That did it for Costa, too. As Xan’s guide, he’d done his best to live up to xenía, the Cretan code of hospitality. Xenía speaks to the heart of Greek identity, because every Greek at some point has been a stranger; in ancient Greek, “stranger” and “guest” are even the same word. In a nation of seafarers and shepherds and traveling scholars, of earthquakes and warfare and overseas trade, relying on an occasional unexpected handout is necessary and inevitable. “All is performed with simplicity and lack of fuss and prompted by kindness so unfeigned,” one British traveler still marveled after many trips to Greece, “that it invests even the most ramshackle hut with magnificence and style.”
Xenía isn’t even a virtue, really; it’s a law enforced by thunder-god Zeus himself. Much the way Christianity adopted a pay-it-forward policy as its “Greatest Commandment” and reveres a homeless savior who got by on handouts, the Olympian myths are all about the immortals quality-controlling xenía by wandering about in human form and seeing how they’re treated when they show up in disguise. The Iliad and the Odyssey, the two Greek pillars of Western literature, are xenía written in blood—a pair of epic thrillers that explore what happens when you (a) abuse hospitality by monkeying with your host’s wife and (b) depend on it during a twenty-year road trip to hell and back. A Cretan is measured by her xenía, and the three rules are very clear:
You offer food.
You offer a bath.
You ask no questions.
Not, at least, until the traveler has been refreshed. That way, he’ll at least get a bite and a breather in case you discover you can’t stand him. You can think of xenía as compassion, but only if you get rid of the notion that compassion is based on sweetness, or charity, or even trading favors. Compassion is a battle instinct, a jungle-law alert system that lets you know when someone, or something, is closing in on you for the kill. We like to pretty it up with a halo and call it angelic, but compassion really springs from our raw animal need to figure out what is going on around us and the smartest way to respond. It’s your social spiderweb, a protective netting of highly sensitive strands that connects you to your kinfolk and alerts you the instant one of them runs into the kind of trouble that can find its way back to you. Compassion requires you to be a wonderful listener, much like psychiatrists and FBI profilers and for essentially the same reason. The goal is to get inside someone else’s head, and in that regard Rule #3 of xenía was way ahead of both crime detection and psychoanalysis; peppering someone with questions, as any police interrogator will tell you, isn’t nearly as effective as letting him relax until the words flow on their own. And when they do—when you get access to someone else’s feelings—you can put aside your own and see the world through a new set of eyes. That kind of insight is crucial to what combat soldiers call “situational awareness”—a constant mental scan of your environment so you’re always up to the second on the best and worst way out of any situation. That’s really the unvarnished essence of xenía, and it’s the reason Darwin and Andrew Carnegie could never quite grasp what heroes are all about. They thought it was crazy to risk yourself for a stranger. But to someone truly tuned into situational awareness—into xenía—treating a stranger like a brother can be the only sane response.
Many years after the war, Americans rushed to their televisions to watch xenía in action when Air Florida Flight 90 crashed into the icy Potomac River on January 13, 1982. To horrified viewers, it seemed impossible that anyone could be alive inside the mangled steel carcass slowly vanishing into the water. But one by one, six survivors gasped to the surface and grabbed at the tail of the plane. Freezing rain and winds were so brutal, it took twenty minutes before a rescue chopper finally arrived. It dropped a life ring into the hands of one survivor and plucked him from the water. Then something peculiar happened.
The next person to receive the ring handed it over to someone else. The chopper lofted her to safety, then wheeled back.
The man gave away the ring again.
And again.
He even gave it away when he knew it was his last chance to live. He must have known, because when the chopper thundered back seconds later, he was gone. The man in the water had vanished beneath the ice. He was later identified as Arland “Chub” Williams Jr., a forty-six-year-old federal bank examiner who hated water and spent his life, until the day he lost it, playing it safe.
“Arland never called a lot of attention to himself,” says Peggy Fuesting, his high school sweetheart from Illinois, whom he’d begun dating again shortly before the crash. “He’d had that fear of water his whole life.” Arland was trusted by bankers and borrowers alike, his boss would say, because he was careful and discreet and never took risks. But there was another side of Arland, one that was formed nearly a quarter-century earlier when he was a cadet at one of the country’s most demanding military colleges: the Citadel. “They make a man out of you,” I was told by Benjamin Franklin Webster, Arland’s Citadel roommate. “The job of the upperclassmen is to remake you from a boy to a man in one year. They push you, physically and mentally. We lost thirty cadets before we even started classes.”
When Webster heard about the crash, he was perhaps the only person who wasn’t surprised that a risk-averse accountant would suddenly emerge as the Hero of Flight 90. The Citadel has one iron law: “Always take care of your people first,” Webster says. “That’s an unbreakable code. You go last. Your people go first.” Some of the survivors said Arland seemed to be trapped by the wreckage and unable to free himself. But instead of clinging desperately to the life ring or clawing out for help, he assessed the situation and realized there was only one best decision. To Arland, the survivors around him in the water weren’t competitors in a battle for survival. They were family.
Of course they were, agrees Lee Dugatkin, Ph.D., a professor of biology at the University of Louisville who specializes in altruistic behavior. After all, xenía is the military’s specialty. For most of our evolutionary history, our ancestors moved in such tight family circles that the only people they’d ever see were members of their own hunter-gatherer clan. “If you saved someone’s life under those conditions, you were very likely saving a blood relative,” he says. But now our relatives are scattered all over the place, so the military has made a science out of reviving that lost feeling of fellowship.
“The armed forces always use the language of kinship to condition soldiers to think of one another as family,” Dugatkin points out. “They’re not ‘strangers’; they’re a ‘band of brothers.’” Consider what happens when a bus full of strangers of all races and backgrounds pulls into Fort Benning for boot camp. As soon as you arrive, your head is shaved, your clothes are replaced with a uniform, you’re taught to walk and talk and eat and make your bed exactly the same way as everyone around you. Because the more alike you look, the Army understands, the more likely you’ll look out for one another.
Lawrence of Arabia underwent the same transformation during his first trip abroad as a young archeologist. He arrived in Egypt as a fussy Brit and made one crucial decision that would change his life: instead of spending his nights in the English compound, he began camping at the dig site with the Arab workers. He shared their meals of sour goat’s milk and warm hearth bread. He traded his khakis for a tunic and a Kurdish belt and joined the singing and storytelling around the fire. Mostly he listened, absorbing “the intricacies of their tribal and family jealousies, rivalries and taboos, their loves and hates, and their strengths and weaknesses,” as one biographer would put it. When the Arab Revolt began, Lawrence’s xenía knew exactly where he had to be. He saw himself in them, and them in him.