I Believed the Drowning Child Argument Until I Heard These Unassailable Criticisms
Now I give all my money to DEI trainings.
I used to believe Peter Singer’s drowning child argument. I would trot it out at family functions, first dates, parties, and work mixers, and I think I did a pretty good job of convincing people. One time, they didn’t even kick me out of the party, but they did make me stay in the kitchen all night.
I used to give my money to the best charities I could find, to save the most proverbial children from the most proverbial ponds. I made my daughter start a lemonade stand and threatened to set all her toys on fire if she didn’t give her earnings to Holden Karnofsky. I gathered the moldy pennies from underneath my couch cushions and used them to buy hundreds of anti-malarial bed nets for kids in Africa. Whenever I walked past a pond, I always checked to make sure there weren’t any children drowning in it, just to be on the safe side.
Then, one day, I made a terrible mistake. I raised the drowning child argument in front of the smartest person I know. Smugly, I said, “if you came across a child drowning in a pond on your way to work” (here I paused to push my glasses up the bridge of my nose) “you would wade in to save them, even if you’d ruin an expensive suit.”
My interlocutor was having none of it, and he stared at me with pity for a few seconds over what was about to come. “What if,” he objected, “the last person who claimed to save a drowning child from a pond did massive amounts of crypto fraud and had a gross polycule in the Bahamas?”
I was dumbfounded. I had never thought of that before. I felt a deep sinking feeling in my stomach as my entire worldview came crashing down before me.
“B- b- but,” I could only stammer. I wasn’t prepared to deal with someone of such great intellect.
“And what if,” he said, his lips curling into a smirk, “the child has intergenerational trauma from Western colonialism, and you’re retraumatizing the child by pulling them out of the pond, because that creates an imbalanced power dynamic wherein you implicitly assert that you have the right to decide who lives and dies?”
I slapped myself for not having thought of something so obvious. I did a racism. I did an imperialism. I did a nationalism. I did a xenophobia. This made it abundantly clear that I don’t even understand the intersectional nature of the multiplicity of my offenses.
I racked my brain for a worthy response, but the invincible objections just kept coming.
“What if there are multiple children drowning in the pond, and by saving some of them, you’re saying that those ones are more important than the others?”
“What if saving children from ponds makes us think that people who save children from ponds are better than people who don’t save children from ponds?”
“What if you were trying to save a child one way, but you learned later that there’s actually a better way of trying to save the child?”
“What if by saving a child, you don’t have time to try to start a communist revolution or go to a DEI training?”
This was all too much. I simply couldn’t take it any longer. I fell to my knees in despair, knowing that I had been bested in the battle of ideas, and I forsook the lie that I had staked so much of my reputation on defending. I turned my face up to the sky and exclaimed: “YOU SHOULDN’T SAVE A DROWNING CHILD IF IT MAKES SOME PEOPLE FEEL BAD!” Tears streamed down my face.
I was ashamed of having believed such an obviously faulty argument for so long. How could I have been so naive? How did I not know that my actions reinforced centuries-old racialized power dynamics and that, by saving drowning children from ponds, I was actually colonizing them and stripping them of their rights and dignity?
After a few minutes of this despair, I used my shirtsleeve to wipe the snot and tears from my face and I peered up at the wise man before me. “What can I do instead?” I asked.
“Well,” he responded. “Have you heard of The 1619 Project? We can discuss it over lunch.”
“Okay,” I mumbled and I stood up. “I hear there’s a good vegan place around the corner.”
“What?!” the man sneered and glared at me. “Don’t you know that plants can feel pain?”
You should stop writing this blog. Instead listen and learn
Hi Glenn. I hope you read this. I have a PhD and I have studied nine languages and dreamt in three. I read about 200 books a year. I wouldn't call myself intellectually lazy, and yet I very much enjoy Jeff Tiedrich's substack. He obviously reads the news compulsively (oh boy!)and he collects any developments that reflect badly on the MAGA movement. He documents and links to everything he presents in his sub stack, and if he makes a mistake, he issues a correction. Like thousands, I find his writing style highly entertaining.
I'm not going to Jeff for novel insights on our rapidly developing culture. I'm going to Jeff as an effective and highly entertaining news aggregator, who has helped me understand more about the pathology of MAGA and the inadequacy of the MSM.
Even though I subscribe to and read the NYT, the WaPo, AP, and the Economist on a daily basis, Jeff keeps me up to speed on the sewers in which Mega dwells. He goes places that I really rather not have to go myself.
BTW, I agree that with you that GW Bush hasn't received enough appreciation for saving millions of lives in Africa from the AIDS epidemic.