions?
One attempt to reclaim the term is here – a Canadian social justice site named DoGooder. It’s kind of charming, but by Lakoff’s analysis such a reclamation will never overcome its status as a shorthand for moral evil on the conservative side.
(And just to partially prove me wrong about all of us understanding its negative connotation, a Canadian local press article celebrating a local man as a ‘do-gooder.)
14 thoughts on “Do-Gooder”
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Who’s Lakoff? He sounds like a libertarian, from the quote you provide.
One thing I’ve always wondered is how “maximizing individual freedom” is supposed to work.
Like, if I exercise my individual freedom to nail down new floorboards at 2am on a Tuesday, I’m limiting my downstairs neighbour’s individual freedom to get a good night’s sleep.
So does “maximizing individual freedom” mean that I should not be allowed to install floorboards at 2am, or that my neighbour should not be allowed to complain about it? Assuming there is an answer to this question, would the situation change if I was hammering at 2pm but my neighbour worked night shift?
I could make the example less banal and more outre (my right to worship in a religion that demands human sacrifice vs. other people’s right to life) but they’d all come to the same thing: compromises must be made.
But how do we regulate compromises? Etc.
P. your comment reminds me of A George Monbiot column in the Guardian from a couple of months back titled:
‘They call themselves libertarians; I think they’re antisocial bastards.’
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Columnists/Column/0,,1671053,00.html
The quote was a made-up one, me trying to catch the point of view of conservatives per Lakoff. He’s a cognitive scientist who talks about framing, you’ve heard Billy and Cal bang on about him before. He’s very, very liberal. But, yeah, the conservative morality as he portrays it does lean heavily towards Libertarianism.
Brad: yeah man. Monbiot. The good stuff.
How about a good-doer.
Yeah, picking up on the last comment… I personally don’t (think I) use “do-gooder” as a term, but I perceive its pejorative force as being a separate issue from “doing good”. Okay, that is, I don’t think of “do-gooders” as people who do good, but people who appoint their own actions as such. Cognitive dissonance helps.
As such “do-gooder” has connotations of religiosity, though I hasten to point out that I can instantly think of a good-doer I know who is (a) not what I’d call a do-gooder, and (b) a priest (and a relative: those who know who I mean know why I rate him); whereas people I can think of I know who I’d call do-gooders include people who have at least nominally “lost” their faith.
Andrew – I agree to an extent. What I’m driving at is that ‘do-gooder’ being a pejorative actually feeds into a whole network of hidden meaning, ultimately serving to undermine ‘doing good’ in general. You may disagree; I don’t exactly have any evidence, it’s just a notion, but one I’m quite taken with today 🙂
Good-doer is kinda nice. But both forms are a bit twee for me. How about ‘Awesomeness Activator’?
Roit. Any sniff of libertarianism is like a red rag to a non-colour-blind bull for me.
That link is great, Brad. My thoughts exactly. I am reminded of a cartoon of a libertarian dog sitting amongst bones, food bowl, chew toys etc and saying “What a minute, what have humans ever done for me?”
I agree that there must be some kind of internalised liberal value system, because the comments above indicate that both I and Andrew think of people who promote or take actions we think of as “good” as good-doers.
So, given that us two individuals share these values, there’d have to be a system, right?
I think Andrew’s also hit on a good point, however. Condemning someone as a “dogooder” is, I feel, not to condem someone who does good. Rather, it is to condem someone who justifies their actions as being “good” when, by our subjective positions, those actions were not good.
Refering to the link posted by Brad, I can illustrate this by saying that Jeremy Clarkson would say that people who vandalize a speed camera are “doing good,” but not that they are “do gooders.”
Perhaps us lefty liberals should try to capture the term, by referring to the likes of Gareth Morgan and Roger Kerr as “do-gooders”, for their ill-conceived attempts to do (what they perceive as) good by changing our political and economic structures?
Do gooder to me has connotations of being the sort of person who thinks they know what the answer to a problem is and goes to try and fix it without finding out whether that’s the actual problem, e.g a do-gooder tries to get people to do the right thing by their standards, without bothering to find out whether that’s the most helpful solution for the people (or cause) they are trying to assist.
For example, People might think Chris Martin was a do-gooder for attempting to raise awareness about the issue of global warming (and I ask you how many people aren’t aware of the issue of global warming at this point in time) and then continuing to fly around in a plane where him and the rest of Coldplay aren’t sitting crammed into economy class.
On the other hand, I suspect that most people rate Mother Teresa, Rod Donald, and the unnamed people who went to Thailand to rebuild houses and fishing boats after 26 December 2004 (to pick some random examples) quite highly, and probably wouldn’t call them ‘do-gooders’.
This might be different to Lakoff the libertarian conservative’s view of the word – but does Lakoff’s view of conservatives reflect the view of the public at large? I’m not sure we can argue that we’ve internalised a conservative value system unless we know Lakoff’s view of conservatives view of the term is consistent with a general view of the term.
Tree: again, yeah, we agree about those connotations. What I was inexpertly trying to express was the fact that ‘do gooder’ is understood as an epithet. This serves as evidence that we understand the set of meanings that makes it an epithet, which (I assert) is an internalised conservative mindset. Your first paragraph is politically neutral, but the behaviour you describe is implicitly liberal, not conservative.
FWIW, Rod Donald was definitely considered a do-gooder.
Lakoff’s moral system provides a possible explanation why – namely that there are different moral systems for conservatives and liberals. I’m not 100% convinced, but there’s definitely something to his explanations. And I have to emphasise he’s not conservative at all, he’s very very left-wing and not remotely libertarian.
(There’s more to my point – the notion that there’s a deeper set of meanings that this taps into, which aren’t rational extensions of the definition but rather are a pre-existent internal heuristic; but that’s beyond the scope of this comment.)
Yeah, Rod Donald is a tenuous example – he’s got that ‘now he’s dead we all think of him as a great statesman’ thing going on.
Would it help if I changed my example of do gooder to some youth worker/preacher from a charismatic church who is trying to get young people to be drug free but feels compelled to throw in some moralising about lifestyles outside the church being wrong? (That was another thing I did think of but didn’t say previously, is that the term do-gooder is often associated with religion also.)
And yeah, I figured Lakoff wasn’t a conservative, hence that convoluted sentence about ‘Lakoff’s view of conservative’s view of the term’. Try saying that 10 times fast.
But being confused now, is your argument that conservatives have internalised this view, or that the broader population has? I thought it was the latter, but your last comment seems to imply the former.
The fact that I’m writing so many comments is a sure sign I haven’t expressed myself clearly in the initial post, which is probably a sign that I don’t have a full enough understanding of what I’m trying to say 🙂 But I’ll soldier on, because I think we’re on the same page except for some detaily bits.
My argument is that the broader understanding has internalised the *logic* behind the view. We all understand why do-gooder is a denigrating term, when the words on the face of it imply the opposite.
This does not mean we all agree with this definition or the logic behind it – but we all understand it. We don’t need to have explained to us why ‘do-gooder’ is an insult.
Yeesh, I hope that makes more sense 🙂
I think you needed more clarity before deciding what the problem was. cf Tree’s first paragraph: a “person who thinks they know what the answer to a problem is and goes to try and fix it without finding out whether that’s the actual problem”.
It looks like you’ve assumed a singular, totalising account of what (and who) people mean by do-gooder, without submitting it to evidence (or for that matter, the possibility of multiple meaning). When you say “the logic behind the view” have you considered the possibility of multiple logics or multiple views?