Most people know that when they hear someone called a do-gooder, it's not meant as a compliment; it's scathing criticism.
The term do-gooder describes someone who is well meaning but naïve about the implications of what he or she advocates. Do-gooders are typically well-educated, elite white people who want to reform society through misguided, philanthropic or equalitarian methods.
Call someone a do-gooder, and you might be accusing them of a wide range of sins. Your condemnation could include advocating one-size-fits-all remedies for social ills; everything from wealth redistribution, social justice, a welfare state, third-world immigration or the adoption of disadvantaged orphan children of color. (Heavens to Betsy!)
Do-gooders have been known to be members of the PC brigade, who are careful to avoid offending anyone. We've certainly seen "political correctness" denigrated by Trump and other candidates in the current presidential campaign. Never mind that sometimes people who attempt political correctness may be trying to show sensitivity for other people's preferences—people they care about.
I would like to claim that I don't care what conservatives say about do-gooders.I am a do-gooder in the purest sense of the term and proud of it. Do-gooders are simply people who do good. I am tempted to reject that negative connotation of the term. Although I might be tempted to make that argument, actually doing so makes no sense based on the history of the term and the way it has been used since the middle of the Seventeenth Century.
According to the Online Etymology Dictionary as of 1650, a "do-good" was thought to be someone who wants "to correct social ills in an idealistic, but unusually impractical or superficial way," exactly the modern-day meaning.
Strangely enough, according to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), the term "seems to have begun on the socialist left, used to mock those who were unwilling to take a hard line." The OED includes a citation from The Nation dating from 1923: "There is nothing the matter with the United States except the parlor socialists, up-lifters and do-goods."
In its current form, the term "do-gooder" began appearing in America in 1927, "presumably because do-good was no longer felt to be sufficiently noun-like."
So, the term do-gooder has carried a negative connotation for a long, long time. Why have people taken a perfectly positive behavior, "doing good," and given it a horribly negative caste.
I think the reason is that there was and still is a need for such a term. Too often the term "do-gooder" perfectly fits the personality of those involving themselves in high-minded social engineering experiments. How many times have we seen well-meaning leaders initiate change programs with horrible unintended consequences?
Two examples:
Public housing as a solution to inner-city urban poverty in the 1970s. Tearing down dilapidated tenements and replacing them with faceless concrete high-rise developments only served to concentrate crime and destroy the fabric of community that once existed.
Eliminating Sadam Hussein's regime in Iraq. Invading Iraq may have seemed to some a worthy idea in 2003 as a way of eliminating weapons of mass destruction, but it only left a power vacuum and ill-will toward America whose ramifications we're dealing with thirteen years later.
I've often wondered who wrote the rule that said a "do-gooder" can only be a liberal? I've often asked: Couldn't that term be used to describe a conservative who wishes to use "government overreach" to meddle in the affairs of another country or, equally, to meddle in the affairs of any subset or minority of our population? Perhaps it could fit; however standard usage requires a do-gooder to be leftleaning. But certainly there are enough pious, self-righteous individuals on both sides of the aisle.
I would only ask that whatever we call this meddling, we remember that arrogance is arrogance and that overreach is overreach whether it is on the right or the left.
