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. Read more »