by Gary Borjesson
I invite you to explore with me what hospitality is, and why it’s an essential and cosmic principle of all life, but especially human life. The heart of hospitality is to provide the occasion for getting to know anyone or anything. I assume here that “getting to know” is useful and good, and hope that seeing hospitality in a fresh philosophical light will inspire and encourage more (much needed) hospitality.
Hospitality’s main features are writ large here, in our meeting. You are my host, and I the guest receiving your hospitality in the form of your precious attention. In return, I am singing for my supper. This hoped for reciprocity and mutual benefit is a feature of hospitality. I say, hoped for but not guaranteed, because getting to know something involves us in what’s unfamiliar, and to that extent unpredictable. In our case, even if you know me, you don’t know the story I’m about to tell, or how you’re going to feel about it. Depending on whether you like my song, you may kick me out of your mind before I come to the end; or you may hear me out and find (so we both hope!) that your hospitality is repaid by what I’ve offered.
Now is a good time to revisit hospitality. Its brave and welcoming spirit offers a remedy to the forces of polarization, tribalism, and xenophobia that make our time feel so inhospitable. It’s part of any treatment plan that addresses what I’ll call our individual and collective autoimmune disorders, in which parts of the same person or psyche or family or country or planet turn against each other—to their mutual detriment. Sadly, our time is not exceptional. In the face of what’s unfamiliar, our first survival instinct is to fear, flee, freeze, or fight—even when what we’re facing is an unfamiliar part of ourselves. In psychoanalytic terms, we fear, hate, rage, deny, split, and project.
True hospitality requires courage because facing our fears and opening ourselves to what’s unfamiliar is risky. For, not only is there no guarantee how meetings between strangers will go, there’s no denying it may go badly. Macbeth welcomed the king as a guest in his home, and then killed him in his sleep. Menelaus welcomed Paris as his guest, only to have Paris make off with his wife, Helen. These abuses of hospitality were catastrophic for all parties. Even in our little meeting, there’s the risk you’ll feel you’ve wasted your time, or I my song.
Because so much is at stake, it’s no wonder hospitality features prominently in our stories. Among other things, these stories are a way that the custom of hospitality preserves and extends itself. For example, nearly all cultures tell stories about the god who comes in disguise to test a person’s hospitality and character. In the Mahabharata, for instance, the god of Justice appears to the hero Yudhisthira disguised as a dog. (Friends of dogs will be heartened to hear that in refusing to abandon his dog at the gates of heaven, Yudhisthira passed the final test!) Among Arabs there’s a saying, “A guest is a guest of God.” In other words, to show hospitality honors the divine. The unspoken corollary is that violating hospitality brings down the wrath of gods and humans—spectacularly in the case of Paris, whose theft led to the Trojan war and the end of a civilization.
At the risk of imposing on your hospitality—but with the hope of charming and inspiring you—I want to suggest just how cosmic the principle of hospitality is. Then I’ll circle back to our human predicament, and to a poignant story from early in my teaching career that will introduce the view offered by philosophy and, specifically, by Socrates.
Imagine hospitality as a fractal, that is, as a similar structure that emerges at different scales. You can then see its structure in how evolution and adaptation depend on interacting with difference and novelty; in how the immune system entertains strangers to distinguish friend from foe; in the unspoken rules of a dinner party; in the nuances of diplomacy—whether on a first date or in peace negations between countries. Wherever it emerges, hospitality wildly increases the odds that we’ll find nonzero-sum games—ways to interact for mutual benefit. And interact we must, for every creature literally gets its living by playing host to its environment. So, if we can overcome our fear, we might meet a lasting friend or the love of our life. If we can brave the difficult conversations, we may reach a deeper understanding with our partners, in business or life or love. Even if we discover that we need to separate, hospitality increases the odds that we part amicably.
Now back to our individual and collective autoimmune disorders, and why hospitality is part of any treatment plan. We appear to be stuck in a vicious inflammatory cycle that goes like this: anxious and threatened, we avoid getting to know. Turning away from hospitality means we don’t develop our stress tolerance for facing what’s unfamiliar, even when doing so would benefit us. This in turn leaves us more brittle and fragile, less tolerant and resilient. Being weaker makes us still more fearful and reactive. Thus our inflamed and inflammatory social and political lives. Our current malady owes in large part to transformative communications technologies that we’ve yet to harness, and that often exploit our survival instincts, much as fast-food purveyors do. The algorithms driving social media are tuned to our baser instincts, stirring fear and anxiety because these best capture and hold our attention. As Jonathan Haidt and others recognize, collectively we need to insist they be tuned to a higher frequency, one that encourages connection, collaboration, and flourishing. In other words, hospitality.
The tragedy of autoimmune disorders is that allies get mistaken for enemies. Symptoms in the individual include anxiety, depression, and suicidality; in the body politic, they include retreating into identities and tribes. Safely in our silos, it’s easier to other—to fear, mock, demonize, ghost, and cancel what we haven’t gotten to know.
Plato’s Socrates offers timeless insight into this timeless problem. By way of introduction, here’s my story. My first job after graduate school was as a philosophy professor at a university in Arkansas. The majority of students were raised as Southern Baptists. One day a student asked to be excused from the weeks of my introduction to philosophy course when we’d be reading Plato and Aristotle. She was afraid these “pagan philosophers” would threaten her faith, and she wanted my support for avoiding hospitality. Her request surprised me. In a bid for time, I said I’d consider it and talk to her after the next class.
The significance of the uncomfortable exchange that followed will be more clear if we look first at how Socrates sees it. For ironically, Socrates faced from his own community the same accusation that my student had, in effect, lodged against him. Athens accused Socrates of corrupting the young’s faith in its beliefs, customs, and laws by introducing them to strange ideas and arguments. Thus, what Socrates saw as engines for evolving thought, the Athenians and my student saw as a threat to their way of life. In short, they accused him of being a disruptive guest.
Plato’s genius is to show us that Socrates recognizes all this. In the Apology, he opens his defense at court by invoking the sacred principle of guest hospitality. Knowing that his jurors take this seriously, he asks them to treat him as if he were a foreigner (the Greek word is xenos),
foreign to the manner of speech here. So just as, if I really did happen to be a foreigner, you would surely sympathize with me if I spoke in the dialect and way in which I was raised, so also I do beg this of you now….leave aside the manner of my speech…and instead consider whether the things I say are just or not.
Socrates reminds Athens that a good host entertains their guest’s story with an open mind. But notice how sly, radical, and threatening (if also promising) this story is! For keep in mind that it’s not the job of courts to do what Socrates asks, and judge whether something is just; their job is only to decide whether a law has been violated. But if they follow Socrates’ jury instructions, they’ll be accepting that reason and philosophy—not the customary laws of Athens—should be the judge of what’s just, and therefore lawful. Martin Luther King made a similar argument in his Letter from Birmingham Jail. King contrasted divine justice with racist human law, drawing attention to the fact that human authority is questionable.
My student didn’t want to question authority. When we talked again, I told her I couldn’t honor her request without failing her as a teacher, since my job was to introduce her to philosophy. I said I respected her concern, and that in any case I could not force her to read Plato and Aristotle. She briefly lit up, asking whether this meant her grade wouldn’t be affected if she didn’t do the work. I replied that choosing not to do the work didn’t mean she avoided consequences. Unfortunately, my irritation had spoiled my attempt at a playful reply, and she left our meeting even less hospitably inclined.
I wish I had found a more hospitable way to address her fear. For she was right, an encounter with philosophy might change her life—and not necessarily for the better. Would she be better off if, like the young men “corrupted” by Socrates, she changed in ways that risked having her family and community say to her, “You’re a stranger to us now.” For her and Athens, philosophy appears to be like Paris, the guest who makes off with what is theirs—the customs and beliefs that unite them and keep the children from straying from the fold. And what does philosophy offer in return? Nothing.
Why nothing? Because philosophy, like guest hospitality, isn’t about telling others what to think. That’s why Socrates famously proclaimed his ignorance: because recognizing we might not know is a condition for getting to know. No one looks for their keys if they think they know where they are.
If you’re still with me, I hope you see now why hospitality is a way of being, the practice of which helps contain our baser instincts, thereby reducing inflammation and increasing occasions to interact, learn, grow, and become our better and wiser selves—individually and collectively. The problem with where Athens and my student are coming from is that while they know what they stand to lose by being hospitable, they don’t know what they stand to gain. Socrates, however, knows both sides. In the Crito, a dialogue set in his prison cell after he’s been found guilty, Socrates personifies Athens. Speaking in the voice of its laws, he persuades his old friend Crito that their view, and punishment, of Socrates is just.
But this just proves his point. For it is Socrates’ philosophic hospitality that enables him to discover both sides of the matter. This in turn puts him in a better position to judge than those who haven’t ventured beyond the cave of their familiar. That’s the pitch, anyway, of hospitality and philosophy—and of psychotherapy, to which I’ll turn in next month’s column for 3QD. Thank you for your hospitality. I hope we meet again.
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