Doing nice things.

Yesterday I helped a woman pick up all her books and flurries of paper after she dropped them in the corridor that was spattered with the rain from the underside of student shoes and when i learnt she was one of the professors at the uni, we carried our armfuls to her office. We chatted about something i don't remember now and she lent me a book from her little mountain on one side of the room. Afterwards, holding this creased literary gratitude (Domestic Peace by Balzac if you wanted to know), i wondered on the way to my next lecture whether reciprocity was in fact a good thing. And by good i mean... Good. Not Good in conventionally competitive contrast to Bad but rather the Good of progress - good for social order and utilitarianism, good for the Soul, our fragile malleable Souls, preoccupied with self-betterment and Doing The Right Thing (which i was brought up being conditioned to do without really knowing why, for a very long time, until the day came when i somehow grew a Heart like the Tin Man and morality suddenly made so much more sense - speaking of, how have i not yet read the book by L. Frank Baum? I actually had to google this.).

I can understand why this book-teetering professor felt the ancient compulsion to repay me for my help, even if it made me thankful to incoherency (oh, wow, are you sure? i mean, ah, thank you, but, blah). Reciprocity is an old concept, reaching way back when the first man thought that a cow was worth a sack of the nice farmer's rice - from bartering, to trade, to paying a pneumatic (a word i grew fond of reading Huxley's Brave New World) drunk female in the back of a club to take off her clothes. Confucius summarised all his philosophy on this idea (of reciprocity not whoring) - Muslims too value mutual obligation; if a man saves another's life then he is in debt until he too can save him in return. Buddhism also depicts the world as a perpetual cycle of cause and affect (called samsara or Karma) - kindness and gratitude in perfect balance, as well as punishment and justice. Saving a life, inviting someone over for dinner, picking books up off the floor; all the time this same notion of rewarding kindness. As though without a reward, we might let a man die or pass by a woman struggling with too many books and no trolley.

((Interestingly, there is (was?) a law in France and Germany called the Good Samaritan law where you're duty-bound to help someone - by which it means that you can be held lawfully responsible and therefore prosecuted for inaction (no idea how and if this is/was ever enforced). It was ironically (probably not ironically - i hardly know when to use that word) introduced by the Nazis in the 1940s.))

Reciprocity is hardly universal though - there are native american cultures who believe that good deeds and kindness are natural functions in a person's life requiring no reward or reciprocity (possibly due to the family-community structure?). This actually institutes a more favourable account of humanity - as though we are fundamentally superheroes like Bruce Wayne hiding altruism in a Bat costume. I would insert here the example of the Samaritan in the Bible who selflessly helped a robbed and wounded Jew on the side of the road - but we forget the two men before the nice Samaritan whom both left the poor man to die. Statistically then, two thirds of the world are heartless (my statistics classes tells me this is a bad sample pool in which to infer a population). Then again, there is only one Batman against the hundreds of villains he defeats in the comics.

It comes down to how we choose to see the acts of man. So am i Human or Batman?