“Imagining the way
Alexander Theroux (2015) “The Way to Cedar Rapids” in Alexander Theroux: Collected Poems
that Cedar Rapids is
is not to have to go.
Not to have to go
to Cedar Rapids and being there
is much the same.”
The German philosopher Immanuel Kant lived and died in Konigsberg, and his farthest travels took him less than 100km from his hometown. Of course this didn’t prevent him from cogitating on anthropology, cosmopolitanism, international cooperation, and an end to all war. It did however make him a proverb among contemporary intellectuals, many among whom see it fit to trace the aetiology of his philosophical foibles to his parochial preference for living and dying contentedly within his domicile of origin. Does travel make us better, and lack of travel worse?
Let’s assume, arguendo, Kant’s philosophical foibles were a product of his being less well-travelled than he ought to have been. Knowing he avoided travel the better to adhere to his health regimen—he was a sickly man—we are forced to conclude that Kant unwittingly reaped philosophical errors due to his own omissive misdeed. But it seems as odd to blame Kant for this act of omission as it does to blame him for being sickly. Also, it is far from obvious that travelling more would’ve moved Kant’s thought onto tracks leading to what are now considered the correct conclusions. Perhaps, like Chesterton he would’ve found that travel narrowed his mind; establishing by observation what he had deduced a priori: his patch of land was superior to any foreign ones he could’ve surveyed.
Failing to malign Kant for being sickly and under-travelled, champions of travel resort to praising the peripatetic enterprise on first principles. They say it broadens the mind, it educates us about how people elsewhere live, and what people everywhere might have in common despite their patent differences. All this assumes, of course, that man in his untraveled state is of an insular outlook, knowing only his own people’s folkways, and given to dismissing the humanity of those with different dress and customs. And, it assumes of course, all of this is bad; it is the original sin of the under-travelled, and expiation comes only from sojourning to the remote, immersing oneself in the foreign, and the embracing what is initially shocking or revolting simply because it shocks and revolts.
Travel Evangelism
Spelled out more concretely, with the inconvenient specificity of actual locales, cultures, and ethnic identities the praise heaped on travel as a beneficial transformative experience becomes untenable. Few well-intentioned people—though there will always be some—will encourage well-heeled foreigners to tour the slums of Uganda, imbibe warthog anuses with Namibian bushmen, or see themselves as fundamentally the same as Djiboutians, Eritreans, Ethiopians, Somalians, and Sudanese who practice female genital mutilation after attending one of the ghastly ceremonies. And those who would do so would struggle to demonstrate how any of these exercises could even in principle educate and broaden one’s mind, or expand one’s circle of empathy. If the cures boasted of on travel’s behalf are illusory what then to make of the illnesses diagnosed in those immune to its charms?
The travel evangelist might object that these are poorly chosen examples. An inexperienced person who might yet be persuaded to travel, a travel agnostic, might benefit from choosing familiar locales populated by broadly culturally similar people and absorbing what variety he may find there in the interruption of his usual routines. While this is certainly a more unobjectionable solution, going to a place much like places one already knows and likes removes the oomph of learning from the strange, shocking, and demanding phenomena that are supposed to broaden the mind and educate the instincts. How are immersions in cultures much like the traveler’s own, and interactions with people much like himself, supposed to overcome the contented tranquility of the traveler in order to teach him something new? Because nothing is ventured, nothing is gained. Yet to venture too much is to risk destroying the travel agnostic’s illusion that travel might change him for the better. The travel evangelist must now fall back on the more modest, and even less impressive, claim that the change of routine imposed by travel is all by itself a good that justifies undertaking the effort of travel.
Converting the Homebody
If a change of routine is a sufficient benefit to be had as reward for the rigors of travel then surely it is also a good enough thing to be had without them. Not everyone needs to travel to Venice and get a boat ride on the stinking canals to break a rut, or catch a flight and take a bus to go to a beach where they may read a novel instead of answering work emails. It is scarcely necessary to add traversal of physical distance to the ritual preparations preceding a recuperative, or plain fun, activity that upends one’s usual schedule. A change of routine is a good independently of whether it is preceded and succeeded by preparatory travel. The benefits aren’t attendant on travel, they’re the benefits of a change of routine to which the travel enthusiast has no privileged claim over the travel agnostic.
The circle that the travel evangelist wants to square is the quasi-religious conversion of the simple change of the traveler’s routine into a profound change in the traveler qua person through the ritual of travel in the locomotive sense. The difficulty of equating a temporary change in the coping behaviours of the traveler as she navigates a different lifeworld to a permanent change in her personality after her travels is what motivates travel evangelists to invest the very act of taking on a journey with a ritual significance. On this line desirable personality changes acquired by reading extensively about a recommended travel destination, or watching documentaries covering all the vaunted sights and sounds, simply lack the gravitas of the quasi-religious moral transformation they argue comes only after the completion of the locomotive travel ritual.
People who’ve consumed all the literature and audiovisual materials pertaining to the Eiffel tower, for instance, can’t possibly have got themselves the same benefits enjoyed by the unlettered travelers who showed up at the destination but never bothered learning anything about it before or after the visit. The former have merely intellectualized what should’ve been a visceral experience, whereas the latter have imbibed the je ne sais quoi that makes the Eiffel tower the popular destination it is. Of course, it is true that there is something of the same sort of difference between reading a recipe and eating the actual dish as there is between learning about a destination and actually travelling to it. But it is a difference that in the limit doesn’t really make a difference. Does a vegan need to follow the illustrious footsteps of Anthony Bourdain and ingest an al dente warthog anus cooked by Namibian bushmen to really learn about Namibian culture and cuisine? Arguably, having seen Bourdain do the deed should be a sufficient education on the topic for vegan and omnivore travel agnostic alike.
Disenchanting Travel
The dominance of travel evangelists in the discourse surrounding travel, tourism, and hospitality has made people second-guess their own hesitancy in taking on an impressive itinerary for their next vacation. They feel guilty having to justify staying home and catching up with reading or watching world cinema as preferable to backpacking through the Other Europe. Even those who do make the halfhearted pilgrimage to a destination against their inertial instinct to stay put with hopes of enjoying the cultural enrichment and personal development advertised in travel brochures, literary travelogues, and travel influencer’s spiels feel private anxiety over whether they are truly receptive to the significant environing stimuli afforded by the destination. They know themselves, and are surely capable of telling whether they really are enjoying a destination vacation. But the glib pro-travel rhetoric accompanying glossy magazines and retouched Instagram photographs hyping up a destination prompt the underwhelmed and bullied traveler to question their own capacity and cultivation for enjoying the destination in the recommended manner.
One only feels pity for the plight of the deferential couple traveling to Mexico, related in Agnes Callard’s excellent piece against the central dogmas of travel evangelism. Having witnessed a rural religious dance they enjoyed they needed their experience to be vetted by an ethnologist who could confirm that the dance was indeed authentic and their having witnessed it was really meaningful for their growth as people. But it is hard to feel anything but contempt for the kind of lay freelance ethnologists who write think pieces defending the intellectualization of travel experiences so long as the intellectualization is performed by people who actually travel or are those generally well-traveled. Far from defending the alleged merits of the ritual practice, or probing the soundness of these self-serving rationalizations, they condescend to lecture the travel agnostic about how they’ll never know what they’re missing until they actually travel to a destination that makes them spontaneously and unselfconsciously wax lyrical.
You Can’t Spell There Without Here
It is hard to stifle laughter at the lightheaded recollections of those intoxicated by nostalgia and unthinking zeal for travel evangelism because they want their post prandial belches at a tropical banquet to express something much more than their insular gastric satisfaction. Because they heard penjualan cries on topless beaches at 13, ate goat satay with rice and fried plantains in a locale not yet frequented by white tourists, and eavesdropped on their drunken father shooting the shit with some local beach bums, they want everyone everywhere for all time to solemnly agree that travel to a foreign location is magical, and mind expanding, and the one true ritual bestowing global citizenship in a desacralized world. The travel evangelist’s derision towards those able to change their routine and attitudes without locomoting, their skepticism that someone could understand the Great Pyramid of Cholula is perfectly imposing even at its 137 meters these days without actually traveling to Mexico speaks of their native lack of imagination which travel decidedly cannot fix. The deficiency is internal and cannot be remedied by the topical balm of foreign stimulations.
It is perfectly respectable to admit brazen hedonism, restlessness in one’s domicile, and an ongoing incapacity to imagine a change without materially changing one’s surroundings, fully comprise the appeal of travel. Fun, like taste, is its own argument. Travel evangelism loses this respectability and draws censure for being frivolous only because it deigns to argue that this fun is morally and intellectually mandatory, and can only be had by traveling to a destination. Growth can indeed occur by inhabiting a strange society and learning what makes it tick. But no one pretends this growth, the contortions and relaxations of personality struggling to retain its autonomy and function outside its native environment, is fun.
Bourdain who advises young people to travel widely and live in uncomfortable situations with this growth in mind doesn’t condescend to say it will all be worth it. Of course he can’t make that promise, and no one can. He acknowledges that travel is a teetering in the unknown, and he is peculiar both in liking it extraordinarily and thinking everyone else ought to too. But he also admittedly likes being wrong about stuff, unlike travel evangelists like deBoer who think it is the homebodies who are wrong for being content where they are, refusing to see places that might leave them unimpressed, eating meals that may give them a blessed satisfaction or fiery dysentery. Surely those who stay put where they are know more about themselves than those demanding they make an effort to go elsewhere.
Escaping or Finding the Self?
If the travel evangelist were operating in good conscience they would treat their affliction, their high need for novelty and their persistent boredom, with travel in the quality and quantity adequate to cure their malaise. But their strident evangelism on behalf of their personal prescription has the undeniable impression of being identical to the halt’s recommendation that the able-bodied ought to use crutches to expand their self-concept. On the moral of their sermons no one is really able-bodied; some just think they are, and they ought to be cured of their delusion. No one is immune to the charms of travel and its many benefits but for those who are defective in some way. But this arch diagnosis is a superfluous exercise in condescension. The travel agnostic isn’t resisting travel because his personality is defective in some way. He is resisting travel because to the best of his knowledge in his current state he enjoys benefits few destinations can rival.
Why some people need to travel and convince others they need to travel are interesting, and profound, questions. But they are no easier to answer for all their piquancy. Every appeal to the putative benefits travel affords the traveler assumes corresponding deficits in the personality and moral complexion of those who find the prospect uninteresting or overrated. The travel evangelist seems to say Oh, you know why Kant disliked different cultures? He didn’t travel and so became casually xenophobic. He simply needed to travel to expand his circle of empathy! The travel agnostic could only match this lunacy by proposing, for instance, Kant didn’t travel outside Prussia between April 22, 1724 and February 12, 1804 only because he was in Prussia for every day between the years 1724 and 1725, and between the years 1725 and 1726…and so on till 1804. There was simply no time to travel. This does explain in a sense why Kant never traveled outside Prussia in his life. And it is less ridiculous than the travel evangelist’s cavil because it doesn’t presumptively diagnose this failure to travel as originating in or leading to a moral failing.
