Reciprocity and Us
A wrong understanding of freedom clouds your thinking about social conventions. Just as any infrastructure can become rigid, so with courtesies like the thank-you note, the timely response (s’il vous plait), and the phones-off-at-concerts rule. Any form can become empty form. The greatness of man is that he can fill form, not just discard it. Courtesies serve real social purpose, helping to teach and enforce norms of behavior that make the civil sphere more a salon than a saloon. Turn from the ‘figure’ of the acts themselves to the ‘ground’ of the social fabric they help to weave, and you'll see that small gestures are among the most powerful to accomplish the recovery of the space where a free man can become.
Among the forms largely lost when man decided God was dead are these old-fashioned, meaningless, formal artifacts of a time when a hierarchy of values held open a large civil sphere for men's occupation. There, with these and other supports (such as many small, private associations based on locality or mutual interest), a man could enter into lively discourse, collaboration, conversation and self-cultivation with his fellow man. Made free by norms of civility, persons could generate a context that supports freedom. Absent that infrastructure (and transcendent values, and a sense of destiny, and the Church and God), the civil sphere has suffered great reduction.
Community has suffered. Social capital – the matrix of institutions and lived or embodied values which hold open the civitas for the life of free persons within it – has suffered. None of us can rebuild it alone, but each of us can refill the old gesture, reform the old form, recover the meaning behind the courtesies. I suggest reciprocity as chief among these Lost Arts of formal courtesy, because I think we stand to gain so much by its recovery.
If I give to you (as a mother, an artist, a donor, a volunteer, a hostess, etc….) you are unwillingly placed under an obligation. Try as I might to let you know how easy it was, how happily I gave, how little I care for repayment, you have a burden to discharge. How does this accord with freedom? Can the two be reconciled? Of course, because it is impossible! ‘Impossible’ just means ‘impossible without God's help’. If you are truly free, you have the capacity to do what you must, freely. In fact this is, possibly, the highest form of freedom. And how would you ever learn to do it without all the practice your life in community affords you?
The back-and-forth movement of reciprocity that springs from genuine gratitude for giftedness reweaves the torn social fabric to help it grow, again, supportive of the freedom of the persons within. Yes, your duty may be discharged perfunctorily, grudgingly, or as an empty formality. You may, of course, ignore it – releasing your interior tension, but adding somewhat to the tension of the social context. On the other hand, you may discharge it in freedom, with joy and creativity, and filled with the re-gift of yourself! The word ‘discharge’ brings to mind an electric potentiality that needs release. Something positive is implied when a tension ratchets up a virtuous potentiality!
Reciprocity, as a free movement of gift between and among persons, becomes generative of the context of community and radiant with the light of Truth. That truth? All having is ultimately a gift of Love, and all giving is ultimately a response to that Love.
“It is the highest and holiest of the paradoxes that the man who really knows he cannot pay his debt will be for ever paying it. …He will be always throwing things away into a bottomless pit of
unfathomable thanks.”