Is Travel Bad?
That New Yorker article from last summer, and the problem with originality
A successful polemic gets in peoples’ heads. Last summer, I read one such polemic. This was the article by philosopher Agnes Callard, called The Case Against Travel. The article has, for a whole year now, wormed it way through my neural pathways. I felt that she might have had a terribly true point about the pointlessness of travel. Is tourism in fact a vain waste of everyone’s time? The article had clearly produced a similar effect among other people. Dozens were tweeting their rage about it. A whole article was penned in the New York Times just to counteract its arguments.
Later on, I’ve had more time to reflect on why the original article got under my skin, why it was so irritatingly compelling to me. The answer, I think, has to do with a personality flaw of mine. The personality flaw, in particular, is that I’m not just careful to question ‘common sense’, but rather, I become sceptical about things because they are common sense. Another way of putting this is that I often lean towards contrarian viewpoints. I am guided by the sour milk of human wrongness.
Travel is taken as a universal good. Almost anyone with the means to travel takes it upon themselves to travel as often as they can. People ‘need a holiday’, by which they don’t mean they need to celebrate the holy feast day of a given saint (the origin of the term), but rather, they want to move to a different place for a while.
Callard’s article, rhetorically, would have us refer to ‘travel’ as ‘locomotion’. You just move. You walk from one place to another. This is of course literally true: travel does indeed involve movement and movement is perhaps the defining aspect of travel from a physical point of view. Her argument is that travel is: a) passive; b) not ‘improving’ c) self-imposed ‘fakery’ (i.e. we only pretend to get something from it).
When ideas are held almost universally, they tend to be poorly articulated and poorly defended. Few of us could really explain why Newtonian gravity is ‘true’, because there are so few skeptics of Newtonianism moving about in the marketplace of ideas these days. This doesn’t, though, make Newtonianism false, an overreach. That travel is a good is held by so many, so we might find ourselves with scarily few arguments to defend ourselves from Callard’s critique. The idea that travel is ‘improving’ is one of the more complex facets of the common sense view of tourism, and so it is more easily destroyed by a critique. But does the novelty and originality of Callard’s critique make it right? No. Her argument needs to be judged on its merits.
Callard’s argument about ‘self-improvement’ and travel does have some real merit to it. It is true that many types of travel don’t improve us. The brute fact of having different co-ordinates for a while, or experiencing different temperatures and pressures of earthly atmosphere are not spiritual achievements. Simply sitting on a warm beach is not a philosophical endeavour. Why should it be? Here, Callard’s argument is really a case against the way people talk about travel, not a case against travel per se.
The other problem, of course, is that Callard is just wrong here. Some kinds of travel do change people. Callard grew up in New York City, the daughter to two Holocaust survivors. Growing up in a city, she experienced the great mixture of human experiences by default. This is not a given. Many of us live in places which are not global cities, where diversity does not come to us, we have to go to it. These experiences change us, and no amount of language-learning or map-studying will do. I did not have a single friend before university whose first language was not English, because I grew up in a rural place. Had I not gone to university, I would have to travel to change this. And in doing that, I would have manifestly changed myself for the better. Callard says this is a delusion. I worry she just hasn’t met the people that haven’t travelled.
Callard’s rhetoric and writing style are strong. They are persuasive in the moment, but the substance of her points fail to check out with lived experience. Thus she says “Travel is a boomerang. It drops you right where you started.” This seems powerful, but what she’s saying is that you come back home again when you travel. This is a tautology: it doesn’t tell us anything new, far from defeating what people know about themselves.
Her arguments fly in the face of common sense. This is a painful thing to admit for someone who loathes common sense. Yet sometimes, the ‘ignorant masses’ get it simply, boringly right, and the philosopher kings (Socrates, Callard et al) are delicately, sophisticatedly wrong.
There is a deeper point here. The internet has expanded our access to opinions. We want more and more. We are obsessed with intellectual frames like ‘luxury beliefs’, ‘gaslighting’, ‘biases’, all of which promise to upend beliefs and give us a special insight. Everyone is trying to win an arms-race of originality and timeliness. This does present us with some spectacularly interesting and original thoughts, like Callard’s article on tourism. But the pursuit of originality for its own sake can be excessive, and I think Callard’s article on tourism is excessive in exactly this way. Sometimes it’s OK to be boring but right. Just have some reasons to think you’re right.