After tragedy in France, rethinking the dynamic of guest and host

“This is for all you muslims in America, go back where you came from before we have to kick you out,” read one angry tweet, from a user whose profile includes an image of a mushroom cloud. “Kick Islam out and save Western civilisation from savages,” said another man, whose Twitter page also encourages readers to “Always keep an open mind.”

Almost as soon as news spread Wednesday that the offices of a satirical French newspaper had been attacked — by radicals offended that the publication often directed its irreverent humor at Islam — there were calls on Twitter to “kick them out,” and the calls continued through the week, as two hostage situations played out near Paris. It was an ugly moment in the evolution of one of our deepest, most emotionally fraught metaphors for coexistence on the planet, the dynamic between the guest and the host. In this way of thinking, France, whether conceived as a Christian country or a great beacon of secular pluralism, is only hosting Islam, and the terrorist attack has brutally broken the sacred codes of the host-guest relationship.

If it is true that radical Islamists can bring the methods of the Islamic State into the streets of Paris, and if this leads to self-censorship and further violence, then we do indeed face an extreme crisis in the history of free expression. But acts such as the horrific massacre at the offices of Charlie Hebdo, in which stone-age tribalism and iconoclasm crash into the fundamental freedoms of secular and democratic society, also animate emotions and metaphors deeply embedded in our psyche.

At the most basic level, “kick them out” is, of course, exactly what needs to be done. The question is who “they” are, and how one goes about pursuing not just the criminals who killed more than a dozen people in Paris but also others of like mind who may be plotting further attacks. And how do we discern who “those people” are and “kick them out” without doing grave violence to the vast majority of peaceful Muslims and to our own cherished ideals of living in a society in which privacy and freedom of association are protected.

But no sooner do you start to parse these questions than you realize you are right where you were before this attack happened: struggling to defend fundamental freedoms against a small but dangerous bunch of extremists who justify their violence with religious certainties. There can be no grand eviction, no easy lapse into platitudes about Islam and violence.

Boris Kazinets and Catherine Gasta played the roles of Philemon and Baucis for a 2000 production of “Faust” in Washington at the Stanislavsky Theatre Studio. (Stan Barouh)

Yet even people who struggle to think rationally will feel the tug of the host-guest dynamic, a lingering, painful sense that something so fundamental to goodness and morality has been violated that we must seek out ingrates and abusers of trust and purge them. So perhaps it is the ancient power of the host-guest dynamic that is leading us into confusion, and perhaps that is the thing we must understand more clearly.

Consider the story of Baucis and Philemon, elderly peasants who unknowingly welcomed two gods into their humble home. Zeus and Hermes rested there in disguise after being turned away from all other doors in the village. The old couple gave them food and wine and all the hospitality they could muster. The gods, in turn, rewarded these acts of human kindness by allowing the man and his wife to die together, changing them into intertwined trees.

It is one of Ovid’s classic tales of metamorphosis, but the idea of hospitality, and occasional tales of good people unknowingly hosting a king or angel or even God himself are common to many peoples and religions. It has been painted and dramatized countless times. The ethical dynamics of the host-guest relationship underlie much of our most basic moral thinking, all around the world.

The story of Baucis and Philemon is so beautiful it will make you weep, and there are few more practical virtues today than knowing how to be a good host, and a grateful guest. Many people who chafe at religious or cultural taboos — such as the wearing of the veil — will nonetheless happily dress modestly and avoid offending sensibilities when they are guests in another country. It is boorish to attack another person’s religion or political views if you are eating at their dinner table. These are basic rules of etiquette, and there are few more valuable and useful ones.

But host-guest thinking does not just operate at the local level of everyday human interactions. It metaphorically structures how we think about issues such as immigration and basic cultural identity. And when extended to broader political and cultural issues, an ugly power dynamic emerges. The host, after all, holds all the cards. A good host is, of course, generous, but this also compels a good guest to be circumspect and grateful. Some fine hosts are prone to be almost megalomaniacal in their generosity, and it is exhausting, after awhile, to be a guest.

Much of the ugliness in our debates about immigration and religion is a macroscopic extension of the irritations that arise from the power dynamic of this relationship. Once you know who the host is, you can begin compelling the guest to act in certain ways, whether that is to give up his or her native language and learn English, to stop wearing the veil in public or to accept that Christian holidays are also national holidays. People who find themselves perpetually in the position of being guests will begin to feel that the relationship is not one of giving and receiving, but of basic social control and inequity.

Representations of Baucis and Philemon, including the masterful painting of the story by Rembrandt in the National Gallery, often depict the moment when the human hosts realize that they are in the presence of gods, and the power dynamic is inverted. And in some fundamental way, many religions conceive humans as guests in God’s world. God is generous, and sets the rules. We are grateful and respectfully obey.

And that is what is so terrifying about what happened in Paris. For the world is too complex today to be divided into guests and hosts. We all live in one another’s world. The Internet has made it possible for people in Paris to offend people in Syria. And the ease of travel and open borders that are essential to prosperity and cosmopolitanism have made it possible for people offended on one continent to take vengeance on another.

A basic narrative of what it means to be a good person cannot, in fact, be extended to how entire nations and religious groups interact. And as we continue to be both more financially and intellectually globalized, other moral metaphors are likely to prove equally destructive. We seem to have arrived at a strange conflation of the global and familial, where we are all sitting in one another’s living rooms, getting on one another’s nerves.

But it’s worse than that, because 16 people have died in Paris, only months after a brutal anti-Semitic murder rampage in Brussels, and the evictions and bloodletting continue unabated throughout much of the Middle East. The conviction that some people exist only at the sufferance of others, a belief often fueled by religion, is leading fanatics to kill, and that fanaticism is the one thing that can never be tolerated, even in the most tolerant world. Religious tolerance isn’t an act of generosity; it is an essential tool for survival.

There is only one way forward. Enlightenment ideals of freedom and equality may have been partially responsible for bringing us to this moment of dangerous global communion; but they are also the only ones that can lead us out. There are no hosts, or guests, when it comes to nations and religions. It is not paradoxical to be intolerant of intolerance. There is no prerogative to be offended. We can think only of rights and freedoms, derived not from God, but agreed upon collectively. This evolution of thought will, very likely, be more difficult for people of deep faith than those who prize secular values.

Many of the basic narratives of right or wrong, be they religiously sanctioned or embedded in fables such as Ovid’s Metamorphoses, are too often linked to violence or coercion to be useful in our crowded, pluralistic world. Before kind old Baucis and Philemon became trees, Zeus destroyed their town, and everyone in it, and made the elderly peasants stewards of his temple on the ruins. That is where all our temples will be built, presiding over ruins, unless we commit not just to leaving religious certainty in the home, but the deeper metaphorical thinking that gives religion its primal force as well.