This long article in the NYTimes magazine is quite a compelling story. It tells the tale of "Big Mike" Oher, a street kid from West Memphis with phenomenal athletic potential who gets admitted into a Christian prep school and adopted into a wealthy white home. His new parents (along with, it seems, half the school community) move heaven and earth to turn him from a social and academic disaster--80 IQ, 0.6 GPA, complete inability to interact with other people--to a "first-team freshman All-American, the starting left tackle of the Ole Miss Rebels," one with a 20-30 point higher IQ who "could read and write and now blended so well socially into rich white Memphis that rich white Memphis almost forgot he was black."

It's an amazing story, to me, because it's simultaneously so uplifting and creepy. Nearly everyone in this tale--most obviously Michael's new family--goes way beyond what could plausibly be thought of as morally obligatory; just read the story for details. This is big-time good-Samaritanism.

So where's the creepiness? The main thing is the way that everything seems framed around helping Oher achieve his destiny as a highly-paid NFL star lineman. It's unclear how much of this is the author's narrative device, but it is clear that the whole sequence of events got going when the football coached pushed hard for Oher to be admitted into a school he was manifestly unable to handle without heroic interventions. One key passage for me was this: "[Oher] was meant to be a football player, but until everyone started telling him he was a star football player, he had shown hardly any interest in football." Beyond lack of interest was a curious lack of aptitude: despite a childhood on the mean streets of West Memphis, he didn't exhibit the desired propensity for violence. As the author of the piece puts it in one of the creepiest passages: "The trouble with Michael Oher as a football player was the trouble with Ferdinand as a bull: he didn’t exhibit the anger of his breed. He was just a sweet kid who didn’t particularly care to hit anybody" (italics mine). Well, gosh, better fix that.

Now this might seem odd coming from someone who staunchly defended Britney Spears' decision to pursue a singing career rather than go to college. (And I agree that there are some definite issues with parents pushing their children towards high-pressure, deeply-specialized life plans.) What worries me here, I suppose, is the implicit idea that because Oher can become a great football player, it is right and proper that he do so, full stop. As far as I could tell on one reading, the article never even claims that Oher likes football. Nothing about his love for the game, his excitement about playing it, how much he's looking forward to a future in the NFL--none of that. The closest I found was the negative implication previously cited--that he had not been interested until everyone told him it was his destiny--and his tutor's resigned remark that “If you asked him why we’re doing [tons of on-line classes to substitute for failed high school grades], he’d say, ‘I got to do it to get to the league.”’

On the other side, we have the claim that "[t]he boy had a gift for telling people as little as possible and also for telling them what they wanted to hear." Finally, there's the lone extended description of Oher on the football field. It is presented as a triumph, as Oher finally overcoming his debilitating passivity; having been hectored as a "fat ass" all game by an opposing player, he finally gets fed up, grabs the guy, and carries him off the field with the intention of putting him on his team's bus because “[i]t was time for [the teasing guy] to go home.” I don't know football at all. But does that sound like a kid who's having fun?

Now, it's obviously to me that this heroic intervention by the Briarcrest community has raised Oher's expected lifetime earnings by, oh, millions of dollars. For all I know there's really no other path but "football star" that would allow him to be self-supporting, let alone a zillionaire. For all I know, too, Oher really loves football and all the words to that effect were left on the editing-room floor. But still, creepy.

Creepy because sad: our society depends upon this kind of voluntary effort to help the disadvantaged, and a more libertarian society would require still more voluntarism. This article is a sobering reminder that those who get helped will often be helped for idiosyncratic reasons, by real, flawed people with their own agenda and goals. I'm not saying anyone involved was out to use Oher for monetary gain; that seems quite implausible. But the Nozickian "from each as they choose, to each as they are chosen" should also serve as a reminder to us to look into our hearts and ask why it is we choose as we do.

Note my worry here is not about desert, exactly; I'm not saying that other West Memphis kids deserved this chance more, and that therefore there's something wrong with splurging so many resources on Oher. (Obligatory reference to Schmidtz's new book.) There's something to be said, too, for the fact that if Oher does become a star NFL player, his prowess may well bring joy to millions (though any attempt to elaborate this argument would have to deal with the mostly zero-sum nature of spectator-joy; does our pleasure rise as a direct function of our team's skill, or rather as a direct function of our team being better than the others?). My worry is more of an incentive-based, systemic one: the article highlights how our beneficence often tracks what Schmidtz calls the 'promissory' model of desert--we want to help out those who will do honor to the chance they have been given. And in a world of limited resources--and limited beneficence--we may gravitate towards those who have the chance to do so in a big way, like Oher. Is there any way to help focus our moral sentiments on those who may have no shot at being NFL stars, but could, with help, nevertheless live full, rewarding lives?

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It's quite possible that much of the creepiness I felt from reading this came from something that has little to do with the points I made above, that is, the way the piece is peppered with quotes that give the rich-white-born-again flavor of the family and community. The "of his breed" was perhaps the most startling, others included:

The Briarcrest president gave a long speech filled with many words of warning to the graduating class. He explained that when they left Briarcrest and went out into the world, they would encounter “all kinds of groups that claim some kind of privilege based on their lifestyles or perversions.” (There was no need to say “gay”; they knew all about sodomy.)

and

[Since everyone else had a baby picture in the yearbook, but none of Oher could be located:] One spring night Leigh Anne [adoptive mother] had an idea. She flipped on her computer and went online and found, as she puts it, “the cutest picture of a little black baby I could find.” She downloaded the stranger’s photo and sent it in to Briarcrest.

and

[Regarding the tutor and family friend:] She wasn’t born again, and she didn’t often go to church. She also advertised herself as a liberal. When Sean heard that, he hooted at her, “We had a black son before we had a Democrat friend!”

[Upon getting easy As from BYU, bringing up his GPA to NCAA standards:]“The Mormons may be going to hell,” Sean [adoptive father] says. “But they really are nice people.”