Hospitality for the Dog(men)

Artwork: Welcome Home Artist: erenarik

In my previous installment, I laid out the idea that the cosmological landscape we inhabit in the world is unstable and chaotic. There is no clear central ordinate principle holding people and society together. We all have undergone near total deracination and the closest thing we have to a center holding things together is economic participation. Coca-Cola and Sportsball with some Netflix on the side; 9-5 notwithstanding. In thinking about how I wanted to continue this series, I thought it best to start broadly and focus in on the main subject slowly. The most obvious thing in my mind, is to try to facilitate an understanding of the relationship between insiders and outsiders and the role of hospitality therein. Of course the natural place to begin, is with dogs.

Dogs are great. Let me rephrase; well-trained dogs are great. I don’t know of many people who don’t think they are the bestest boys. In symbolic/story language it is understood that dogs are creatures of the margin. Left to themselves they are wild and destructive. Tasteless scavengers. Indiscriminate breeders. Filthy vicious creatures. By contrast when man steps in, tames, trains and gives them purpose, they are then capable of being engaged with hospitality and are invited into hearts and homes. When placed under authority they are transformed from savages to trusted and trustworthy companions. Dogs, for better or worse, are associated with all manner of positive and negative attributes but are nonetheless also associated with being outsiders. Even the bestest of boys will never be a person. They will always be an animal. Though they eat the crumbs that fall from the master’s table, they will never be children at the table. In another sense their presence can act as a litmus test for determining the governing principle of a place or even a period of transition. Whenever you encounter dogs (in story or real life) you are in marginal to chaotic territory; either the fringes of society or the wilderness. The degree to which man has exerted dominion is the degree to which hospitality can be relied on as a mediation strategy without resorting to violence. 

Hospitality is typically thought of in terms of the hotel industry. The other thing commonly thought of when hospitality is mentioned is being welcoming or more broadly, politeness. I think though that these are poor ways to think about hospitality and a much better way to think about it is in terms of maintaining boundaries and relationships while still being mindful of the marginal. Let me explain. Think of it in terms of concentric circles, with each progressively inner layer being reserved
for more intimate relationships. The layers are: indiscriminate exclusion, discriminate inclusion, discriminate exclusion and indiscriminate inclusion. Taking a look at Scripture, we can see examples of how this idea of hospitality plays out in the life of the Israelites through the laws they were given regarding interacting with enemies, foreigners, sojourners and God Himself. As an example there laws pertaining to the harvesting of fields which ensured that provision was left at the literal margins
for certain marginal people among them. One thing we can also learn from the laws God gave to the Israelites is that sometimes hospitality is off the table. Let’s go a bit deeper and talk about the extreme end of this – dog-headed men.

The dog-headed man is a longstanding trope used to describe foreigners who are so different in appearance and mannerism that they may as well be dogs. They were typically described as having unintelligible language, crude dress, savage behavior and interestingly enough incredibly beautiful women (this will be touched on in later installments). There was no diplomacy with these people. There was no trade (they didn’t have anything to offer). They were feared and fought. Their mythos, in part, was a reminder to people of the limits of hospitality, that not everyone was deserving
of or capable of such. A depiction of the extreme exception to this is Saint Christopher the patron saint of travelers. His mythology is an interesting one in that he is sometimes depicted is a dog-headed man who converted to Christianity. Because of his conversion he was able to put away his wild ways and unintelligible yips. The savage, naked dog-man was given new clothes and a new heart. You can clearly see the Gospel at play in his story and it is a beautiful thing. Of important note however, is that just as Saint Christopher stayed dog-headed so too do people retain their createdness regardless of their eternal status. While the story of Saint Christopher can be a silver lining there is still the reality that he represents the extreme case which tends to prove the rule, namely that hospitality is not a likely possibility when dealing with dog-headed men. So, here is where things get uncomfortable. We live in the edgeworld. Nearly everyone here is a dog-headed man.

Perhaps more accurately stated, the goal of the rulers of our edgeworld is to have everyone become dog-headed men. Some are dog-headed because The West isn’t their home and they came here for access to the economic prosperity and entertainment and have no regard for the culture. Others are native to The West and are being made dog-headed through slow and painful deracination, being pushed aside in real time, politically and geographically, to make room for the importation of foreigners. In contrast to most of human history, a people would have seen such a
thing as an invasion and acted accordingly. Should the natural barriers set in place by God and the rules of hospitality not been enough to keep the destructive influence of foreigners out, they would have fought to repel them or died trying. Unfortunately for us we can overcome most natural barriers with our technology. Additionally, in no small part thanks to the Civil Rights zeitgeist and nonexistent immigration standards the world over, hospitality has been weaponized through inversion from the local to the continental level. This is very quickly creating a world in which hospitality is not an option to mediate the relationship between insider and outsider even if we wanted it to be. At least not without significant strife (I will cover this in later installments as well). 

I want to take things back to Scripture now to make one more point. I touched on it in my first piece but I will flesh it out here a bit more. We have abandoned the ways of God for the ways of men. The evidence I have for this is not just that we exist in the edgeworld but that we are seeing the rise of foreigners in The West at an accelerating rate. Scripture tells us that the punishment to nations in particular for disobedience to God is that foreigners will displace and rule over them. This is a sign
that we are under judgment and need to seriously repent, collectively. 

While we are waiting for God to answer and show mercy, we have some other things we can do. The overarching focus of these pieces is to help reclaim an understanding of human createdness for the sake of living in harmony with the governing principles God has woven into the fabric of creation. Doing what we can to embrace and foster that, in my thinking, will go a long way to shaping our prayers and areas of political focus. To that end, we can work to fight the entropic forces that seek to have us reduced to dog-headed men by strengthening our family ties and remembering who our fathers are (in the flesh and in the faith). We can fight the good fight in the civic realm and try to reverse some of the damage at the local level. We can also pray for the dog-headed in our midst, so that hospitality becomes an option again.

Make no mistake my friends, we are in a land at the edge of the world, the end of an age, an in-between shadowy place where chaos abounds, and monsters dwell. In this strange and uninhabitable place, the stakes are high, and the days are evil. Our civilization is on the brink of destruction, yet with the end of a thing something new can come forth, if God wills it. Lord willing, the next installment will cover the process by which one people becomes distinct from another.

Until we meet again.

Unbiased Mike

More from Unbiased Mike: