New Yorker has a rather odd piece called “The Case Against Travel” meant to reduce the status of travel and travelers. It can be summed up as travel doesn’t make you interesting and you don’t get much out of travel that’s actually deep. It points out, for instance, that Socrates chose not to travel outside of fighting in the Peloponnesian War. Travel was much more costly and cumbersome then!
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.
It is possible to make claims that oversell travel and it is possible to strawman the benefits of travel. Travel for the sake of travel may not be illuminating! but I think it’s fair to say that:
- Travel can be fun. I’ve never been much for racking up countries as a goal, or ticking off local attractions on a list, though I’ve seen many of them. I don’t practice slow travel, but I don’t rush to see everything either. If I enjoy a place, I know I’ll go back so I don’t have to squeeze everything in, and if I tried to I would enjoy it less.
Still, seeing things that are different, meeting people who have different experiences and perspectives, and trying different foods creates tremendous variety. And you can bring some of that back with you. While my wife is a former professional chef, I cook the foods I’ve learned to make on our travels, having done courses throughout Southeast Asia.
- Travel can change us. The saddest day I’ve ever experienced, outside of the death of my father, was visiting the slums of Mumbai.. including makeshift communities right off the grounds of my hotel. I sat and pondered how those were different, seeing children without limbs – who had them cut off because it made them more valuable as beggars – while the people serving me on the property had real incomes but chose to live in self-built structures (that nonetheless had power and satellite TV) versus making long commutes to somewhere they could afford to live, and how their plight was the result of building restrictions as much as wages. Without having been there, I wouldn’t understand the differences between these two modes of living that are often lumped together. This changes my outlook and my politics.
And then to visit the Taj Palace on the same trip, but also on the anniversary of the attack there. And to see how McDonald’s there is different, without beef and with sauces – and as a place you can use the bathroom. At the Gateway of India, a family from rural India visiting for the first time asked to take pictures of us – as the first white people they’d ever met.
- Travel in conjunction with other things can make us more thoughtful and interesting. Because we’ve seen things and have more context we can understand what we read, be it books or current events articles, in a deeper way – and also be more skeptical of reporting, asking questions when something doesn’t match what we saw or experienced visiting a destination. That’s much better than accepting something uncritically, or rejecting it based on preconceived notions without visiting someplace.
- Travel shows us what’s possible, teaches us to appreciate what we do have, and most importantly gives us context. I understand a head wobble in India, and what it means to say that something is very Thai. I understand that it often doesn’t even make sense to refer to a whole of ‘Thailand’ without understanding the difference between Bangkok and more rural areas (the Prime Minister is often derisively described as the Mayor of Bangkok, for how disconnected much of the country is from what goes on there). How do people talk in a place, and what do they talk about? How large does Iran Air flight 655 loom in relations with the U.S. today?
You don’t have to like every place. There are things that are special in Paris and Madrid, but you can also realize that the average person lives in less space, and has fewer things, that Italians are poor by U.S. standards. So they may be great to visit, or to pick and choose elements of local life, while not wanting to trade yours.
- Travel can make us care about the places that we visit. It may be self-delusion to think that I know a place because I’ve spent a month or more there, but without having spent as much time there as I have I wouldn’t have genuinely cried with the crushing of Hong Kongers who cared about democracy and freedom in their homeland as mainland Chinese rule came in to crush them. Is caring more about the plight of others in the world, even if the result of overstating a personal connection, a good or a bad thing?
More than thousand HKers sing Les Miserables' 'Do you hear the people sing?' at HK international airport with their calls for free election and democracy. Here is the Ground Zero in the war against authoritarian rule. That's the reason for us never surrender. pic.twitter.com/1MkTp4BkVg
— Joshua Wong 黃之鋒 😷 (@joshuawongcf) August 10, 2019
It’s true that travel alone doesn’t make you interesting, but what you get out of travel can. And it’s also possible to do the uninteresting things, while still getting something out of travel more broadly!
a decade ago, when I was in Abu Dhabi, I went on a guided tour of a falcon hospital. I took a photo with a falcon on my arm. I have no interest in falconry or falcons, and a generalized dislike of encounters with nonhuman animals. But the falcon hospital was one of the answers to the question, “What does one do in Abu Dhabi?” So I went. I suspect that everything about the falcon hospital, from its layout to its mission statement, is and will continue to be shaped by the visits of people like me—we unchanged changers, we tourists.
Falconry was about an hour of my visit to Al Maha in the desert outside Dubai. It was cool to see the falcons, but that was it. And my couple of nights at Al Maha didn’t change me but darnit it was an enjoyable couple of days – riding a camel out to a spot in the desert to watch the sunset, eating lunch by my pool as gazelles wandered by.
It’s possible to have unique and enjoyable experiences and call those what they are, and also spend time talking to people and seeing things, and recognize that these are all different things under the broad ‘travel’ umbrella. Ultimately travel is what you make of it, and you can make of it what you wish.
That piece is in The New Yorker, not The Atlantic. It’s a classic example of wiseass elite contrarianism, in the vein of, “Scrambled eggs: You’re doing it wrong,” or “Like Thai food? You’re ordering wrong.” (Slate builds its whole brand on this kind of stuff. Take something conventional wisdom says is good, take a practice or method people are used to, and explain why it actually sucks or is unenlightened.) It’s formulaic, pompous, and ultimately stupid, and so is this piece.
Activists who vilify travel typically cite the associated carbon footprint. The funny part is, they’re making internet posts / rants about how awful air travel is, and the carbon footprint from data servers supporting the internet now rivals or surpasses that of commercial aviation. So if these wannabe social engineers want to help the planet they themselves could log off and shut up. Commercial aviation is getting steadily cleaner at a rate electric power generation can only dream of.
Sounds about right. Used to be that only the rich could travel. Now that many more people can travel, the elite thing will naturally be to go in the other direction. So the snooty New Yorker folks look down their noses at people traveling to turn it into a low-brow pastime of the masses. Gotta build the base of their ivory tower, haha.
It’s the New Yorker. As Family Guy so wisely put it, “no one at the new yorker has an anus.”
Well it is like anything else. There are people who enjoy it, folks who hate it, and those who don’t care (as well as a few who are against anything that they are not doing but someone else is enjoying). And you have people literally all over the map. Many people don’t travel because they either don’t know how, can’t afford it, or don’t want to get out of their comfort zones. I know a lovely couple who are terrified to leave the U.S. (they also are very politically conservative, which may or may not be a correlation). When I suggested a trip to London their reaction was, “We’ll be blown up!” And one fellow I met went to the Dominican Republic 25 times…but has never left his resort.
On the other hand you have people like me who’ll go anywhere. My country count–yes, I do that–is well past 100 (plus 7 continents) and the preferred way to see more is to get there by land, with sea and air second and third choices. And there are a lot of people with the same mindset. Most folks are somewhere between these extremes.
The one thing I’ll say is to know something about where you will be; I’ve heard of travelers who didn’t know what country they were in or that their visit to Hawaii involved an island. Occasionally I’ll lecture on cruise ships, giving talks on where we are going. They aren’t deep, but at least they are orientations for the casual travelers and that’s a start.
But you’re right Gary, once you do start traveling with an open mind it’s hard not to compare where you are with where you live. As a much younger man I joined thousands of others in taking the Hippie Trail, going overland from France to Nepal. The experience deeply enriched my life but it also made me darn skeptical about what governments and the news media said about other places. When the Afghanistan war started I knew how it would end. After visiting there for a couple of weeks it was obvious that any invasion would be unwinnable. But that’s not the sort of thing those who “lead” want to hear. And I suspect that until they meet them the average citizen may not realize that those who live elsewhere are human beings just like themselves. And to my mind that’s the best part of travel, once you see the world as a whole and people as people your mind opens up and you start asking more questions.
What a beautiful piece you wrote here Gary! thanks.
The Hong Kong bit was specially moving as I feel exactly like you describe.. or maybe I feel it even more as a Venezuelan who lost his homecountry by a very similar process?.
‘Is caring more about the plight of others in the world, even if the result of overstating a personal connection, a good or a bad thing?’?_ it’s surely a good thing, it makes us better humans.
And now for a lighter conversation: ‘While my wife is a former professional chef’ – in Spanish we say ‘and ppl still say that God doesn’t have his favorites’ 🙂
Mark Twain says it more succinctly: “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.”
@RHP. That is one of my favorite quotes of all time!
Basically 2 groups. The influencers who travel just to get likes and notice and those who travel to experience.
I’m always bemused by those who smugly say, oh we’ve been to XYZ country to find out they never left the port duty free shops or the resort.
I prefer to get out and meet the people of the country, learn about them and how their lives are different from my own. I want to see and experience beyond the resort. I’ve Climbed volcanoes, had tea with Bedouins and drank kava in Fiji, Climbed pyramids in Guatemala.
THAT is travel to me. Daughter and I have laughed silly at some of our experiences and made friends in other countries we still keep in touch with.
To travel right is to grow.
@Gary, I really enjoyed this post. Thanks!
As someone who has been to almost 100 countries, I have never been to one that I did not like. I was shocked a few years ago to be sitting next to my travel buddy while dining in Bhutan, and hearing her tell someone that she had hated India! I was with her in India several years before that, and it was the first time that I heard that she had hated it! It was mind-boggling to me.
I’m a longtime New Yorker subscriber. Don’t read everything in it but do love being provoked. This one was definitely a provocation. It fit the writer’s mentality and worldview but not mine. No point in that writer traveling – ever. Find another strawman to beat to death. Why do I travel – even in my 80s? Because it breaks me out of my bubble and keeps me humble.
“The case against travel” is worshipped and adored by half my family and friends who stayed in their basement and solely communicated on Zoom and never left their basements unless double-masked and gloved for several years. It’s like mass brainwashing. The case against travel is basically the case for being buried alive.
To quote John Burroughs, “To learn something new, take the path that you took yesterday.”
The problem with travel is that you take yourself with you everywhere. Not every one is trying to escape themselves, but many are.
And most lack the mental fortitude to know how to “find” themselves without having to generate 80 tons of CO2 to do it. Open a book. Find interesting friends. Travel is the brainlessly lazy crutch for those who cannot fathom how they can change themselves otherwise.