In my research, I’m always interested to see a similar idea expressed in different ways by different people.

Here’s an example, from three different writers. They are all commenting on a notion that, I think, many people might find counter-intuitive: The idea that we should do good works with no regard for the results for others, but only because of the rightness of the action, and because it’s the right thing for us to do for ourselves.

The first example comes from Leonard Woolf. Leonard Woolf was an English political theorist, author, publisher, and civil servant, and husband of author Virginia Woolf.

Ever since I read this passage from Leonard Woolf’s memoir The Journey Not the Arrival Matters (Amazon, Bookshop), it has haunted me.

Here’s a lightly edited version of a passage he wrote:

Looking back at the age of eighty-eight over the fifty-seven years of my political work in England, knowing what I aimed at and the results, meditating on the history of Britain and the world since 1914, I see clearly that I achieved practically nothing…I must have in a long life ground through between 150,000 and 200,000 hours of perfectly useless work….

Though all that I tried to do politically was completely futile and ineffective and unimportant, for me personally it was right and important that I should do it.

The next example comes from another memoir, from Christopher Isherwood’s fascinating memoir, My Guru and His Disciple. The writer Christopher Isherwood is probably best known for his book, The Berlin Stories, which was the basis for the musical and movie Cabaret. When I read the memoir, I was surprised to learn that he lived for years in the monastery of the Hindu monk Swami Prabhavananda in Los Angeles, and considered becoming a monk himself.

In this memoir, Isherwood writes a passage in which he discusses an observation by the writer Gerald Heard:

Gerald had also deplored the Quaker preoccupation with social-service projects. The Quaker social worker, he said, is unwilling to face the truth that his activity is chiefly symbolic; its material consequences for the people he is trying to help can’t possibly be foreseen and may sometimes be disastrous. The only person who stands to benefit spiritually from the project is the social worker himself—as long as he can remember that he isn’t really helping his fellow men but offering an act of worship to the God within them. The worker nearly always forgets this, Gerald added, because he becomes distracted by anxieties about the material success of his project.

The third example comes from Thomas Merton, renowned Trappist monk and author, from a letter to his friend, Jim Forest. Here’s a lightly edited version:

Do not depend on the hope of results…You may have to face the fact that your work will be apparently worthless and even achieve no result at all, if not perhaps results opposite to what you expect. As you get used to this idea, you start more and more to concentrate not on the results, but on the value, the rightness, and the truth of the work itself.

For me, these observations point to the same conclusion: It’s right to do the right thing, even when it doesn’t seem to make any difference. While we never can really know what the effect of our actions will be on the world, we know that right action is the right choice for ourselves.

What do you think?