What is the most uninformative statement that people are inclined to make? My nominee would be “I love to travel.” This tells you very little about a person, because nearly everyone likes to travel; and yet people say it, because, for some reason, they pride themselves both on having travelled and on the fact that they look forward to doing so.
The opposition team is small but articulate. G. K. Chesterton wrote that “travel narrows the mind.” Ralph Waldo Emerson called travel “a fool’s paradise.” Socrates and Immanuel Kant—arguably the two greatest philosophers of all time—voted with their feet, rarely leaving their respective home towns of Athens and Königsberg. But the greatest hater of travel, ever, was the Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa, whose wonderful “Book of Disquiet” crackles with outrage:
I abhor new ways of life and unfamiliar places. . . . The idea of travelling nauseates me. . . . Ah, let those who don’t exist travel! . . . Travel is for those who cannot feel. . . . Only extreme poverty of the imagination justifies having to move around to feel.
If you are inclined to dismiss this as contrarian posturing, try shifting the object of your thought from your own travel to that of others. At home or abroad, one tends to avoid “touristy” activities. “Tourism” is what we call travelling when other people are doing it. And, although people like to talk about their travels, few of us like to listen to them. Such talk resembles academic writing and reports of dreams: forms of communication driven more by the needs of the producer than the consumer.
One common argument for travel is that it lifts us into an enlightened state, educating us about the world and connecting us to its denizens. Even Samuel Johnson, a skeptic—“What I gained by being in France was, learning to be better satisfied with my own country,” he once said—conceded that travel had a certain cachet. Advising his beloved Boswell, Johnson recommended a trip to China, for the sake of Boswell’s children: “There would be a lustre reflected upon them. . . . They would be at all times regarded as the children of a man who had gone to view the wall of China.”
Travel gets branded as an achievement: see interesting places, have interesting experiences, become interesting people. Is that what it really is?
Personally, I rather prefer Maya Angelou’s take-
“Perhaps travel cannot prevent bigotry, but by demonstrating that all peoples cry, laugh, eat, worry, and die, it can introduce the idea that if we try and understand each other, we may even become friends.”
Travel is not some magical, all-powerful cure for the ills of the traveller or the world. And when done without care, without awareness, it can do a great deal of harm. But it is also a powerful tool to foster connection, which in turn breeds understanding. And that is dearly needed in our world.
There’s travel and there’s travel
When people go to some place to see the sights and lie on the beach, that’s not the same experience as when someone goes to an unfamiliar place to meet new people and really engage with their new location. The former is like junk food compared to an actual meal.
It’s not the most popular, but traveling alone (and on a relatvely tight budget) really gives it another meaning as it forces you to get out of your comfort zone a lot more.
Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.
—Mark Twain, Innocents Abroad (1869)
As a counterpoint to this. Americans travel more now than they ever have in our history and I’d say culturally we are not significantly more open-minded or charitable as a whole.
I mean, I very much get how it feels that way given the current political climate, but the data does indicate Americans have gotten more open-minded over time, especially about racial/cultural differences.
And this study specifically notes a huge shift in rhetoric about immigration between 1945-1965 - correlating with the big boom in travel in the 40s, post WWII, and jet travel coming into play in the 50s-60s - two of the biggest increases in American travel. And the overall trend positive has continued, despite the increased polarization in the last couple decades.
I’m not at all saying that increased travel caused all of this, correlation is not causation and society is way more complex than that. But the trends are there, at least.
Interesting article, at first I felt like it was more against people who just mindlessly do “what they’re supposed to do”, but it is a sort of “common wisdom” that travelling is a broadening experience by itself, despite very rarely significantly changing the traveler. I guess it could serve as a good example as to why we should always ask ourselves: “How will this actually affect my life?” before doing things. Thanks for sharing!
