If you have not yet seen Christopher Nolan’s rendition of The Odyssey, you must do so. Matt Damon, Anne Hathaway and Tom Holland are the lead actors in this mythical fantasy epic that has a clear moral thread running through it.
The movie is shot with large and clunky 70mm Imax cameras. These cameras and all the surrounding equipment that go with it are nearly museum pieces now and had to be acquired one by one to complete the painstaking recreation of this saga.
The result is a movie for the ages with hyper detailed landscapes, massive physical sets and an audio track that makes a 2,000-year-old soundscape come eerily alive.
Even more than its technical perfection, what stands out is the clear moral thread that binds the whole narrative together. The story is anchored on Zeus’s Law, otherwise called xenia or the Golden Rule that requires you to “treat people the way you want to be treated, partly because a humble person may be a god in disguise, and partly because it’s what lets society function.”
The thread that Nolan pulls through the movie is the lead character Odysseus’s guilt for having given a trick gift of a Trojan horse to the Kingdom of Troy that unleashed the horror of a long war.
Judeo-Christian tradition has embedded the Golden Rule in many verses, such as in Matthew 7:12, “Do to others what you would have them do to you” and Leviticus 19:18 in the Torah that says “Love your neighbour as yourself” and then adds in 19:34, “Love the stranger residing with you as yourself.”
Indian mythology and scriptures are also full of such stories. Originating in the Taittriya Upanishad, the centrality of the Golden Rule is expressed through the aphorism ‘atithi devo bhava,’ or ‘a guest is God.’
In the Anushasana Parva, the 13th book of the Mahabharata epic, there is a famous maxim that says, “Do not do to others what is painful or contrary to your own self.”
The Panchatantra fables include several stories that illustrate the benefits of the Golden Rule as well as the costs of violating it (a bit like the story of Cyclops in The Odyssey).
In the Jataka Tales, a hawk pursues a dove that takes refuge with a king whose name is Shibi. The hawk argues, fairly, that the dove is its rightful food and it will starve otherwise. Shibi resolves the competing claims by offering his own flesh, cut to equal the dove’s weight.
In a variation called the doctrine of refuge illustrated in the Ramayana, Lord Rama grants protection to Ravana’s own brother when he defects and seeks shelter, over his advisors’ objections. The principle being that anyone who comes seeking refuge receives it, even an enemy’s kin. This is closest to the idea of xenia in The Odyssey.
To parse this more precisely, the Golden Rule is often broken into two parts: the xenia ethic that exhorts one to welcome and protect the stranger in a reciprocal fashion and the theoxeny principle that the stranger may be God in disguise, so mistreating them invites divine punishment. Many ancient cultures including Greek, Zoroastrian, Indian and Roman inculcate this virtue through scripture and fable.
The message from The Odyssey and those embedded in all these ancient maxims have special relevance today.
We live in an age of social media and populism. The echo chamber that is enabled by social media and the capitalization of this phenomenon by politicians results in a pervasive ‘othering’ and deep polarization in society.
A shift in societal attitudes towards ‘strangers’ or guests has resulted in widespread anti-immigrant sentiment, protectionism in economic spheres and an environment where ‘hating’ your neighbour appears to be getting normalized.
Nolan’s twist is that the hero breaks Zeus’s Law. Odysseus weaponizes a gift, the Trojan Horse, and must reckon with the terrible consequences that it has wrought. Othering is not what other people do; it is what each one of us does. Xenia enforces responsibility on both the guest and host.
The fact that ancient Greeks, Norse, Romans, Jews, Egyptians, Persians and Indians independently arrived at a similar law implies that this is not a myth or fable, but a necessary societal scaffolding.
Social media and its narrow thought bubbles hand us false certainty about who the stranger is by tokenizing them. This is an illusory certitude that is the exact opposite of not knowing who the stranger is.
Where we go from here is not altogether clear. If one were to believe the chroniclers of history, the pied pipers of this age will either lead us to renewal or ruin. One likely path appears to be renewal only after ruin.
The prevailing ancient guru of our time quoted both by Prime Minister Mark Carney of Canada and by President Xi Xinping of China is Thucydides, with his famous aphorism in the Melian Dialogue that translates to: ‘The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.’ Atithi devo bhava or xenia is a claim that the strong owe something to the weak precisely because power is unequal.
The host is safe and the traveller is vulnerable, and the covenant embedded in the guest-bond is to restrain the strong from exploiting the stranger. In republics around the world, this vulnerability is exactly what is protected by a constitution.
P.S: According to the Hitopadesha, “If a guest returns from a house disappointed, they transfer their own bad karma to the host and take away all the host’s accumulated merits.”
The author is chairman, InKlude Labs. Read Narayan’s Mint columns at www.livemint.com/avisiblehand