It’s understandable that dealings with potentially hostile strangers should encourage an all-or-nothing logic, a tension preserved even in English in the etymology of the words “host,” “hostile,” “hostage,” and indeed “hospitality,” all of which are derived from the same Latin root.22 What I want to emphasize here is that all such gestures are simply exaggerated displays of that very “baseline communism” that I have already argued is the ground of all human social life.
