The Revolution of Hope: Toward a Humanized Technology by Fromm Erich

Author:Fromm, Erich [Fromm, Erich]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: American Mental Health Foundation Books
Published: 2010-10-26T00:00:00+00:00

55 In psychoanalysis or similar forms of depth psychotherapy, knowledge of the patient rests upon the capacity of the analyst to know him and not of his ability to gather enough data to know much about him. The data of the development and experiences of the patient are often helpful for knowing him, but they are nothing but adjuncts to that knowledge which requires no “data”; but, rather, complete openness to the other and openness within oneself. It might occur in the first second after seeing a person, it might occur a long time later, but the act of this knowledge is a sudden, intuitive one and not the final result of ever-increasing information about the life history of the person.

It is a noteworthy phenomenon that in the development of capitalism and its ethics, compassion (or mercy), which was a cardinal virtue in the Catholic–Medieval world, ceases to be a virtue. (Among the virtues, for instance, enumerated by Benjamin Franklin, compassion, love and mercy are not even mentioned.) The new ethical norm is “progress,” and by progress is meant basically economic progress, the growth of production and the creation of an ever more efficient system of production. All human qualities that serve “progress” are virtuous; those that impede it are “sinful.” The fact is that compassion does not serve “progress” but, on the contrary, hinders it. Whether it is the ruthless exploitation of the worker in the 19th century, or the destruction of a competitor, or the advertising of useless products, compassion would stand in the way of the pursuit of “progress.” Hence it can no longer be a virtue, but is looked upon as sentimentality or plain stupidity. Pursuit of progress as the central ethical norm enables people to act with “a good conscience” when they are behaving in an uncompassionate and in-human way. This trend found its ultimate manifestation after World War I. During the war, the principle of the unrestricted use of force as a means to achieve political ends was still restricted by compassionate considerations which prompted the prohibition to kill unarmed civilians. Such considerations have by and large disappeared since then. The large-scale destruction of civilian populations by air attacks during World War II, the methods of destruction of non-combatant peasants in Vietnam, the use of torture in Hitler and Stalin’s regimes as well as in Algeria, Brazil, and Vietnam, demonstrate the total disappearance of compassion in the pursuit of political and economic aims. What seems to be an increase in cruelty is, to a large extent, the decrease of compassion.

In modern industrial society acts of compassion have been replaced by “philanthropy,” the bureaucratically organized, alienated form of satisfying one’s moral conscience. Thus money, often acquired with complete absence of compassion, is given as the facsimile of compassion. Even the greater sense of social justice which has led to the welfare state is in no way an expression of compassion. It is the result of very mixed motives: the need for a growing consumer market,

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