Cultivating Intellectual Hospitality

By: Cherie Harder

Cherie Harder serves as President of the Trinity Forum. Prior to joining the Trinity Forum in 2008, Ms. Harder served in the White House as Special Assistant to the President and Director of Policy and Projects for First Lady Laura Bush. From 2001 to 2005, she was Senior Counselor to the Chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), where she helped the Chairman design and launch the We the People initiative to enhance the teaching, study, and understanding of American history. This essay has been adapted by the author, with significant revisions,  from “Reviving Intellectual Hospitality,” Comment Magazine, February 11, 2021.

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Cultivating Intellectual Hospitality

Rarely a day goes by without a report of our inability to discuss our differences with clarity and charity: scholars are silenced, lectures interrupted, celebrities cancelled, lives and reputations destroyed by twitter trolling. Both within the university and broader civic culture, we are increasingly angry, addled, and alienated—so focused on what we believe to be the darkness or dimness in others, we can no longer see clearly ourselves. The irony is that while partisans are busy asserting that their opponents are evil and stupid, the very act of doing so—widely replicated as it is, and provoking a corresponding vitriol from the other side—renders our public discourse and character as a whole ever more callous, clueless, and cruel. We are becoming what we denounce.

Our growing collective inability to abide or understand disagreeable ideas (and those that hold them) has implications both for the state of the country and the state of education. It is hard to imagine how an increasingly diverse republic can flourish when growing numbers of its citizens won’t listen to and can’t stand each other. And if much of education (classicly understood) aims at enabling students to discover, discern, and value that which is true, good, and beautiful from that which is not, the unwillingness to hear viewpoints with which we disagree undermines the purpose of the enterprise, as it disincentivizes curiosity, exploration, and debate in favor of conformity.

How to disrupt this toxic cycle? In a time riven by difference and marked by malice and misinformation, we need new and creative means of rebuilding a shared sense of the common good. Vital to such renewal will be the reinvigoration of what might seem a modest practice: the extension of intellectual hospitality.

Defining Intellectual Hospitality

What is intellectual hospitality? If hospitality, classically understood, involves welcome for the stranger and the offer of attention and care, intellectual hospitality extends an invitation to new ideas and the people who hold them. Scholar Diana Glyer observes that

the ancient tradition of hospitality specifically meant to take our eyes off ourselves and linger face to face with someone who is not like me. . . In the classroom, the concept of intellectual hospitality occurs when students engage with unfamiliar ideas, read books from unknown authors, and entertain new ways of looking at the world. . . Intellectual hospitality encourages us to engage with new ideas, not merely contradict, dismiss, dispute, reject or ridicule them.

Such hospitality to new perspectives necessarily includes a sense of curiosity and openness to learning. Everything we now know was once new to us; we learned to absorb new information and to understand new concepts by attending to the unfamiliar. But more than that, intellectual hospitality is important to our very ability to think well. Thinking itself is a relational act; as Alan Jacobs writes in his excellent book How to Think, “To think independently of other human beings is impossible, and if it were possible it would be undesirable. Thinking is necessarily, thoroughly, and wonderfully social. Everything you think is a response to what someone else has thought and said.” None of us is truly an independent thinker. The way that we think, as well as what we think about, consists largely of what we have previously been exposed to through our relationships and interactions.

As such, intellectual hospitality can occur when we read old books or encounter a great work of art or antiquity (what the poet W.H. Auden called “breaking bread with the dead”) and welcome an acquaintance with the unfamiliar thoughts and ideas we find there. An even more potent form of intellectual hospitality is found in wrestling with ideas with other people.

One delightful example of such hospitality can be found in C.S. Lewis’s creation of the “Inklings” group. Lewis loved to discuss poetry and stories and met regularly with J.R.R. Tolkien to do so. Soon they began inviting others of more disparate perspectives to join the discussion. They read their stories and poems aloud and critiqued each other’s work.

They also had frequent disagreements. Lewis and Owen Barfield in particular rarely agreed, even as they deeply respected each other. Lewis even referred to Barfield as his “oppositional” friend, and later said of him:

[Barfield] is the man who disagrees with you about everything. He is not so much the alter ego as the anti-self. Of course he shares your interests; otherwise he would not become your friend at all. But he has approached them all at a different angle. He has read all the right books but has got the wrong thing out of every one. . . And then you go at it, hammer and tongs, far into the night. . . Actually (though it never seems so at the time) you modify one another’s thought; out of this perpetual dog-fight a community of mind and a deep affection emerge.

A few decades earlier, Dorothy Sayers, along with five of her girlfriends at Oxford—where they studied, but were not allowed to receive degrees until years later—started a writing group they named the “Mutual Admiration Society” (because, as Sayers wryly remarked, that’s what they would have been called anyway). Like the Inklings, the group brought their newly created essays, poems, and stories to be read and critiqued together. They argued and debated, supported each other, kept each other’s confidences, and collaborated on various work and writing projects. Their careers, tastes, and politics significantly diverged, but they developed and challenged each other’s thoughts, particularly around questions of education. In her biography of the group historian Mo Moulton writes, “Through their diverse careers, they worked to make the best ideas, the most creative work, and a joyful encounter with learning accessible to a wide range of people. That, they believed, was one of the greatest achievements to which a democratic society could aspire.”

For both the Inklings and Mutual Admiration Society, disagreement was a regular part of the discussions—and served to sharpen their arguments, minds, and work. While both of these illustrations are from another time and place, any moveable intellectual feast may cause friction and sparks even as it nourishes and invigorates.

But if intellectual hospitality can act as a powerful pollinator and fertilizer of the curious and thoughtful mind, it remains vulnerable to certain poisons. Personal disrespect or contempt destroys the trust and openness that hospitality slowly builds, and withers the curiosity that hospitality quickens. Intellectually hospitable disagreements aim to challenge one’s thinking or improve one’s work; expressions of contempt are designed to corrode one’s person and sense of value.

Contempt and disrespect are not only kryptonite to intellectual hospitality; they also undermine the ability to think well. Some studies suggest that insulting content inhibits reading comprehension (the reader naturally reacts to the insult, rather than fully digests the larger point) and intensifies opposition, as the insulted person tends to dig in to their original position, rather than open up to new possibilities. The attempts to shun people for dissent, whether seen in the cancel culture of college campuses, heretic hunting of political partisans, or social-media shaming, punish those who think outside a box—and scare off those who might try.

Cultivating Intellectual Hospitality

So how can intellectual hospitality be cultivated? While there are many possibilities (it would make for a great discussion), I’ll offer a few suggestions

• Take it offline. Intellectual hospitality, like most other forms of hospitality, is most effectively and enjoyably extended in person. Neil Postman noted that

Every technology has a prejudice. Like language itself, it predisposes us to favor and value certain perspectives and accomplishments. . . The writing person favors logical organization and systematic analysis, not proverbs. . . The television person values immediacy, not history. And computer people, what shall we say of them? Perhaps we can say that the computer person values information, not knowledge, certainly not wisdom. . . Every technology has a philosophy which is given expression in how the technology makes people use their minds, in what it makes us do with our bodies, in how it codifies the world, in which of our senses it amplifies, in which of our emotional and intellectual tendencies it disregards.

Social media in particular rewards speed, snark, and superficiality—none of which are conducive to the cultivation of connection, care, and curiosity vital to intellectual hospitality.

• Read widely. Reading takes us out of ourselves, engages us in a conversation across time and place with new (and often very foreign) perspectives, and teaches us to understand others’ motives, decisions, and character. It also requires the reader to grapple with the fact that brilliant thinkers and writers of every age had flaws and blind spots, and that wisdom, scholarship, and expertise all require seeking to understand the mindset and discern the contribution, while identifying the dross and questioning the assumptions. As such, it cultivates an epistemological modesty in the reader as well: what blind spots might he be bringing to the reading of the text?

• Cultivate curiosity. People often have good reasons for their views, even their mistaken or potentially harmful ones. Seeking understanding does not necessarily increase the likelihood of assent, but it is likely to grow one’s understanding and empathy. Moreover, extending intellectual hospitality does not require affirmation of (much less capitulation to) the ideas or values of your conversation partners, nor does it obligate you to check your own values or worldview. Rather, it sets the table for better understanding, probing, and articulating one’s ideas.

• When appropriate, set parameters. Hospitality includes both welcome and boundaries. When hosting discussions or gatherings, insist on civility and model charity. It may also be helpful to set out expectations at the start of a gathering—whether about putting away phones, abstaining from posting about the group, or keeping confidence with anything shared in that spirit. Providing such ground rules is often helpful to cultivating a spirit of inquiry, generosity, and warmth.

• Pursue friendships and conversations with others who think differently. Left to our own devices (technological and otherwise), we will unconsciously self-sort (or be sorted by algorithms), such that most whom we encounter in physical or virtual spaces will tend to think like us. Meeting others from different backgrounds and different approaches takes proactive effort—and can deepen our empathy as well as challenge our thinking.

• Seek other ideas. Relatedly, seek out those whose judgment and thoughtfulness you respect but whose views you disagree with, and ask their perspective. Search for the fairest and most thoughtful representation of an opposing view. Engage with the strongest case the opposition has to offer, not a straw man.

• Avoid unnecessary provocation. This is almost always an attempt to embarrass, dominate, or upset. Hyperbole, invective, sarcasm, or expressions of contempt rarely contribute to better understanding a point of view—and usually aim at diminishing or demeaning the one holding it.

• Allow for changes of mind and heart without seeking to score points. Intellectual hospitality provides space for growth and reconsideration without requiring that someone lose the argument or lose face.

• Join—or host—a book club. Perhaps one of the most accessible, yet potent, forms of cultivating intellectual hospitality is through the simple act of hosting and participating in reading groups and book clubs. By its very nature, a reading group serves as a powerful countercultural form of intellectual hospitality in that it flouts so many of the atomizing, stigmatizing currents of public life. Against a cultural current that encourages distraction, diverts our attention to the trivial and monetizable, and rewards rapid and snarky responses, a book club does the opposite. It asks its participants to engage in focused reading and reflection; it encourages thoughtful and respectful engagement; and it takes place within a context of hospitality and relationship. And it is a form of intellectual hospitality that virtually anyone, anywhere can create or participate in.

At a time when malice and misinformation drive much of our public discourse and distort our common life, many have expressed frustration at feeling powerless or confused about what to do. Reweaving a fragmented common life and rebuilding a healthy and hardy civic discourse are enormous undertakings—and while they may demand more than hospitality, they cannot be realized without it. Reinvigorating our common life requires reconnecting with each other, person by person. In the midst of our division is an opportunity to open our minds, hearts, and homes to our neighbors—to learn to think more deeply, read more broadly, understand more fully, and live more abundantly.

Sources Cited/Bibliography

Glyer, Diana Pavlac, “Intellectual Hospitality,” Azusa Pacific Life, July 21, 2015

Jacobs, Alan, How To Think, Penguin Random House (New York, 2017)

Lewis, C.S., Surprised by Joy, Geoffrey Bles (London, 1955)

Moulton, Mo, The Mutual Admiration Society: How Dorothy L. Sayers and Her Oxford Circle Remade the World for Women, Basic Books (New York, 2019)

Postman, Neil, “Five Things We Need to Know About Technological Change,” Remarks delivered March 28, 1998: https://web.cs.ucdavis.edu/~rogaway/classes/188/materials/postman.pdf