Hospitality and Culture By Charles Mabee The underlying thesis of this little essay is that culture is constructed on the

principle of difference. It is difference that enables culture to operate, to function, with humanitys violent impulses held somewhat at bay. The task of culture is to fully implement the doctrine of divide and rule. Without difference, society would most likely retreat back into what we might term a mob mentality; or, as Thomas Hobbes described it, a war of all against one (bellum omnium contra omnes). This hidden, underlying threat of returning to mob rule propels unifying cultural institutions to slice up various segments of society with the implied purpose of braking hostile and aggressive energies by directing them toward larger groups that can mollify them, rather than in overt expression in violent acts of one on one. In short: by collectivizing the individual into some sort of group context, acts of violence either by or toward the individual, is reduced. You may want to confront your neighbor when you realize that he has no intention of returning the lawnmower that he casually borrowed last summer, perhaps in an angrily, or even violent mannerbut it is the task of the larger culture to reduce this implied threat of one on one violence by directing the issue to legitimated authorities. Now you are held in check because you know that your neighbor has citizenship and is protected by the laws of the land (inalienable rights that stipulate innocence until proven guilty) and a differentiated group called police. You think twice and direct your energies from anger to establishing necessary proof of the theft. Now you must convince a third party, or a host of third parties, that your neighbor really did borrow your lawnmower and refuses to return it. Similarly, your country may have lost the Civil War in its fight for national legitimacy, but your opposition to the federal government and its enforcement of laws you do not desire to follow, continues on in the differentiated group called Klu Klux Klan: the group giving meaning and identity to those disenfranchised from the larger society in the wake of the lessening

violence of wars end. Better the KKK, than Confederate rebellion: it may represent an anathema to the larger society, but it is hardly worth a second civil war. The former can be to some extent tolerated, the latter cannot. Examples could be multiplied almost endlessly, but the point is always the same. By channeling perceived individual grievances into something larger than the individual, yet smaller than the overall group (everyone), culture functions to lessen and mitigate violence. Generally, one can easily imagine that the more violent a culture is, i.e., the more direct the threat of mob rule, the more political it becomes in its struggles to ward off the threat. This propensity toward violence is an expression of humanitys general orientation toward the reality of death that we all face. As humans, our ultimate enemy is death, and we kill others in a fruitful quest to ward off its inevitable interruption in our own lives. We might say that violent acts carry within them something of a living foretaste of this inevitable event. While we may not kill the person whom we beat with a rod, we can be certain that each blow carries something of death with it. If the beating continues long enough, we force death out of its clandestine hiding place in our bodies, forcing it to change its masquerade from implicit suffering to explicit finality. When a soldier is trained to unthinkingly kill in a military environment, his/her exposure to death tends to kill off the full potentiality of human imagination. When you kill, even legitimately kill as a soldier, your life emerges as something less than before; and this truism is learned: when you kill another, you kill something of yourself. By creating a differentiated group in society labeled soldier, society attempts to mitigate the destructive tide of violence which could so easily stem from military acts of violence by creating difference: a soldier is different from a civilian. The refusal of certain terrorist groups to accept the military differentiation imposed by the state in this regard, stands as one of the major conundrums of

contemporary society: a group that does not accept the legitimacy of any social differentiation other than its ownself-legitimized, rather than state legitimized! This is the bald threat that terrorism makes to the system of social differentiation that thrives on the basis of legitimate multiple legitimacies throughout society. At the end of the day, it is by assuming this posture of legitimacy that the cogs of social mitigation of violence are oiled, accomplished through the integration of social differences into some sense of the well-being of the whole (everyone). It is the business of culture to nurture and support the overlapping structures of legitimacy through all levels and layers of society by means of the formulation of a grand narrative that convinces all of the component culturally differentiated parts. This business of cultural integration is the birthplace of morality itself, underwriting the grand good and evil dualistic oppositions that makes the system of differentiation function. What does hospitality look like in the larger cultural task? Is it, in other words, a supportive element in the system of differentiation that lies at the base of culture, or does it interrupt it? The short answer is that it interrupts by a strategy of suspension of social difference. If we may be so bold as to extract a sense of purity from the complexities of actual practice, hospitality is blind to the question of difference. In the hospitality dynamic, the head of state, the policeman, the sojourner, the ill person, the homeless person, and the like, are all treated without regard to social differentiation. The meal, the symbolic center of hospitality, is equally important to all. The root point is this: no one is more or less capable of sharing a meal than anyone elseour hunger and need for food is biologically-based, and not dependent on social differentiation: access to food may well be dependent, but not the need. In that way, the meal serves to radically democratize social engagement and serves to suspend all elements of its dynamic power. Biological realities tend to do that, and hospitality is something of a return to biology. Such social markers as

privilege, wealth, judicial rights, standing and the like, carry far less weight in the new identity of guest. In hospitality, this role of guest trumps all socially-constructed categories. We may say that the guest temporarily has removed himself/herself from a former, i.e., pre-guest life, and assumed a new identity (albeit it temporarily). The policeman guest remains policeman throughout hospitable exchange: but his social role is removed from ultimacy to penultimacy. It does not lead in the exchange between host and guest; it tends to fade into the periphery. What does all of this amount to? Does the hospitality dynamic promise to end all power relationships, conflicts over religious doctrine, social inequality, economic privilege, and the scourge of war itself? Clearly not, such optimism would be unwarranted and nave. It seems to me that the goals should be much less grandiose. At its core, hospitality is an attack upon ultimacy and/or totality. Hospitality is a tool of undercutting, of deconstructing, all absolutes. Such absolutism is the enemy of hospitality, and in a soft way the hospitality dynamic represents a direct attack on it. In its role of social deconstruction, hospitality is the ultimate soft power. By deabsolutizing the categories of social differentiation, if only by suspending them for a short time, hospitality offers a window on a alternative kind of future for humanity. And make no mistake, it is only a window, not the full-blown revolution of thought that would necessarily go into such a project. It is important to keep in mind that hospitality does not really replace the underlying system of social differentiation that stems societal violence: at least not directly. In its system of creating an everchanging new place, it does not displace, but merely temporarily replaces. It does not represent an attack on the system of differentiation itself. It simply ignores it by suspending it, and thereby, putting it in the penultimate position of the social periphery. Interestingly, the beginning stages of revolutionary thought have tended to do much the same with regard to formerly established world-views: think of enlightened thinkers who simply left priests to do priestly work, and pursued their ambition as if

priestly authority did not obtain (quite disparate thinkers as Confucius, Rene Descartes, and Thomas Jefferson, come immediately to mind, as thinkers who addressed society and left heaven to priestly machination). Similarly, the implementation of hospitable practices in society are designed to enable society to do its work of legitimizing social differentiation as a means of controlling mob violence, while it softly pursues an alternative path of a singular differentiation: host and guest, a differentiation which trumps all others.