Intellectual Hospitality is a Species of Love

Recent years have seen countless controversies over academic freedom, including at MIT.  Just this month, on the 1st of September, 2022, President L. Rafael Reif wrote in a letter to the MIT community that “freedom of expression has always been, and must remain, a fundamental MIT value.” And yet, it increasingly seems that our institutes of higher education fail to provide an environment in which it is possible to think with others with whom we disagree.

The Octet Collaborative is in the midst of a year focusing much of its work - a reading group and a retreat with faculty, followed by four events in the coming academic year - on this question.  Rather than framing the issue as one of academic freedom, however, we are asking how to develop and preserve the virtue of intellectual hospitality - not so much a question of freedoms to be demanded, but of virtues to be formed and obligations to one another to be honored.  In this essay, I’d like to explain what intellectual hospitality is and why it is so critical to the flourishing of the university.

More than tolerance

To begin with, I want to emphasize that intellectual hospitality is more than merely tolerating diverse viewpoints.  There are two ways to understand this, building off of the word hospitality itself.  Let me begin with a story.

In the summer that I turned twenty-five, I went abroad for several weeks, first for a summer school on behavioral economics at the Central European University in Budapest, and then in Greece with a group of former colleagues from the New York Fed. After a week seeing the obligatory (and unforgettable!) sights of Athens, we drove three hours down to the Peloponnese, to a tiny resort town called Gytheio. Nearly everyone there was a tourist on summer holiday, just like us, but we had chosen this town specifically because it was the family home of one of my former co-workers, Dave. I will never forget the evening that we left the little town of restaurants, shops, and hotels alongside the harbor and ventured up to the little village perched on the terraced hillside above.

The whole town turned out for dinner in a small, central courtyard that night.  Tables lined the square and we all sat down to a lamb dinner in which everything we ate was freshly picked, prepared, slaughtered, and served - one got the sense that there was nothing on the table that hadn’t been alive the night before. I can still taste it all, and I can still see the joy and the pride on the faces of the women and men who laid it out before us, still hear the stories and laughter that ran late into the warm Mediterranean night. It was, unquestionably, the best meal I’ve ever eaten.

When I think of hospitality, that meal is the first thing that comes to mind: the way everyone in the town had something to give and offered it up proudly and joyfully, as though it were a greater honor for them to serve us than it was for us to be served.

There’s an important insight into the nature of hospitality in this: that hospitality is as much about giving as it is about receiving, that it is active and not merely passive. It’s not simply receiving the other with deference; it is more than tolerance. Dave’s family didn’t simply welcome us into their space and then move out of the way, giving us the run of the place (frankly, we wouldn’t have known what to do if they had). They welcomed us in and gave of themselves.

Here’s another way to think about the nature of hospitality.  The Greek word for hospitality is philoxenia. It literally means love of the stranger, or love of the strange. Its opposite is a word we all know in English: xenophobia.  Hospitality is a species of love, one which unites strangers and overcomes that which estranges us from one another.

Postures and practices

So what are the postures and practices necessary for intellectual hospitality? (“Postures,” as many readers will recognize, is a term I’m borrowing from Andy Crouch’s first book, Culture Making, in which it was his preferred way to describe the various relationships between “Christ and Culture.”) This was the question that several MIT faculty explored at a faculty retreat held in July 2022. We welcomed Ken Churchill, founder of TalentEd Ventures, as a special guest at our retreat; many of the ideas in this essay were developed through conversations with Ken in the weeks leading up to the retreat and during our time together.

Let’s consider postures first, then move to practices. The first posture is one of respect, recognizing the image of God borne by the other, remembering that the other is other, but at the same time united in common humanity.  John Calvin noted that “Scripture… teaches that we are not to consider that men merit of themselves but to look upon the image of God in all men, to which we owe all honor and love,” and specifically applied this admonition to those who oppose us: “Assuredly there is but one way in which to achieve what is not merely difficult but utterly against human nature: to love those who hate us, to repay their evil deeds with benefits, to return blessings for reproaches.  It is that we remember not to consider men’s evil intention but to look upon the image of God in them, which cancels out and effaces their transgressions, and with its beauty and dignity allures us to love and embrace them.” (John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, 3.7.6)

The second posture required for intellectual hospitality is one of kindness. This is a word which - like hospitality itself - is often mistakenly considered rather bland, even passive, but in scripture it is a strong word.  Not only is it one of the fruit of the spirit, but Paul also uses it in combination with other virtues including purity, knowledge, and patience (2 Cor. 6:6), as well as compassion, humility, and meekness (Col. 3:12).  Half of its uses in the New Testament refer to God’s kindness toward us, perhaps most powerfully in Ephesians 2:7, where Paul says that God has “made us alive together with Christ… so that in the coming ages he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus.” Kindness is a posture that moves us toward the other to embrace them as a fellow image bearer of God, even when we cannot embrace all that they believe, say, or do.  It reflects a genuine concern for the other and an authentic desire to know and understand them. Others’ ideas are part of what we seek to receive when we seek to receive them as persons - again, even if doing so does not mean adopting their positions.  At the end of the day, the other is still other, though perhaps less of a stranger.

A helpful way to think of these postures is in terms of the classical understanding of virtue as frequently occupying a golden mean between two extremes. If intellectual hospitality occupies a middle space, what lies to either side? In one direction, we would find mere tolerance, an apathetic acquiescence to the other which challenges none of the ideas held by the other, even those which are foolish and even injurious. In the other, a domineering and controlling spirit that makes no room for the other’s otherness, insisting on conformity and intellectual assimilation.  Both of these extremes are harmful to the other and to one’s own self, because neither results in the kind of fruitful exchange that occurs in the presence of genuine respect, humility, and engagement driven by love.

Second, what are the practices necessary to intellectual hospitality?  What habits must be developed and then sustained and nourished to ensure its survival?

First, making room - the practice of welcoming and listening with kindness to the other’s ideas.  The purpose of making room is to embrace the other as a person, a fellow human made in God’s image, and to seek to understand the other’s thoughts, ideas, and positions.  Making room avoids practices of dismissal (“you only think that because…”) and defensiveness (the easy temptation to listen for no other purpose than to prepare your best, most withering counter-argument).  Making room requires a certain degree of humility, because it always presumes that the other may actually have something to teach us, even if we continue to reject his or her conclusions, logic, or methods of reasoning.

Second, differentiation. There should be a deliberate cataloguing of where we disagree, avoiding the apathetic papering over of difference. Years ago, a friend of mine in campus ministry served a term leading the Chaplains at Harvard University, an extremely diverse and collegial collection of ministers serving multiple faith traditions. The group had always got along just fine, but my friend noticed that they never really talked about anything of substance - which was tragic, given their collective wisdom and the years of training they had each devoted to their callings!  So, he decided to organize their monthly meetings around exploring the areas of their disagreement.  For the next year, they told each other what they believed about life, death, life after death, suffering, hope in the face of despair, forgiveness, reconciliation.  It was a rich year in which all learned more about one another’s beliefs and about their own, as they were forced to articulate their deepest convictions among colleagues who hadn’t spent any time at all inhabiting their own traditions.  And, of course, they came to know - and love - one another more deeply. To be sure, this worked well only because they were all committed to postures of respect and kindness (even then, my friend worried that it would go off the rails at some point!). But equally critical was the starting point of the conversation:  the acknowledgement that they did not all agree, and that there was good fruit to be had from pressing into their differences.

The last critical practice is engagement.  For most, this is the most difficult, because it is most demanding of balance between the extremes of apathy and domination. It is at this point that, having listened in order to understand the other’s viewpoint and having clearly articulated the differences, one seeks to persuade the other. This practice requires “showing your work,” which can feel tedious and time-consuming. But done well, the practice of marshaling arguments, not merely asserted in abstraction, but in relation to the person sitting across from you, is one of the most powerful ways of conveying a posture of kindness and respect that there is.  Engagement, ultimately, is not only about a contest between ideas; it builds relationships between human beings, and in acknowledges that the work and the rewards of doing so will always go both ways.

Obstacles in the way

So what is it that makes intellectual hospitality so difficult to practice?  I think we can point to three things:  language, fear, and apathy.

Intellectual hospitality is mediated by words - perhaps not only by words, but always by words. Words can be difficult - even with the best of intentions it can be difficult to express our own views, much less those of another. And in many cases, we encounter situations where words aren’t being used with the best of intentions, but where the very definitions of words are shifted to favor one side or the other, or ruled out of court, or evacuated of meaning altogether. This skews the very medium in which we express intellectual hospitality, rendering its practice nearly impossible.

Fear is a powerful deterrent to intellectual hospitality.  To make room for the other, listen, and engage requires a degree of vulnerability, and there can be real costs to doing so.  We may be accused by the other side of being overly doctrinaire and unyielding, even violent.  We may be accused by our own side of being overly welcoming of heterodox views, aiding and abetting a move toward a slippery slope to disaster. We may be characterized as unenlightened, disloyal, bigoted, cowardly, or any number of other unpleasant epithets. Worst of all, intellectual hospitality toward our enemies may cost us status and belonging among our friends. Some may conclude that intellectual hospitality just isn’t worth the social risk. The implication is that the virtue of intellectual hospitality depends on the virtue of courage.

Intellectual hospitality depends even more on the virtue of love, because apathy is the most powerful obstacle standing in the way of intellectual hospitality.  Engaging the other is hard work. It is simply easier to remain in our comfortable echo-chambers - which only reinforce our prevailing views and make it harder to hear, consider, and understand the views of others. Moving out toward the other requires us to care about them in some way (even if that way is tinged with hospitality). I want to stress this: apathy is not merely inertia or lethargy. Intellectual hospitality is a species of love that overcomes our estrangement; as has often been said, the opposite of love is not hatred, but apathy - or rather, apathy is hatred.  It fails to concern itself with the other at all; it treats the other as though he simply doesn’t matter. Apathy is the most powerful obstacle standing in the way of intellectual hospitality; it also presents the greatest danger to deform those who succumb to it, turning ever further inward on themselves.

A look ahead

The work of the Octet Collaborative is focused on overcoming these obstacles, beginning within the Christian community at MIT. In the coming year, Octet will gather Christian faculty and staff for four expert-led intellectual hospitality conversations around controversial questions:  race relations, the overturning of Roe v. Wade, sexuality and gender, and mental health.  Why have these conversations among Christians, rather than with the broader community?  Because even among Christians, significant differences exist - and we can’t presume that we know how to exercise intellectual hospitality, even amongst ourselves.  But we can presume on something that I’ve heard invoked frequently by Christian faculty at MIT, in the midst of sharp disagreements: that our unity is ultimately secured not by our holding the same opinions, but by the Holy Spirit who unites us to one another by uniting us to Christ.

I invite you to pray for the faculty and staff of MIT as we embark on this venture, in the hopes that the Spirit of Christ would develop and nurture intellectual hospitality among his own at MIT, in order that we might offer it as a gift to the Institute, opening these conversations up more broadly, in the years to come.