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The New Testament: Reciprocity
In the East, with totemism, which Durkheim and Mauss identified with China’s thought of archaic times there is no crucial divide between Man, the chosen creature in the eyes of God, and the other creatures placed at his disposal quite the contrary, humans as a whole are distributed in an all-encompassing division of the world into sections or sub-sections where some are identified with specific plants and animals and other features of the world such as the four directions of the compass rose or bodily secretions such as sweat, milk, blood or sperm, and so on.
In the West, the question of whom we call “us” folds under the umbrella of reciprocity: who do I consider as a human being in the exact same way that I see myself as being one.
When it is displayed at all, reciprocity comes in two known varieties: negative reciprocity and positive reciprocity. Negative reciprocity as in “tit-for-that”: I’ll treat you in the exact same manner as you treat me. Positive reciprocity as found in the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth under the shape of presenting the other cheek, treating one other as if he were me. Here in the words of Matthew: “You have heard that it was said, ‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.’ But I tell you not to resist an evil person. But whoever slaps you on your right cheek, turn the other to him also. If anyone wants to sue you and take away your tunic, let him have your cloak also. And whoever compels you to go one mile, go with him two” (Matthew 5, 38-41).
The positive reciprocity of “turning the other cheek” marks a turning point in moral progress that has its roots in ancient Greek philosophy, and in the teachings of Socrates in particular. It moves away from the negative reciprocity embodied in the law of retaliation, which, while it allows for rebalancing by compensating for wrongs, does so at the cost of injustice to individuals, who might be recklessly crushed in the process of rebalancing. Besides, negative reciprocity fuels endless vendettas through its logic of reparation for each new wrong committed or perceived to have been committed.
Positive reciprocity is the absolute weapon, both intellectual and practical, enabling us to face up to the physical reality of all those other weapons we might otherwise have to resort to one day or other – even if a positive outcome to the confrontation is of course not automatically guaranteed. This essential passage from the Gospel is not the somewhat vacuous promise of another world elsewhere, but the intellectual and practical tool enabling us to live happily in this world, regardless of what might be resolved one day in a different one: a spirit of de-escalation, the spirit of a time taken for reflection, for a return to reason, to the Logos, what is called in John’s Gospel, “the Word”: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” (John: 1, 1).
Unfortunately non-reciprocity is also found in the West, a disposition to deny the status of human being to other human beings on the grounds of a different religion, a different skin colour, or an endless series of other pretexts. The cause of some of today’s wars is non-reciprocity: the ruthless exclusion of certain others from the category of human beings.
Let us argue that in the case of non-reciprocity, those who deny others the status of human beings are probably prepared to admit that these others are capable of being self-conscious, but deny them consciousness in the strict sense because, according to the deplorable (‘to be deplored’) message of their religion, having been offered the opportunity of praising the ‘True God’, they have nevertheless maliciously refused to do so.
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* Durkheim, Émile & Marcel Mauss 1969 [1901-1902] « De quelques formes primitives de classification. Contribution à l’étude des représentations collectives », Année sociologique, 6, 1-72, in Marcel Mauss, Œuvres complètes, Paris: Minuit
Illustration by DALL·E