Our relatedness to an other is as important as any relationship in determining identity. I was thinking this after two recent experiences of meetings, one a Buddhist retreat and the other a Quaker Meeting, where people spoke about unsolicited gestures of friendship or random acts of kindness.

We make a distinction between relationship and relatedness. I think Gordon Lawrence was the first to include relatedness in the title of a group relations conference. The essential point is that you do not have to be in or a relationship with some other to be influenced by what you think or feel about that other. Eric Miller used to give the example of another part of the organisation, with which you had no contact but a lot of feeling - marketing perhaps, if you were on the production side. These are often negative projections, the enemy you can only imagine because you are never really face to face. (Until you go to war.)

But altruism is, as they say, something else. Why do we do it? In the past I have fallen back on ideas of delayed gratification to argue that no act is really altruistic – there is always a pay off, even if that is feeling good about yourself.

But the stories I was hearing in these meetings were of something else, a potential to move from relatedness to relationship. The common example given is of the supermarket (en)counter. You are in your consumer identity, hot and bothered and paying for it. The woman (usually) at the check out is, as someone suggested, programmed to ask how you are, to wish you a good day, or suggest you take care. At the same time she may be looking bored and alienated – in her identity as downtrodden employee. Instead of ignoring the banality of the exchange, a Quaker responded that actually she would rather not be there, would not have been there but could not get what she wanted on the internet, and if she had , she could have stayed at home. ‘Watching television?’ ‘I don’t have television.’ The check out person was interested, and the shopper found she was talking to a philosophy masters student. A change in the relatedness led to a different relationship.

The Buddhist story was of paying the toll on the Severn Bridge between England and Wales - £4. A Buddhist teacher, herself dependent for her living on the freely given ‘dana’ from those who come to her retreats, thought to pay the toll not only for herself but the car behind. She could not resist looking behind to see what effect this had, but of course could see nothing, but then a large car passed, the driver honking and waving and grinning broadly.

My thought on hearing this story was: what if the next person, finding the toll was free for him, decided to pay for the car behind him. And so on through the day. Until someone, too harassed and indifferent, accepted the free offer and drove on. And I thought, that person would be me, because I am often harassed and indifferent.

So this is why I am thinking that identify is as much negotiated through relatedness as through relationships.

If, as OPUS makes claim, we have a role of citizen, this is about a relatedness to a society in the mind, not the only the relationships and relatedness we have with others in specific roles we take in the family, in the local community, in the organisation, etc.

This is a question I would put to Wesley Carr and Ed Shapiro, who argued at last year’s OPUS conference that interpretation of what is going on in society comes better from those in formal roles in relation to that society, than from some nebulous concept of citizenship.

But unnecessary generosity comes from our identity as citizen – where else could it come from?