Four Things We Get Wrong About Strangers

Why curiosity matters, why xenophobia is sometimes okay, why talking is not the issue, and why strangers are not just friends we haven't met yet.

In this issue of Wayward Things, I’m talking about strangers, coffee-shop dogs, the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, and what it means to live in a world of eight billion people, most of whom we will never know.

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A few years back, I published a book about the art of dealing with strangers. In the book, Hello, Stranger (Granta 2021), I made the case that finding better ways of dealing with strangers is one of the central problems of human life. Given that there are eight billion people on the planet, and we only know a few thousand of these, strangers are everywhere. We are outnumbered. And, very often, this fact terrifies us.

This is a fear that can be exploited by the unscrupulous. I wrote the book in the wake of Brexit, with its fevered dreams of taking back control, and in response to what I saw as a rising culture of inhospitality, much of it politically motivated. Since the book was published, this spiral of anti-stranger rhetoric seems only to have got worse, driven by a desire to exclude those who are not like ourselves, on the spurious grounds that this will somehow keep us safe (spoiler: it won’t).

So in Hello, Stranger, I made the case for thinking more deeply about the double art of hospitality—the art of welcoming strangers into our world, and the art of being welcomed by others. This double art is one we sorely need to get better at, if only because, of all the problems in life, the problem posed by strangers is unlikely to go away soon.

Gustave Van de Woestijne: Hospitality for Foreigners (1920). Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

Since the book came out, I’ve found myself involved in lots of conversations about strangers, and about the arts of hospitality. And in these conversations, I’ve repeatedly come up against several things that, I think, get in the way of us thinking through these issues clearly. So here, I want to share four things I think we get wrong about strangers.

First, we assume xenophobia is the whole story—that we are inherently disposed to mistrust strangers. Second, we treat this xenophobia as always and everywhere bad, a moral failing to be eradicated or at least corrected. Third, we reduce all our difficulties with strangers to the problem of how to talk to strangers. And fourth, we imagine that, to remedy the problems we have with strangers, we should seek to befriend them.

I think that all of these are mistakes. And I think that, if we want to get better at dealing with strangers, these are ideas we could do without.

Our First Error: Xenophobia is the Whole Story

First, then, xenophobia—literally the fear of the stranger. The word, as is well known, comes from the Greek roots xenos and phobia, but it was coined only in 1880, in an article in the London Daily News (where it was paired with ‘xenomania’, a word that sadly never caught on).

In Ancient Greece, the xenos was the guest who turned up from afar, the one who didn’t belong to your world, but whom—because they were on your doorstep—needed to be dealt with one way or the other. When somebody turns up unannounced like this, their arrival prompts all kinds of questions: Who is this person? What are they up to? What is going on in their head? What are their intentions? Can they be trusted? These questions go deep, and running through them is an unmistakable thread of fear. I feel this fear too. In all my encounters with strangers, however positive, I suspect there is always some undercurrent of anxiety, or awkwardness, or unease.

But fear is by no means the only primary response we have to strangers, nor is it necessarily the most dominant one. Because this fear of strangers is often tempered by something else: by curiosity. Let me give an example. The other day, I was in a coffee shop here in Taiwan. The coffee shop had a dog, a neat little Shiba Inu, who was dressed (this being Taiwan) in a very smart tunic. Here he is.

On the way to being friends… With the coffee shop dog. Photo Will Buckingham.

Who would not want to be friends with such a dapper little guy? So I ordered a latte and sat down, very much hoping the dog would come over to introduce himself. However, to my disappointment, he at first treated me with suspicion. He looked at me out of the corner of his eye, sidled around out of reach, and clearly thought I was not to be trusted.

I was upset, of course, but I didn’t exactly blame him. This was his world, after all, and I was the xenos, the stranger. So I went back to my book and pretended to ignore him. But as I read and drank my coffee, I noticed that—little by little—he was taking an interest in me. He came over, gave me a tentative sniff. I let my hand fall, and he licked it. I scratched him behind the ears. He seemed to like this. Then he rested his head on my leg (see the photo above), and I knew we were on the way to being friends.

As with dogs, so with human beings. We are afraid of strangers. But we are also curious. We want to know what they are up to. We want to hear their stories. We want to know what new possibilities they might bring us because—as the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas once remarked—strangers bring us futures we cannot anticipate. They offer us something other than the same old thing, endless repetition.

The ancient Greeks had a word for this attitude of openness to strangers. They called it philoxenia, or ‘friendship with the stranger.’ Hearteningly, the roots of this word go back much further in history and literature than do the roots of the term ‘xenophobia.’ If the latter was coined in the 19th Century, ‘philoxenia’ reaches all the way back through Biblical Greek (‘Forget not to show love unto strangers: for thereby some have entertained angels unawares’ — Hebrews 13:2) to Homer.

So, when I think of my own unease in encountering strangers and strangeness, and how fear, anxiety and awkwardness run through them, I find myself having to acknowledge that I, like everyone else, am in part a natural xenophobe.

But this is not the whole story, because this fear is mixed with other things: curiosity, a desire to find out more, a desire to connect, to befriend. Or, in other words, philoxenia. If xenophobia is that which pushes us away from strangers and causes us to keep our distance, philoxenia is that which draws us closer. Both may be deeply rooted in us, but neither one more fundamental than the other. As a result, in our relationships with strangers, we find ourselves having to navigate between the two, between fear and curiosity, caught somewhere between anxiety and hope, trying to work out what our next move should be.

Our Second Error: Xenophobia is Bad

The second thing we get wrong is we imagine that xenophobia, this fear and trembling in the face of the unfamiliar, is necessarily and always a bad thing. It is easy to treat xenophobia as an inherent flaw, as something we must eradicate. And there are certainly many manifestations of this fear that cause immense harm: exclusion, dehumanisation, hatred, or the rhetoric that seeks to diminish others on the grounds of them being different from ourselves. But, before our fear of strangers hardens into these things, a certain caution in the face of otherness is something we all possess, and it is not something to be entirely dismissed.

In Hello, Stranger, I wrote about my own experiments in hospitality over the years, as both host and guest: from giving strangers the keys to my house in the UK, to travelling alone as a teenager in Pakistan, to turning up in remote villages in Indonesia, in the hope of receiving the hospitality of strangers. After the book came out, some less attentive readers assumed my intention was to encourage readers to throw caution to the wind, opening their doors to all and any strangers. But that was never my aim. Indeed, in the book, I dedicated a whole chapter to the terrible things that can go wrong when strangers meet, from mass murder (Odysseus’s bad guests) to cannibalism (the Cyclops). And I drew on the work of the philosopher Onora O’Neill, who made the point that the demand that we should trust indiscriminately is pretty stupid.

Fear of the stranger can, in many cases, be useful. It is part of what keeps us safe from Cyclopes and other malefactors. As Odysseus knew, it makes sense to listen to our fear in the face of the unfamiliar. This fear may be telling us something, and this may be something on which our lives depend. All this is true. And yet, if we respond to strangers only on the basis of fear, we end up not more safe, but less. When travelling in remote parts of Pakistan as a skinny and vulnerable eighteen-year-old, staying in the cheapest hotels for a few rupees a night, I quickly discovered that universal mistrust was a terrible strategy. If you mistrust people, they can’t help you. They can’t offer you protection. Universal mistrust leaves you more isolated, and more open to being abused, exploited or harmed. So I learned to trust. Not indiscriminately, to be sure, but to trust all the same. And as I learned more how to trust, I found that people invited me into their homes, they helped me out, they looked after me, they protected me.

Trusting, I came to realise, may always be difficult and fraught, and may always come with risks, but ultimately, it kept me safer. In other words, while xenophobia may keep us safe to some extent, when this is our only response to strangers, we cut ourselves off from these networks of trust, and we thus undermine this safety we are seeking. And if trusting indiscriminately, as O’Neill writes, is stupid, so too is mistrusting indiscriminately.¹ Of course, we need a justified and provisional caution. But we also need the curiosity that allows us to remain open to others. In this way, we can trust more judiciously, acknowledging both our fear and our curiosity, our xenophobia and our philoxenia: because this is where our best hope for safety and security lies.

Our Third Error: t’s All About the Talking

Switchboard operators (1945), Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

The third problem in how we think about strangers is our weird contemporary obsession with the problem of talking to strangers. Over recent years, there has been a rash of books and articles about how we need to get better at talking to strangers. I’m not sure where this obsession has come from, but it really is everywhere. See, for example, this piece from the Guardian, this article on Harvard research on happiness, this piece on Swedish hellos and the Säg hej! campaign, and Malcolm Gladwell’s book, Talking to Strangers.

However, this obsession with talking gets in the way of the bigger picture. Yes, sometimes we might need to get better at talking to strangers. But the problem with strangers is not, first and foremost, a talking problem. That is to say, talking is neither the first and last word when it comes to finding better ways of managing our relationships with strangers. And, of course, it’s also a pretty exhausting solution to the problem: eight billion people makes for a hell of a lot of talking.

Besides talking, as we navigate our mutual claims to a shared world, there are all kinds of other ways we can relate to strangers. We can cook for them, eat with them, open doors for them in the shopping mall. We can give them space, smile at them, sleep with them, dance with them, trade with them. We can share conspiratorial glances with them as the train rolls into the station three hours late. We can do them the courtesy of ignoring them.

And all of this, one way or another, involves ritual. If, in Hello, Stranger, I don’t talk much about talking, I talk a lot about ritual. Borrowing from the anthropologist Caroline Humphrey, I argue that ritual is the craft of building trust. Even simple rituals—opening the door for somebody, shaking hands, the polite awkwardness of goodbyes in the UK, and so on—help us manage the challenges of existing in the same space as strangers. Ritual helps us find out who we are dealing with. And good ritual, as Humphrey’s work on the ritual codes of Mongolia demonstrates, is a powerful way of offsetting the risks that strangers bring.

Ritual may involve talking. But to my mind, many of the questions we have about talking to strangers can be subsumed under bigger questions of ritual. And ritual doesn’t need to involve talking at all. Take, for example, my coffee-shop canine friend. You could see our interaction—ignoring him, letting my hand fall so that he could lick it, politely tickling him behind the ears—as part of a shared ritual that aimed at building trust.

So, while many of us have sometimes found ourselves tongue-tied when meeting strangers, and talking with strangers can sometimes be a problem, the bigger and more interesting question is this: what are the rituals—whether small and informal, or large and formal—that we need to help us get by with people we don’t know?

Our Fourth Error: Strangers Are Friends We Haven’t Met Yet

Abraham Meets the Three Strangers (c. 1000). St. Sophia of Kyiv. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

The final error I want to talk about is the stubbornly persistent idea that strangers are friends we haven’t met yet. You hear this a lot, but it is unhelpful. It suggests that, when we meet with strangers, our ultimate aim should be to make them less strange, to domesticate them, to make them friends.

And, of course, it’s fun to make friends. I was delighted when the coffee shop Shiba Inu and I started to become good pals. Nevertheless, the idea that we can or should seek to turn strangers into friends, allies, buddies or sidekicks seems a peculiar one. For one thing, the claim that strangers are friends we haven’t met yet is obviously untrue. Strangers, alas, are sometimes enemies we haven’t met yet (this is necessarily true: to the extent that we have enemies, there was once a time that they were strangers to us). The sheer ambivalence of the stranger is one reason that our mix of caution and curiosity, xenophobia and philoxenia, is so very useful to us. This cocktail helps us work out whether the person we are encountering is a potential friend or a potential enemy—or whether they are, more likely, just another person who happens to be kicking around in our vicinity, and who will, in time, wander off.

Pragmatically speaking, of course, the idea that we should seek to befriend strangers—or that the inevitable trajectory leads from stranger to friend—is clearly unworkable. We can’t befriend all eight billion people on the planet, or even all the people we run into on our morning commute. Any attempt to do so is to court exhaustion, and to be an annoyance to others.

But there’s something deeper that is wrong about this idea of strangers as friends we haven’t met yet. And that is in the refusal to allow strangers to be strange, even if this strangeness unsettles us. This brings me back to Levinas, who argues that there is something about the stranger that remains stubbornly strange, forever beyond our grasp.

Absence de patrie commune qui fait de l’Autre l’Etranger; l’Etranger qui trouble le chez soi. Mais Etranger veut dire aussi le libre. Sur lui je ne peux pouvoir. Il échappe à ma prise par un côté essentiel, même si je dispose de lui. Il n’est pas tout entier dans mon lieu.

It is the absence of a common homeland that makes the Other the Stranger; the Stranger who unsettles our being at home with ourselves. But ‘the Stranger’ also means ‘the free one.’ I can have no power over them. They escape my grasp in some essential way, even if I have them at my disposal. They are not entirely within my domain.²

The question, then, is not so much how we can tame this strangeness, but how we can find ways of relating to the stranger—managing our sense of being unsettled, while allowing the stranger to maintain their autonomy, their freedom. There is, to be sure, an ethics to seeking out friendship. But there is also an ethics, potentially a much more demanding one, to letting the coffee-shop Shiba Inu persist in his own way of being, without wanting to mould him into becoming a friend.

And this, it seems to me, is the true challenge: finding ways of living in a world of strangers without the restless desire to assimilate these strangers into the world as we envisage it. It is only when we recognise strangers as strangers, without trying to diminish their strangeness, that we see the real ethical challenges with which they present us. Only then—navigating between our justified caution and our curiosity, building trust where and how we can—can we start to invent new ways of thriving together, alive to the mystery of the fact we are surrounded by so many lives we can never fully understand.

1. Seneca writes, ‘Trusting everyone is as much a fault as trusting no one (though I should call the first the worthier and the second the safer behaviour).’ He’s wrong, of course. Trusting no one is a hopeless way of keeping safe. See Letters from a Stoic, translated by Robin Campbell (Penguin Books, 2004), p. 66.

2. Totalité et infini: Essai sur l’extériorité, by Emmanuel Levinas (Librairie générale française 1990), p. 28. For an alternative translation, see Totality and Infinity; An Essay on Exteriority by Emmanuel Levinas, translated by Alphonso Lingis (Duquesne University Press 1969), p. 39.