When Margaret Mead wrote, "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed people can change the world: indeed it's the only thing that ever has," she certainly couldn't have imagined that her words would be used to justify the selfish protectionism that passes for political activism these days.

In fact, the celebrity anthropologist, who championed understanding and human harmony, would have been appalled by the bullying tactics, overstated emotionalism and character assassination employed by individuals who rush to crank up the drawbridge now that they are squatting on their own private corner of paradise.

Oscar Wilde put his finger on the major problem with NIMBYism when he observed, "Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live; it is asking others to live as one wishes to live."

Mead, on the other hand, spent a lifetime studying the way people, planetwide, cope with the inevitability of growth and change. In fact, she served as a world-renowned arbiter, frequently called upon to defuse emotionally laden conflicts with facts, rationality and, her old standby, common sense.

Mead, who died in 1978, never got the chance to meet Deborah Rodriguez; but Rodriguez is definitely Mead's kind of woman. You see, Mead envisioned a world in which women and men's unique skills and contributions would be valued equally.

In 2002, Rodriguez found herself in Afghanistan, as a volunteer nurse's aide with a Christian humanitarian organization called The Care for All Foundation. "All around me," Rodriguez related in "Kabul Beauty School: An American Woman Goes Behind the Veil," "I heard people introducing themselves as teachers, engineers, nutritionists, agricultural specialists and experts of all sorts. Not once did anyone introduce herself as a hairdresser."

Although she'd acquired emergency and disaster-relief training, it was Rodriguez's beauty parlor experience that made her the darling of both Western foreign-aid workers and Afghans alike. The burka never eliminated the desire to be stylishly coiffed. In Kabul, the closest decent haircut was more than a day's drive away. Those who dared to operate one-chair salons out of their homes after the fall of the Taliban, not only lacked up-to-date equipment and supplies but had only mastered the most rudimentary cosmetology skills and allowed fear to keep their businesses small and secret.

Never satisfied with her beautician calling while living in America, Rodriguez prayed to be "part of something bigger and more meaningful." In Kabul, however, Rodriguez ultimately discovered that teaching Afghan women "to run better salons and make more money" was the one world-saving act she, and she alone, could accomplish. With funding from corporate and international sponsors, the Kabul Beauty School welcomed its first class in 2003.

"I knew that most were juggling children and often abusive husbands and mothers-in-law," wrote Rodriguez, "that they lived in homes without water or electricity or any of the amenities Westerners take for granted, that they braved sneers and skepticism from people who believed women should stay at home. But they showed up on time every day, incredibly focused on making better lives for themselves."

Altruism (helping others at a cost to oneself) has been a persistent prickle in the flesh of evolutionary biologists. Selflessness is precisely the sort of trait that should disappear as the result of natural selection. Still, across the span of nature from slime molds to bees to dolphins there seems to be all sorts of self-sacrifice at work.

While the explanation for animals overcoming the genetic impulse toward self-interest is "kin selection" (restricting help to relatives only), with human beings, researchers are forced to look beyond biology to the somewhat nebulous, science-wise, influence of culture as well. Kieran Healy, author of "Last Best Gifts: Altruism and the Market for Human Blood and Organs," contends that, in fact, we learn unselfish concern for the welfare of others from a wide variety of sources, including parents or role models in politics, religion, or secular ethics.

In her comprehensive book, "The Heart of Altruism," Kristen Renwick Monroe further explains: "Altruists tend to have a different way of seeing the world than the rest of us do. Where we see a stranger, they see a fellow human being. Think if someone offered you a million dollars to kill your child. Of course, you wouldn't do it. That's the way altruists feel about all people."

The editor of Redbook, a magazine for which Mead wrote a wildly popular column for 17 years, noted that since the publication of "Coming of Age in Samoa," Mead provided a veritable "treasury for those who seek ways to appreciate and understand the human condition . She cared about us all. She wanted us to care about each other."

Caring about others isn't for sissies. No wonder the group is so small.

Beverly Kelley, Ph.D., who writes every other Monday for The Star, is an author ("Reelpolitik" and "Reelpolitik II") and professor in the Communication Department at California Lutheran University. Visit http://beverlykelley.typepad.com/my_weblog/. Her e-mail address is Kelley@clunet.edu.