IN BERTHOLD BRECHT’S PLAY The Caucasian Chalk Circle, an otherwise sensible girl saves a small child when she doesn’t have to. The estate she works on has been overcome by an opposing army, and the wife of the slain governor has run off with a heap of her dresses, leaving a child behind. The girl’s fellow servants tell her to walk away, pointing out that the army will be all too interested in the governor’s heir, but she doesn’t. She spends an entire night staring at the child, caught in the throes of what Brecht calls “the terrible temptation to do good.”
The desire to do good when you don’t have to has a strangely powerful attraction. We Americans seem ever more obsessed with our desire to “be a good person,” or at any rate, to be declared “not the asshole.” But it is no longer enough to simply be a Presbyterian. We don’t have a united sense of how being good is supposed to look or play out anymore, unless you count being moralistic about making sure your kids get to eat Halloween candy. To me, it seems that our sheer rudderlessness in the presence of this basic desire—the desire to do good—is likely to bring about more chaos, not less, and certainly not less anytime soon. While it feels right to throttle the motor, we don’t know how to pilot the ship.
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