Circles. We’ve used the image of concentric circles for a very long time. Aristotle spoke of a goal or purpose as a “telos” or bullseye, or innermost circle on a target. The Roman philosopher Hierocles used the image in an interestingly different way, parallel to the way I use it in my new book, The Everyday Patriot. Imagine your life as mapped by a series of concentric circles. In the bullseye is your inner self, your heart and mind. Order that in a healthy way and you have something good to contribute to the next closest circle out, your family. A healthy family in turn contributes to a broader circle of good friendships, and a healthy neighborhood, which then helps make up a positive, well functioning community, town, state, nation, and world. Each circle should contribute in a positive way to the next circle out. And every outer circle should always be in turn reaching back to nurture and support its innermost circles.
Tribalism of any kind is where people get stuck in a circle and wrongly think its health depends on them shunning, suspecting, disliking, or fighting all broader circles in the world, or the disparate circles within those broader horizons. In seeking to make one’s closest group stronger, tribalism actually corrupts it and makes it weaker, and that corruption then leaks into its own inner circles, ending up in disordered hearts and minds.
By contrast, one of the most ancient virtues is that of hospitality, which just means opening your heart and mind, and your other inner circles, to the stranger who comes from a different inner ring of an outer band. It’s good for the stranger, and it’s very good for you. Remember, you are in most other people’s far outer circles, so you should treat them the way you would want to be treated by them, as a stranger to them. And that means with the attitudes and actions of a warm, welcoming, helping, and caring hospitality. In my book, I try to show how national patriotism, properly understood in any country, isn’t about tribalism, or national narcissism, but is about growing our own garden well for the sake of others as well as ourselves, creating a strong healthy, well functioning broad circle to offer to the even larger circle of the world, and to all its diverse inner circles, more indirectly, as well. It’s about inclusion, care, and health for all. Our own good is inwardly linked to the greater good and in a great many ways. If we could understand that better in our time, and take it to heart, the world would be a vastly more harmonious place, and so would our communities, physical and virtual.
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