The Eagle and the Fox

"Tony was having trouble getting his neighbor to keep his chickens fenced in. The neighbor kept talking about chickens being great creatures, and as such, they had the right to go wherever they wanted.

On his next trip to the grocery store, Tony bought a dozen eggs. That night, he snuck out and placed the eggs throughout his yard. The next morning, when he was sure the neighbor was watching, Tony went out and gathered the eggs.

After that, he never had problems again with finding his neighbor’s chickens in his yard," Swara told a short story when she came, after saying Basmalah dan greeting with Salaam.

Then she said, "Selfishness can be divided into ruthless selfishness arousing moral reproach in us, as it fails to meet the standard of fairness, and acceptable selfishness, which we expect from others. We feel that people have an obligation to look after themselves and to take care of their own affairs. It is nonetheless in the common interest of everyone for society to be equally fair to everyone.

In everyday life, says Antti Kujala and Mirkka Danielsbacka in their Reciprocity in Human Societies, people permit one another to display a certain degree of selfishness, but in extreme situations, such as the aftermath of a catastrophe, they will demand unselfish assistance from themselves and others alike. Mutual human benevolence decreases in proportion to distance between people.

The 'usefulness' of reciprocity for the individual in both normal and extreme situations has made it possible to become selected, through evolution as part of human behavior. People tend to demand and expect reciprocity in social interaction. The expectations and obligations of reciprocity apply not only to relations between two or more individuals, but also to the relationship between those in power and ordinary people.

There are certain mutual obligations that generally link rulers and ruled, those in authority and those subject to authority. They are obligations in the senses (1) that each of the parties is subject to a moral obligation to carry out certain tasks as its part of the implicit social contract and (2) that failure of either party to perform the obligation constitutes grounds for the other to refuse the execution of its task.

The obligations of those in power can be broken down into three major tasks: protection from foreign enemies, the maintenance of peace and order, and the obligation to contribute to the material security and prosperity of the subjects. In return, the subjects are expected to obey orders serving these tasks. Traditionally, the main obligations of the people have been to provide soldiers and to pay their taxes and rents. These mutual obligations are usually not defined by any written constitution as such, and those in power and their subjects continuously test them in practice to see how much they can benefit, and to check where permitted behavior becomes a breach of the social contract, or insubordination.

The parties are not equal, but the subjects, nonetheless, have recognized moral demands and requirements with regard to those in power.

The violation of reciprocity or mutual obligations by elites can fatally undermine the legitimacy of their position and lead to their overthrow from power.

The norm of reciprocity requires that we repay in kind what another has done for us. Allow me tell you a story,

After they became friends, an eagle and a fox decided to live close to each other, and thus to confirm their friendship through habit. So the eagle mounted on a very high tree where she gave birth to her chicks and made her nest, while the fox entered a bush under the tree and gave birth to her cubs.

One day when the fox had gone hunting, the eagle, having nothing to eat, flew down to the bush, seized the cubs and devoured them with her chicks. The fox came back and when she saw what had happened, she did not regret the death of her cubs as much as her inability to take revenge; because, being an earthbound animal, she could not chase a flying one. So she stood at a distance and cursed the enemy, which is the only thing that remains for the incapable and the weak to do.

But it happened that the eagle soon paid the price for her irreverence towards friendship. That is, when some people were sacrificing a goat in a field, she flew downwards and grasped some burning entrails from the altar; as she brought it into her nest, a strong wind blew and a thin and dead little piece of wood ignited a great fire, burning the high tree and her nest. From this the chicks flared up—for they were not able to fly yet—and fell on the earth. And the fox run and ate them all in front of the eagle's very own eyes.

This is one of the Aesopian fable, where recent work on Greek ethics has emphasized the importance of the norm of reciprocity.

Reciprocity, according to Christos A. Zafiropoulos in his Ethics in Aesop's fables, involves a voluntary exchange of goods and services between two or more parties. In essence, it poses the following demands to the ethical agent: to help those who helped him, to harm those who harmed him and not to injure those who helped him. Therefore, it has two main facets, a positive and a negative one. The first can also be termed 'amicable' reciprocity and it involves the repayment of gifts and favours, while the second can be termed 'hostile' and involves the repayment of injuries.

In both types of reciprocity, the failure to reciprocate disrupts the balance of the relationship and may generate justified demands by the party waiting for benefit. The value of the objects or actions exchanged in both generalized and balanced reciprocity is defined by the participating members in the relationship and it must be equal in relation to each one's capacities and abilities, but not necessarily alike in other respects.

Reciprocity in Greek social life, says Zafiropoulos, dominated the content and the behaviour associated with friendship and enmity. Greek discussion of friendship was articulated through a terminology that emphasized the ideas of debt and obligation for repayment among friends and enemies, epitomized in the motto 'help your friends and harm your enemies'. Reciprocity among friends also involved placing value in the ideas of loyalty, courage, and trustworthiness. Being able to help a friend demanded constant preparation for support, which should better be offered in times of danger and misfortune rather than of prosperity. Friends were a means of protection in poverty and adversity. This led to the belief that the more friends one had the more secure he was against his enemies. Therefore, utility and being trusted to help when needed characterized a true friend.

To achieve this continuous mutual devotion, assistance, and benefit, friendship was thought to need time and practice. Friends must become accustomed to each other and a good way to bring this about, was by living together and getting used to each other. So Greek friendship included the idea of co-existence and sharing. As it was often claimed, 'friends have everything in common', κοινά τά των φίλων . Sharing referred to a range of things, such as residence, daily experience, belongings, danger. It also referred to sharing hatred for an enemy. Just as one should help his friends and their friends too, he should also punish his own and his friends’ enemies. Long-standing feuds were a common phenomenon in a polls relationship. Athens and the Athenians did not refrain from expressing their hatred of their enemies at every opportunity.

Although there is much continuity in Greek attitudes to friendship, it is possible to mark certain historical stages. The distinctive features of the Archaic period are indicated by the reflections on the unreliability of friends in the poems attributed to Theognis. These elegies reveal an intense concern for loyalty and trustworthiness as the paramount virtues of a true friend. This indicates a transition from the old certainty about the functionality of the reciprocal obligations among the aristocratic networks of friends and alliances to a disruption of this trust due to the social turmoil that characterized the sixth and fifth centuries B.C. and the gradual replacement of the aristocratic ideals, including those on friendship, by those of the rising democratic polis.

In the second stage, democracy brought with it a change in friendship networks from social institutions that promoted the interests of particular citizens and groups of citizens into social institutions under the control of the democratic institutions and ideology. The resulting ideological concepts were those of equality among friends, of mutual assistance and benefit and of the interdependence of citizens on one another in an egalitarian framework. This diminished the opportunities for particular networks of friends to gain power at the expense of the other citizens and, thus, to threaten the very basis of the democratic ideology.

The final stage is that of the Hellenistic period, in which the institutions of the polis are pardy replaced by those of the post Alexandrian kingdoms and by Roman domination. The stress on frankness and honesty, which is a dominant theme in the discourse of friendship in this period, needs to be linked with the requirement by the royal courts of reliable counsellors. At the transitional point between the egalitarian view of friendship in the Classical democratic polis and the utilitarian view of the Hellenistic period stands Menander, who points to the need for mutual help among friends but also highlights the validity of character as a criterion for choosing a friend.

Reciprocity was also present in religion and interstate politics. The faithful made offerings to the gods expecting a favourable return by them. Furthermore, religious practice itself (i.e. prayers, sacrifices, offerings in general etc.) constituted a reciprocal act in return for the gods' benefits to mankind. As for the political sphere, although relationships between groups of citizens based on reciprocal sets of duties were a threat to the power of the demos, the norm of reciprocity often guarded the relationships between the various city states (it was a feature of Athenian politics in particular). Greek diplomacy gave a pivotal role to the obligation of the city to repay previous favours and failure to do so was often condemned.

Now let's see what happen to our Eagle and Fox. Amicable and hostile reciprocity in relation to friendship is a frequent theme in the aesopian fables. They usually illustrate failed or dysfunctional reciprocal relationships between friends and successful hostile retaliation between enemies.

Friendship, its betrayal and the actions that occur from it are encapsulated in this fable. The eagle and the fox become friends; the expression that is used is φιλίαν προς άλλήλους πονησάμενοι, which literally means “creating friendship towards each other”. Friendship between the fox and the eagle is something artificial, something they create (ποιησάμενον); this artificiality is explained by the fact that amicable reciprocity is not the natural disposition between two predatory animals. The friendship between a land animal and a sky bird is unnatural for another reason: their natural environments are in two separate spheres, the land and the sky; therefore, in order to co-exist, both will have to surpass their natural limits. Their agreement is a paradox from its very outset and the possibility of these animals living together causes tension; it predisposes the reader for the subsequent violence among them and for the failure of their amicable reciprocity. Their relationship of amicable reciprocity is dysfunctional and it is because of its enactment (the co-existence of two predators) that the consequent disaster occurs. They decide to live in proximity, so that their daily companionship will make their friendship stronger. The Greek idea of a shared life as a component of the reciprocal relationship between friends is present here. The expression used is βεβαίωσιν φιλίας την συνήθειαν ποιούμενοι, 'making custom the confirmation of friendship'. The vocabulary of artificiality appears again; they will have to make custom turn into a confirmation.

The fable acquires religious connotations. Initially, their reciprocal relationship seems successful. The narrative does not describe their effective shared life as friends any further. Instead, it jumps straight to the betrayal of friendship. The fox's reaction is revealing: it is not the death of her cubs that causes her grief, but her inability to avenge it. The high-low distinction is now the obstacle to the fox's revenge. She is a terrestrial animal who cannot chase a flying one or reach its nest. She can only curse her former friend who has turned into an enemy, calling the supernatural forces to help her in her cause. 

The fable’s message is clear: those who betray friendship will soon be punished by one way or another.  The Fox did not witness the death of her cubs, but the eagle does see her chicks’ devoured, being unable to react. This is also the message of the epimythium. The fable’s message is that those who betray friendship, even if they escape punishment from the wronged ones because of the latter’s incapability, will not elude divine punishment. But the overall image is pessimistic; it portrays a world in which amicable reciprocity is unattainable, because of its violation by the parties concerned, and hostile reciprocity replaces it as an effective way of handling social relations.

What about then, in our humanity, shall we be pessimistic too? There's a joke, 'When you borrow money, borrow it from a pessimist. He won't expect you to pay him back.'

To cite Adam Smith in his The Theory of Moral Sentiments , 'How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it, except the pleasure of seeing it.'

Is self-interest a natural disposition of our species, other than generosity toward members of one’s immediate family? Is our conscience nothing but 'the inner voice that tells us that somebody might be looking'? And if Adam Smith’s affirmation of humanity’s moral sentiments is more nearly correct than Mencken’s skepticism, how could this oddly cooperative animal, Homo sapiens—the name applied by the father of modern biological classification, Carolus Linnaeus—ever have come to be?

Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis in their A Cooperative Species: Human Reciprocity and Its Evolution, advance two propositions. First, people cooperate not only for self-interested reasons but also because they are genuinely concerned about the well-being of others, try to uphold social norms, and value behaving ethically for its own sake. People punish those who exploit the cooperative behavior of others for the same reasons. Contributing to the success of a joint project for the benefit of one’s group, even at a personal cost, evokes feelings of satisfaction, pride, even elation. Failing to do so is often a source of shame or guilt.

Second, we came to have these 'moral sentiments' because our ancestors lived in environments, both natural and socially constructed, in which groups of individuals who were predisposed to cooperate and uphold ethical norms tended to survive and expand relative to other groups, thereby allowing these prosocial motivations to proliferate.

The first proposition concerns proximate motivations for prosocial behavior, the second addresses the distant evolutionary origins and ongoing perpetuation of these cooperative dispositions.

While cooperation is common in many species, Homo sapiens is exceptional in that in humans cooperation extends beyond close genealogical kin to include even total strangers, and occurs on a much larger scale than other species except for the social insects.

Thus, in short, according to Bowles and Gintis, social preferences such as a concern for the well-being of others and for fair procedures remain essential to sustaining society and enhancing the quality of life."

"Probably, my words are too long-winded," Swara was about to end her conversation, "but that's how it is and now, my time is up, I have to go, bye and Allah knows best."

Swara began to disappear into silence, accompanied by her chanting,

And if there's no tomorrow

And all we have is here and now

I'm happy just to have you

You're all the love I need somehow

It's like a dream

Although I'm not asleep

And I never want to wake up

Don't lose it

Don't leave it *)

Citations & References:
- Antti Kujala & Mirkka Danielsbacka, Reciprocity in Human Societies: From Ancient Times to the Modern Welfare State, Palgrave
- Christos A. Zafiropoulos, Ethics in Aesop's fables : the Augustana Collection, Brill
- Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, A cooperative species: Human Reciprocity and Its Evolution, Princeton University Press
*) "Breathless" written by Andrea Jane Corr, Caroline Corr, James Corr, Robert John Lange & Sharon Corr

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