The ancient Greeks had “xenia.” The Romans called it “hospitium.” The Pashtun call theirs “nanawatai.” In Australia, it’s called “wunan.” Societies all over the world, for thousands of years, have featured some variation of “sacred hospitality.”

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These cultural constructs, though separated by time and distance, all combine concepts of *sanctuary,* or protection from danger, and *hospitality,* or provision and care.

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There were, of course, local variations; the Greek concept only applied to “foreigners,” by which they meant only Greek citizens of other poleis and not slaves, barbarians, etc. But all of them share some notion of sacred obligation to anyone who invokes it.

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Guest rights are typically seen as *sacred* obligations, transcending any mortal legal or personal obligation. The Trojan War began not just because Paris absconded with Menelaus’ wife Helen, but because Paris was Menelaus’ *guest* who violated his obligations as a guest.

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The Greeks went to war against Troy out of duty to Zeus Xenios in his capacity as guarantor of guests and guest rights. In many cultures, guest rights extend even to criminals who invoke them, obligating people to protect and care even for enemies:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clan_Lamont#MacGregor_hospitality

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Why are these traditions of hospitality so universal and so sacred? Because they help mitigate risk in a dangerous, unpredictable world filled with potentially dangerous strangers.

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It is, in Alexander Wendt’s terminology, an institution of cooperation that evolves in anarchy to reduce risk of conflict, in place of self-help and the security dilemma.

7/ https://twitter.com/AndyinDC1/status/1384925582148964359

I got to thinking about this when I came across this idea of mobility as one of the core freedoms of human societies (which we’ve lost, naturally). Not just the negative right to *leave,* but the positive right to *hospitality* when you get somewhere else.

8/ https://twitter.com/davidwengrow/status/1312349824390500352

We have a popular concept of the past in which “exile” from a “tribe” meant certain death, because the only alternative to life within the group you were born into was dangerous and vulnerable isolation.

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While no historic system of hospitality was perfect or universal, of course, but they were far more common and pervasive than most people realize.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/347538152_This_land_is_your_land_Naturalization_in_England_and_Arabia_500-1000

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And this pervasive hospitality enabled a fundamental freedom that we lack: a freedom to leave a community with a reasonable expectation that you might find a place in another.

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Consider the way in which James Scott identifies freedom of movement as the antithesis of state control in his brilliant “Against the Grain”:

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Early states were obsessed with sedentism and sedentary agriculture because it was regular, legible, and *taxable.* Those walls that mark the emergence of the first city states were likely as much about keeping workers in as they were about keeping enemies out.

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In contrast, freedom entailed being able to leave, gaining (or resuming) mobility, by joining the community of non-state “barbarians” living beyond the margins of the state.

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Norms of hospitality might have been costly for hosts, but they also enabled a (theoretically) universal mobility and, with it, the possibility of freedom from one’s own community if things turned sour at home.

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In contrast, we live in a world of heavily policed borders, bureaucratized and often militarized immigration, onerous customs checks, and, to the extent that we can move about, commodified hospitality accessible only to those with the money to buy it in markets.

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Thanks to capitalism’s totalizing capacity, there’s virtually nowhere left that’s both accessible and not governed by regimes of state borders and private property. From Ester Boserup’s “The Conditions of Agricultural Growth”:

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The freedom of mobility is not to simply move from one place to another like place—from frying pan to fire, as it were—or to leave a community and lose all social support. It’s to be able to leave one *mode* of living for an entirely different way.

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As per Scott, mobility might be the difference between sedentary toil in an early state for the freedom of “barbarian” life. It’s the freedom to choose or construct an entirely different community or even way of life.

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So let’s keep that in mind for our communities *now* as we think about ways of building free communities in the future: for immigrants, as a society, and for guests, as individuals. Keep a chair open for Elijah, as they might say.

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PS: as a quick addendum, I’d like to link this to another “positive” right, the traditional human right to housing, that enables far greater human freedom than our modern obsession with negative rights: https://twitter.com/AndyinDC1/status/1368189182930268165