the stranger and the fool revisited

“Treat others the same way you want them to treat you….If you do good to those who do good to you, what credit is that to you? For even sinners do the same. If you lend to those from whom you expect to receive, what credit is that to? Even sinners lend to sinners in order to receive back the same amount. But love your enemies, and do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return; and your reward will be great, and you will be sons of the Most High; for He Himself is kind to ungrateful and evil men. Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful.”—Luke 6:33-36

My recent post on the story of Nabal stimulated enough discussion in our Sunday school class this week that it thought it might be worthwhile to follow up on it. At the heart of our discussion lay the perceived tension between a biblical obligation to welcome strangers and treat them with honor and the reality that, at some point, an influx of aliens will tax limited resources to a point of breaking. As Mom wrote in her response to my journal entry, “On the one hand, I so want to share the good that America has to offer with anyone courageous enough to seek it, or fortunate enough to have been born to it. On the other hand, it is possible that critical mass will be surpassed, and we will sink, and won't be able to offer any good to anyone. Where is the balance? Where/when is it right to say, ‘no more.’?”

I’d like to suggest, however, that the question itself overlooks the most important point of Nabal’s encounter with David. The central issue at stake is not Nabal’s lack of hospitality, but his misperception of David and the situation his presence created. Nabal did not see David as a potential partner but as a drain. His question was not that different from the one that plagues many of us as we think about incoming immigrants: how (and why) are we supposed to stretch our resources to cover the cost? Even our desire to see ourselves as charitable or altruistic often exacerbates the tendency to perceive the people who enter our space as a burden rather than a gift. And as long as that is our perception, no matter how much good will we may try put forward, we will eventually be forced into courses of action that are inhumane, driven by fear, and ultimately contrary to our own best interests. In other words, we can’t simply treat hospitality as a moral mandate; we need to recognize that in attending to the needs of strangers we contribute to our own good as well.

This, of courses, raises the legitimate question as to whether we can truthfully look at millions of immigrants as a boon more than a drain, or whether this is simply wishful thinking. There are a few ways to answer this. One is to point to the many ways that our lives are visibly enriched by their presence: the cultural and linguistic experiences that they offer to those who are open to them, the services they already provide in the work sector. America is, after all, a society made up largely of immigrants and their descendants. To suggest that we who now live here constitute a native national identity that can be threatened by new immigrants is to discard our own cultural history.

One could also approach it from the opposite direction and look at the cost of inhospitality. To offer just one example, by the most recent estimates, the proposed wall to protect and maintain 700 miles of the US-Mexico border will cost 49 billion dollars to construct (http://www.sacbee.com/111/story/107179.html). That’s almost half of the combined total of the amounts budgeted for education, health and social services in the four Border States. I recognize that statistics are easy to manipulate and that this single comparison does not definitively prove anything, but it should at least prompt us to ask whether keeping people out isn’t more expensive than letting them in.

To me, however, the most compelling reason for recognizing the intruder as a gift and not a burden is that his or her presence has the power to make us one kind of people or another, and the kind of people we become largely determines whether we flourish as human beings or perish. In Dependent Rational Animals (pages 119-128), Alasdair MacIntyre develops this idea by considering the relation of mercy to what he calls “just generosity.” He argues that, because we come into the world in need of nurturing and training from people whom we can never repay, and because over the course of our lives we find ourselves sometimes called upon to give to those who cannot repay us (young children, elderly parents, strangers whom we come upon in times of emergency, etc.), and sometimes in need of similar help from others, the cohesion of a social group requires that we learn to acknowledge our mutual dependence.

Those communities that learn to accept and value this dimension to their lives also generally learn that to sustain it they need to develop the virtue of just generosity, “a generosity I owe to all those others who also owe it to me.” Just generosity describes the habit of acting out of uncalculated friendship toward another, “from attentive and affectionate regard toward that other,” and trusting that other to act in the same way. But if we are to expect this kind of virtue from one another, we have to promote it actively in our communities, to teach one another to embrace and develop it, and to discourage actions that violate it.

Outsiders play an important role in teaching us how to exercise this virtue. They present us with the possibility of extending just generosity beyond the borders of our immediate circles purely on the basis of our shared humanity. Specifically, they created the opportunity to exercise what Thomas Aquinas called misericordia, or as we might call it, mercy, the capacity to “understand the other’s distress as one’s own” and to respond accordingly. Says MacIntyre, “Misericordia has regard to urgent and extreme need without respect of persons. It is the kind and scale of the need that dictates what has to be done, not whose need it is. And what each of us needs to know in our communal relationships is that the attention given to our urgent and extreme needs, the needs characteristic of disablement, will be proportional to the need and not to the relationship. But we can rely on this only from those for whom misericordia is one of the virtues. So communal life itself needs this virtue that goes beyond the boundaries of communal life” (Dependent Rational Animals, 124).

To put this another way, if we suppress the fact of our own dependence upon people whom we cannot repay, if as a society we learn to encourage pretensions to independence and self-ownership and to despise neediness, we condemn ourselves to fighting desperately against our own inevitable moments of need. Illness, old age, disability, weakness, poverty and calamity become marks of shame. Moreover, where strength and independence are deemed more virtuous than weakness and dependence, it becomes increasingly difficult to explain why those who have developed the means to dominate owe any deference to those who have not—to articulate why people in power shouldn’t, say, enslave Africans, persecute Jews, massacre Native Americans, or shut the elderly and disabled out from our social interactions. By contrast, if we learn to consider our dependence upon one another a good thing, to act with mutual just generosity, and to value opportunities to extend that generosity to those who come into our midst from the outside, we create a social environment in which we can enter into our own times of need confidently, without shame or fear. In a word, we recapture our humanity.

Of course, we cannot expect the state to adopt such an attitude toward outsiders if its citizens don’t first. That’s why it is so important that churches and other groups in which social and moral formation takes place to take the lead. Before we can begin to address the logistical questions, we first have to establish in our minds and hearts the kinds of people we hope to become and the kinds of actions that will shape us into such people. The primary question cannot be what we can afford to give, what the other person has legal right to demand of us, or whether this person has come into our midst legitimately in the first place. The first question has to be: will we affirm our own humanity by doing good to this person or despise it by doing harm?