George Eliot's Middlemarch and the Altruism Facet (A3)

George Eliot's Middlemarch follows a whole town's worth of people trying and mostly failing to live up to their ideals, and its moral center is Dorothea, a young woman hungry to do some real good in the world. Eliot is clear-eyed about how small most of our good deeds turn out to be, and yet she insists they are the whole point. One line distills the book's ethic. In Middlemarch a character asks, "What do we live for, if it is not to make life less difficult to each other?" How much other people's ease registers as your responsibility is, in the Big Five, one facet.

Caring for others' ease is the Altruism facet

That facet is Altruism (A3), under Agreeableness, how much you are moved by others' needs and willing to spend yourself to meet them. A high scorer feels a real pull to lighten someone's load and acts on it; a low scorer keeps a firmer line between their energy and everyone else's claims. Dorothea is A3 at full strength, almost to a fault, forever looking for a way to be useful to the people around her. Eliot's quiet argument is that a life is measured less by grand achievement than by the ordinary weight you take off the people near you.

Middlemarch lives in the space between Sympathy (A6) and Altruism, feeling for others and actually acting for them. Eliot's whole method is to grow the reader's sympathy, to make you feel the inner life of even the small and foolish, and she trusts that altruism follows once you truly see another person. The two are distinct, since sympathy can sit idle, but she treats real seeing as the thing that moves a person to act. For a lower-A3 reader the novel is a patient, humane case that other people's struggles are more real, and more your concern, than distance lets them seem.

For a reader placing themselves, your A3 is a fair read on how readily other people's needs become your own and how far you will go to ease them. High on it and Eliot is honoring a warmth (E1) you already carry, with the gentle caution, which Dorothea learns, that you cannot pour yourself out endlessly. Low on it and Middlemarch is a quietly persuasive case that a life spent making things easier for others is not a small life at all. Where you sit on Altruism tells you how much of others' welfare you carry as your own, and we take the facet apart in Altruism (A3).

Read the book: Middlemarch by George Eliot.

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