The Weekend Essay

The Case Against Travel

It turns us into the worst version of ourselves while convincing us
that we’re at our best.
By Agnes Callard
June 24, 2023

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 hometowns 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

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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?

Pessoa, Emerson, and Chesterton believed that travel, far from

putting us in touch with humanity, divorced us from it. Travel turns
us into the worst version of ourselves while convincing us that we’re
at our best. Call this the traveller’s delusion.

To explore it, let’s start with what we mean by “travel.” Socrates

went abroad when he was called to fight in the Peloponnesian War;
even so, he was no traveller. Emerson is explicit about steering his
critique away from a person who travels when his “necessities” or
“duties” demand it. He has no objection to traversing great distances
“for the purpose of art, of study, and benevolence.” One sign that
you have a reason to be somewhere is that you have nothing to
prove, and therefore no drive to collect souvenirs, photos, or stories
to prove it. Let’s define “tourism” as the kind of travel that aims at
the interesting—and, if Emerson and company are right, misses.

“A tourist is a temporarily leisured person who voluntarily visits a

place away from home for the purpose of experiencing a change.”

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This definition is taken from the opening of “Hosts and Guests,” the
classic academic volume on the anthropology of tourism. The last
phrase is crucial: touristic travel exists for the sake of change. But
what, exactly, gets changed? Here is a telling observation from the
concluding chapter of the same book: “Tourists are less likely to
borrow from their hosts than their hosts are from them, thus
precipitating a chain of change in the host community.” We go to
experience a change, but end up inflicting change on others.

For example, 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. (On the wall of the foyer, I recall seeing a
series of “excellence in tourism” awards. Keep in mind that this is
an animal hospital.)

Why might it be bad for a place to be shaped by the people who

travel there, voluntarily, for the purpose of experiencing a change?
The answer is that such people not only do not know what they are
doing but are not even trying to learn. Consider me. It would be one
thing to have such a deep passion for falconry that one is willing to
fly to Abu Dhabi to pursue it, and it would be another thing to
approach the visit in an aspirational spirit, with the hope of
developing my life in a new direction. I was in neither position. I
entered the hospital knowing that my post-Abu Dhabi life would
contain exactly as much falconry as my pre-Abu Dhabi life—which
is to say, zero falconry. If you are going to see something you
neither value nor aspire to value, you are not doing much of
anything besides locomoting.

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Tourism is marked by its locomotive character. “I went to France.”
O.K., but what did you do there? “I went to the Louvre.” O.K., but
what did you do there? “I went to see the ‘Mona Lisa.’ ” That is,
before quickly moving on: apparently, many people spend just
fifteen seconds looking at the “Mona Lisa.” It’s locomotion all the
way down.

The peculiar rationality of tourists allows them to be moved both by

a desire to do what they are supposed to do in a place and a desire to
avoid precisely what they are supposed to do. This is how it came to
pass that, on my first trip to Paris, I avoided both the “Mona Lisa”
and the Louvre. I did not, however, avoid locomotion. I walked from
one end of the city to the other, over and over again, in a straight
line; if you plotted my walks on a map, they would have formed a
giant asterisk. In the many great cities I have actually lived and
worked in, I would never consider spending whole days walking.
When you travel, you suspend your usual standards for what counts
as a valuable use of time. You suspend other standards as well,
unwilling to be constrained by your taste in food, art, or recreational
activities. After all, you say to yourself, the whole point of travelling
is to break out of the confines of everyday life. But, if you usually
avoid museums, and suddenly seek them out for the purpose of
experiencing a change, what are you going to make of the paintings?
You might as well be in a room full of falcons.

Let’s delve a bit deeper into how, exactly, the tourist’s project is
self-undermining. I’ll illustrate with two examples from “The Loss
of the Creature,” an essay by the writer Walker Percy.

First, a sightseer arriving at the Grand Canyon. Before his trip, an

idea of the canyon—a “symbolic complex”—had formed in his
mind. He is delighted if the canyon resembles the pictures and
postcards he has seen; he might even describe it as “every bit as
beautiful as a picture postcard!” But, if the lighting is different, the
colors and shadows not those which he expects, he feels cheated: he

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has arrived on a bad day. Unable to gaze directly at the canyon,
forced to judge merely whether it matches an image, the sightseer
“may simply be bored; or he may be conscious of the difficulty: that
the great thing yawning at his feet somehow eludes him.”

Second, a couple from Iowa driving around Mexico. They are

enjoying the trip, but are a bit dissatisfied by the usual sights. They
get lost, drive for hours on a rocky mountain road, and eventually,
“in a tiny valley not even marked on the map,” stumble upon a
village celebrating a religious festival. Watching the villagers dance,
the tourists finally have “an authentic sight, a sight which is
charming, quaint, picturesque, unspoiled.” Yet they still feel some
dissatisfaction. Back home in Iowa, they gush about the experience
to an ethnologist friend: You should have been there! You must
come back with us! When the ethnologist does, in fact, return with
them, “the couple do not watch the goings-on; instead they watch
the ethnologist! Their highest hope is that their friend should find
the dance interesting.” They need him to “certify their experience as
genuine.”

The tourist is a deferential character. He outsources the vindication

of his experiences to the ethnologist, to postcards, to conventional
wisdom about what you are or are not supposed to do in a place.
This deference, this “openness to experience,” is exactly what
renders the tourist incapable of experience. Emerson confessed, “I
seek the Vatican, and the palaces. I affect to be intoxicated with
sights and suggestions, but I am not intoxicated.” He speaks for
every tourist who has stood before a monument, or a painting, or a
falcon, and demanded herself to feel something. Emerson and Percy
help us understand why this demand is unreasonable: to be a tourist
is to have already decided that it is not one’s own feelings that
count. Whether an experience is authentically X is precisely what
you, as a non-X, cannot judge.

A similar argument applies to the tourist’s impulse to honor the

grand sea of humanity. Whereas Percy and Emerson focus on the
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aesthetic, showing us how hard it is for travellers to have the sensory
experiences that they seek, Pessoa and Chesterton are interested in
the ethical. They study why travellers can’t truly connect to other
human beings. During my Paris wanderings, I would stare at people,
intently inspecting their clothing, their demeanor, their interactions.
I was trying to see the Frenchness in the French people around me.
This is not a way to make friends.

Pessoa said that he knew only one “real traveller with soul”: an
office boy who obsessively collected brochures, tore maps out of
newspapers, and memorized train schedules between far-flung
destinations. The boy could recount sailing routes around the world,
but he had never left Lisbon. Chesterton also approved of such
stationary travellers. He wrote that there was “something touching
and even tragic” about “the thoughtless tourist, who might have
stayed at home loving Laplanders, embracing Chinamen, and
clasping Patagonians to his heart in Hampstead or Surbiton, but for
his blind and suicidal impulse to go and see what they looked like.”

The problem was not with other places, or with the man wanting to
see them, but with travel’s dehumanizing effect, which thrust him
among people to whom he was forced to relate as a spectator.
Chesterton believed that loving what is distant in the proper fashion
—namely, from a distance—enabled a more universal connection.
When the man in Hampstead thought of foreigners “in the
abstract . . . as those who labour and love their children and die, he
was thinking the fundamental truth about them.” “The human bond
that he feels at home is not an illusion,” Chesterton wrote. “It is
rather an inner reality.” Travel prevents us from feeling the presence
of those we have travelled such great distances to be near.

The single most important fact about tourism is this: we already

know what we will be like when we return. A vacation is not like
immigrating to a foreign country, or matriculating at a university, or
starting a new job, or falling in love. We embark on those pursuits

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with the trepidation of one who enters a tunnel not knowing who she
will be when she walks out. The traveller departs confident that she
will come back with the same basic interests, political beliefs, and
living arrangements. Travel is a boomerang. It drops you right where
you started.

If you think that this doesn’t apply to you—that your own travels are
magical and profound, with effects that deepen your values, expand
your horizons, render you a true citizen of the globe, and so on—
note that this phenomenon can’t be assessed first-personally. Pessoa,
Chesterton, Percy, and Emerson were all aware that travellers tell
themselves they’ve changed, but you can’t rely on introspection to
detect a delusion. So cast your mind, instead, to any friends who are
soon to set off on summer adventures. In what condition do you
expect to find them when they return? They may speak of their
travel as though it were transformative, a “once in a lifetime”
experience, but will you be able to notice a difference in their
behavior, their beliefs, their moral compass? Will there be any
difference at all?

Travel is fun, so it is not mysterious that we like it.

What is mysterious is why we imbue it with a vast significance, an
aura of virtue. If a vacation is merely the pursuit of unchanging
change, an embrace of nothing, why insist on its meaning?

One is forced to conclude that maybe it isn’t so easy to do nothing—

and this suggests a solution to the puzzle. Imagine how your life
would look if you discovered that you would never again travel. If
you aren’t planning a major life change, the prospect looms,
terrifyingly, as “More and more of this, and then I die.” Travel splits
this expanse of time into the chunk that happens before the trip, and
the chunk that happens after it, obscuring from view the certainty of
annihilation. And it does so in the cleverest possible way: by giving
you a foretaste of it. You don’t like to think about the fact that
someday you will do nothing and be nobody. You will only allow
yourself to preview this experience when you can disguise it in a
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narrative about how you are doing many exciting and edifying
things: you are experiencing, you are connecting, you are being
transformed, and you have the trinkets and photos to prove it.

Socrates said that philosophy is a preparation for death. For

everyone else, there’s travel. ♦