Abstract demands for universal help rationalize refusing concrete acts of kindness

Evidence

Distrust all those who claim that help can only be given either to everyone at once or not at all. This is the lie which is lived by those who do not in fact want to help, and who talk themselves out of their duties in particular individual cases by means of grand theory. They are rationalizing their inhumanity.’ 15 He had once described pity as an appropriate present-day form of morality alongside politics. And he was a supporter of Schopenhauer, for whom to be healed of the illusions of Maya and to practice works of love were one and the same thing. Could someone like this have any objections to kindness, provided that human beings’ demand for happiness and their instinctual nature were also asserted, and provided that bourgeois and capitalist society were sharply criticized? Surely Fromm’s ideas must have appealed to Horkheimer as a model of how the thought of Marx and Freud might be modified in the spirit of Schopenhauer and Buddhism. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 290

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: Horkheimer’s distrust of all-or-nothing help as a rationalization of inhumanity inverts the usual left critique of charity as mere band-aid.
• XREF: connects to: Seeing fellow humans as needing help can break through moral disengagement — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm…, 652; Impartiality frameworks breed indifference to concrete need — Val Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, 686; Consumption-based charity substitutes for and eliminates collective political response — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1465
• yield-rescued: below the book’s yield-target cutoff, included anyway for connecting to: Seeing fellow humans as needing help can break through moral disengagement — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm…, 652; Impartiality frameworks breed indifference to concrete need — Val Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, 686; Consumption-based charity substitutes for and eliminates collective political response — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1465

Broader Connections

• Impartiality frameworks breed indifference to concrete need #corroborates (0.92) — Val Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, 686
• Seeing fellow humans as needing help can break through moral disengagement #complicates (0.78) — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 652