The Case Against “The Case Against Travel”

A Defense of Travel

For some reason Instagram thought it would be a good idea to serve up this June 2023 New Yorker article “The Case Against Travel” by Agnes Callard, an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Chicago. The title itself made my curiosity spike nearly as high as my cortisol. Surely, I thought, she’s not about to make the claim that people shouldn’t travel, is she? I clicked. She did.

I suffered all the way through the article in vehement disbelief and disagreement. Halfway through reading it I started to think to myself she can’t be serious. And to tell you the truth, after I finished, I don’t know if she wrote it in earnest or in jest. It wasn’t that her tone sounded facetious, nor was there a wisp of humor or anything tongue-in-cheek about it. It was the sheer perspective - that travel is somehow an unworthy enterprise in and of itself - that felt so backward, so alien, so palpably ignorant that I thought the only way someone as educated and intelligent as this person could start and finish an article of this sort would be with some surreptitious motive, like rage-bait.

So, as someone who is new to the world of writing about his travels, I had to dismember this article from top to bottom, doing my part both to vanquish her valueless viewpoint on travel - which, as you’ll see, she often conflates with both tourism and vacation - and to protect the sanctity of travel, of seeing the world, of living as a citizen of earth and not a prisoner of whatever city, country or culture inside of which you happened to have been birthed.

The author makes so many assumptions, mistakes and fallacies that I completely forgot I was reading the words of a self-ascribed philosopher. Philosophy - literally “love of wisdom” - can be characterized as a systematic approach to knowledge by making use of the cold, double-edged blade we call reason and rationality. Making these kinds of errors as a philosopher is akin to a Samurai fumbling his sword; he’d be disgraced, swiftly jettisoned from the dojo and stripped of his monicker of Samurai.

Because this article was so chock full of disputable claims, the only way I could conceive of properly refuting it was by including the entire article, and weaving my refutations into it. So for the bulk of this post, what you’ll see is my attempt at restoring the good name of Travel (with a capital T) by carefully pointing out where I disagree with her, where she is factually incorrect, or where she makes egregious and unfair assumptions. Her words will be demarcated by green indented quotations, and my words will be everything in between.

Before I dive into the text, though, I want to share with you a bit of Callard’s backstory. Here is a list of places that she has spent considerable time in her life that I found on her wikipedia page.

• Born and lived in Budapest, Hungary until age 5

• Moved to Rome

• Moved to New York City

• Studied in Chicago at University of Chicago

• Studied in California at UC Berkeley

• Studied in New Jersey at Princeton University

How many people do you know have spent meaningful time in Budapest, Rome, New York City, Chicago, San Francisco (Berkeley) and Princeton? For most people, the answer is either zero, or near zero, and for the few whose answer is meaningfully higher, it’s safe to assume they’ve seen a great deal of the world, and that their friends and family members have, too. (I’m assuming a positive correlation between the number of cities one has lived in or spent significant time in, and the number of people in their circle who have also spent significant time in the same number of cities.)

And that’s okay! What a list of cities through which to view the world! What’s more, Agnes Callard not only viewed the world through those cities, but she viewed it through the windows of some of the most elite schools in America, and thus the world. Categorically, Princeton is an Ivy League school, and University of Chicago and UC Berkeley are every bit as prestigious. Her privilege is on display at the top of a tower of ivory.

I want to be clear. I’m not taking aim at her academic career on its face. While I am deeply critical of the state of higher education - primarily the cost of it - I applaud her accolades, and I’m sure she earned her privilege. I’m simply pointing out that readers of her article on travel and its virtues - if any - should know where she has been.

It matters.

Similarly, since she advocates for staying put, readers should know what kind of life she has built for herself. Agnes Callard has three children, two with her first husband, whose surname she still takes, and one with her second husband, whom she is currently married to. All three of them live together. At the risk of casting judgment, all I will say about this is that she has every right to construct and live within such a home, but no doubt she will have trouble relating to or identifying with nearly everyone about the values and virtues of such a life. It’s hardly replicable or advisable, and certainly not scalable. This is the home from which she chooses not to travel.

Lastly, in my opinion, it’s relevant to know that Agnes Callard is autistic. Admittedly, I am not an expert on autism, nor do I claim to know much about it, but from my personal experience, there are forms of autism - that is, segments of the so-called “spectrum” - that can fairly be portrayed as a super power, and others that are surely more accurately described as a disability. I believe it is fair to say, though, that in general, those with autism do not find it easier or more fun to travel than people who do not have autism. That is to say, none of the “super power” sections of the spectrum make traveling more desirable or rewarding, while many of the “disability” sections of the spectrum make traveling overwhelming and difficult.

Here is an article Callard wrote about a couple important aspects of her personal life, one of which being autism, though she never uses the word. Instead she refers to it as “The Fact.” Honestly it’s a fascinating read and makes me like her more. Here is she is talking about her autism.

The Fact I’d like to tell you has to do with a difference between how we — you and I — think. But to get specific about this difference, I have to use a word you associate with people who don’t talk, who can’t take care of themselves, whose inner lives seem utterly obscure to you, people who harm themselves, people you struggle to see as human, people whose existence you see as a tragedy.

And here she is later in the same article openly talking about what you might call a learning disability.

There is a reason for all of this, which is that I am bad — really bad, you cannot imagine how bad — at figuring things out on my own. If I take too many steps in reasoning without the intervention of another person, I go very far wrong. So I have accustomed myself to reasoning in public as much as I can, to making sure to expose my mistakes to correction.

Well Agnes, I appreciate - really appreciate, you cannot imagine how much I appreciate - you exposing your thoughts and mistakes to the public. I mean that genuinely. So here I am, an atom of the public, attempting to correct your perspective on travel, and hopefully to open your eyes to the wonderful world of … the world.

Let’s begin.

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.

Really? She can’t think of anything someone might say about themselves that is less informative than that they like to travel? Some philosopher. I wonder if she would think the statement “I don’t like to travel” is somehow more or less informative. While I admit that the words “I like to travel” don’t immediately offer up a great deal of information about a person, but what they do is invite a conversation whereby you can learn a tremendous amount about them by listening to their stories. How did they get there? Did they fly first class or economy? Did they stay in a resort on a distant tropical island, or did they pay for a cheap hostile in a dirty city? Did they go in a group, or by themselves? Did they work while they traveled, or did they take time away from their job to detach and unwind? Traveling itself says a lot about a person if only you take the time to listen and ask questions.

What’s more, it doesn’t seem remarkable to her that traveling is something nearly everyone likes. At a time in human history when you can navigate to most places on the planet quickly and comfortably, when, for the first time, people who aren’t filthy rich can experience the farthest reaches of the globe, surprise surprise, people like to travel. This is a sign of our times, not some vapid, mocking preference.

She claims at once that people make this claim because they are proud of themselves, but in the same breath says she doesn’t know why they’re proud. Perhaps, Agnes, they are not proud! Perhaps there are limitless places to explore, foods to eat, songs to sing, people to meet and sites to see that not traveling makes people feel as though they are missing out on life. Is that pride? No it is not.

Even still, let’s say they are proud of themselves for traveling. Well, so what. There are worse things to be proud of.

We’re off to a good start.

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.”

So a handful of thinkers, authors and philosophers don’t like traveling? Who cares? Socrates never wrote anything down; does that mean we should stop writing? If it matters to her what big time thinkers thought about traveling, then, as a philosopher, she should consider the opposition to her opposition, How about Twain’s many statements about traveling, such as,

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.

Or how about Hellen Keller?

Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing at all.

Honestly, as a philosopher, she should know that it makes no difference what any one person’s preference, stance or perspective is when trying to prove a point. The merit and value of a thing stands on its own two feet. Appealing to G.K. Chesterton, Emerson, Pessoa, and even the great Socrates is just that, an appeal to authority, one of the more well-known logical fallacies. It doesn’t matter what someone says is true or false, right or wrong, valuable or worthless. What matters is the means by which they came to that conclusion. Their empassioned statements, though moving and beautiful, add positively nothing to the veracity of the claim.

Let’s continue.

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.

At home, yes. Abroad, no. We avoid doing touristy things at home because we are not tourists at home, and we have a life to live, a job to do, bills to pay, etc. We do touristy things when we are abroad, that is, when we are tourists because those touristy things are presumably representative of what that place has to offer, because it’s tried and true, because its own nature causes it to stand out.

For example, when in New York City tourists like to visit the Statue of Liberty. It is perhaps the most quintessential tourist activity in New York, next to visiting Time Square. But the question is why is it a touristy thing to do in the first place? Because it’s an extremely significant and symbolic object that represents a great deal of what America means. There’s a backstory to it that fascinates people, and connecting with the statue physically helps them connect with the country emotionally.

“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.

Agnes clumsily conflates tourism with traveling, or rather tourists with travelers, yet another logical fallacy, this time of false equivalence. When a bachelorette brings her queens with her to Nashville and parties on broadway for an entire weekend, she is being a tourist. When a wayward backpacker hitchhikes all over Southeast Asia by himself, it hardly makes sense to call him a tourist, and instead makes a great deal more sense to call him a traveler.

Agnes blatantly admits that she doesn’t enjoy listening to people’s travel stories, and even asserts with no evidence whatsoever that this is the viewpoint held by the majority. Earlier she asks us to “shift the object of our thought from our own travel to that of others” in order to better understand her point. I’d encourage her to do the same exact thing when talk to other people about their stories, and rather than mouthlessly yawn at their adventures, take them to heart and learn how to learn about people.

Onward.

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.”

This is a clear example of a straw man fallacy. What is this “common argument” she speaks of? Who makes it? Perhaps some people seek to be enlightened in their journeys, good for them, but it is only one of a myriad different reasons people choose to travel. Hardly the rule that Callard describes it to be. If there is no difference between traveling and tourism, like she says, then is she really saying that tourists are trying to reach an enlightened state? I don’t think so. Who goes to PCB to see god? Who sips cocktails on the Virgin Islands to raise their conscious awareness? No one. They go to relax, let loose, have fun and enjoy time with friends. If that’s your definition of an “enlightened state,” then you need to dial back your definition a skosh.

Travel gets branded as an achievement: see interesting places, have interesting experiences, become interesting people. Is that what it really is?

Sometimes yes, sometimes no. Summiting a mountain top? That’s an achievement. Backpacking across a continent? Another achievement. Taking a picture of yourself on the Great Wall of China? A bucket list item, yes, but not an achievement. Going to Amsterdam to smoke weed and lurk the RLD? Not an achievement, nor would it be sold as one by any traveler.

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.

I can feel a No True Scotsman fallacy coming on…

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.

She’s saying that Emerson is saying that there is a right and a wrong way to travel, and that the wrong way to travel is called tourism. She’s also slotting in all of her travels as the right kind of travel, since it either wasn’t her choice (she was a child), or she was traveling somewhere to study. No True Scotsman ftw.

“A tourist is a temporarily leisured person who voluntarily visits a place away from home for the purpose of experiencing a change.” 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.

Ah yes, who here hasn’t read the “classic academic volume on the anthropology of tourism” Hosts and Guests. What’s that? Literally everybody?

Here’s another, less bullshitty definition of tourist: someone visiting somewhere for pleasure. Using this definition, all that stuff about change simply disappears because that’s not actually what it’s about.

Her pretentiousness is on full display here, and she doesn’t realize at all how out of touch she is with ordinary people. And no I’m not talking about her autism. It’s the liberal, intellectual bubble that she’s voluntarily trapped herself in that validates her esoteric perspectives while simultaneously shielding her from the perspectives of regular people.

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.

Sounds a lot like the way she approached writing this article - she didn’t think for herself.

Also, Abu Dhabi! This needs to be added to the list of places to which this writer, who is encouraging us not to travel, has traveled.

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.)

“…we unchanged changers, we tourists.” Gag.

And what’s wrong with an animal hospital being a place for tourists? Is there some rule somewhere that defines what places are and are not permitted to be tourist destinations?

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.

This says everything about her ineptitude at planning trips, and absolutely nothing about why certain places should allow tourists or not. She made a bad decision to go somewhere she didn’t enjoy, and she wants it to be someone else’s fault. Even more selfishly and ironically, she is literally placing the blame on the animal hospital.

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.

Cherry picked and untrue. Talk to someone about their travels, and they will do so much more than tell you how they moved to those locations. They’ll effuse about the wonder and amazement of big mountains and valleys; the snide remarks they got from the locals; the power and mystery in the art; the confusion of the big city. And so on.

Yes, in order to get anyway, you have to move, but that is true about base level reality. Nothing stands still.

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.

This entire paragraph is a pile of literary trash. Who goes to another country and walks in straight lines? Honestly, who does that, and then has the audacity to say that travel makes us worse? No, ma’am, YOU traveling makes YOU worse. You should have gone to the museum, which exists in a country thousands of miles away from where you live (which explains why you don’t go there regularly), and contains historic artwork from hundreds of years before you lived. You should have stood and marveled at the excellence within. Instead, what did you do? You walked in straight lines? You are doing it wrong, Agnes Callard.

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 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.”

Once again, cherry picking. She has created an image of the worst way to view the Grand Canyon, and is basing her argument on this image. Nonetheless, the Grand Canyon on its worst day is more impressive that bloody postcard!

I have seen the Grand Canyon, and let me tell you, it’s unbelievable. The one thing I tell people who are considering going anywhere near the Grand Canyon is not to skip it, and that literally nothing can prepare you for seeing it.

When I stood at the edge of the canyon, all kinds of thoughts raced through my mind: what did the pioneers think when they stumbled across this expanse? What mysteries like in the nooks and crannies of this big crack in the earth? It’s crazy that you can see this from space. The raging Colorado River looks like a little spring from here. I can’t believe what I’m seeing.

And so on. I’ll tell you what I didn’t do. Shrug and mumble something about how it resembled a 3x4 inch postcard.

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.”

Another miserable example of a travel story. And I mean that the story is one of misery. Two travelers who got lost didn’t enjoy themselves as much as they expected even when they got exactly what they were looking for. Agnes simply asserts that these fictitious travelers remain dissatisfied, and we are forced to believe her because it’s her made up story. These misanthropic travelers then muster up the finances, time and energy to go back to a far away destination that they didn’t actually enjoy, just to demonstrate it to an ethnologist, whose favor, I presume, they wish to win?

Who are these people? What is this example? It’s so blatantly invented and cherry picked because real examples of real people traveling to real places betrays her entire thesis.

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.

More elitist jargon. It doesn’t matter what Emerson tells us is worthy or unworthy to visit. He most certainly does not speak for every tourist.

It seems to me that Agnes almost touched on something real, but missed it. She is describing a person who is seeking authenticity in his or her life. Perhaps a better word is meaning. The tourist is searching for meaning and regularly coming up short. The first question to ask would be, “why is there a crisis of meaning in this person’s life to begin with?” I suppose we could spend dozens of hours and thousands of words on that topic, but since it’s not about travel and tourism, we’ll leave it unanswered for now.

A follow-up question might be “can we find this meaning by traveling?” If we believe that Agnes Callard is being genuine when she writes this article, her answer would be a resounding “No.” That somehow or another, your problem lies within you. And that, I agree with! The problem does lie within you, but something that is really interesting about you, is that you are exactly wherever you are, all the time, whether you are a traveler or a tourist or in your own home. Traveling can be a way to knock the rust off, to dig you out of a rut, just as much as it can be a risky venture that creates problems you never had before.

When it comes to the question of authenticity, traveling is a moot issue. It doesn’t apply.

A similar argument applies to the tourist’s impulse to honor the grand sea of humanity. Whereas Percy and Emerson focus on the 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.

Maybe, maybe not. If you observed someone’s clothes, and they intrigued you, then perhaps you could, I don’t know, compliment them? And who knows, maybe they’d be nice and they’d strike up conversation with you, and then after a few minutes you’re exchanging WhatsApp information, and badabing, badaboom you made an international friend.

Alternatively, are you traveling for the express purpose of making friends? If you don’t make friends, is the trip a failure? Why are you setting that goal at all? What does traveling and making friends have to do with each other? You can travel and make friends, not travel and make friends, travel and not make friends, and not travel and not 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.”

Ignoring the fact that Pessoa is describing what sounds like an autistic boy, the important part is that Pessoa created an oxymoron - stationary traveler - and then placed this kind of traveler above all others. He says somehow that imagining the cultures, the foods, the languages, the architecture of another far off land is more valuable than directly observing. Once again, though, these are bald claims and assertions. There is nothing behind them to support their veracity.

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.

Callard leans hard on G.K. Chesterton in this piece, and my guess is because he is such a prestigious thinker. I actually like a lot of what I’ve read about him, including this quotation which is relevant to me lately:

When men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing, they then become capable of believing in anything

But honestly, Chesterton is spewing nonsense. Go to Mexico and help build houses for the poor and needy there, and tell me you are somehow less in touch with the shared humanity you have with them. Go to Haiti and pray with the people there in a church and tell me you’ve created more spiritual distance between the two of you. Honestly. Without direct experience, your imagination idealizes the foreign, and to that end, you are not loving what is real, you are loving your own idea of what is real.

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 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.

Once again Callard conflates travel with another word, vacation. In my opinion, she does this at the most inopportune time in her article because vacation - the root word being to vacate - does not carry any connotation whatsoever of a desire to be changed, improved or transformed. Vacation is usually a time to relax, seek pleasure and literally empty out from your routine. Everyone who goes on vacation knows they’ll be back to “the real world.” This is not some irony that is lost on vacationers.

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.

In other words, you can’t disagree with me because any evidence to the contrary is untrustworthy and outside of your ability to sense it.

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?

QUITE LITERALLY YES.

It’s not always the case, but yes, Agnes, yes! I lived for a year in Korea and I did not come back the same person. I have had friends travel to India for weeks and months and they were exposed to real world hardships they’d never encountered before, those experiences are part of what made them who they are today. They became more grateful for their station in life, more compassionate to others, and braver when it comes to dealing with hardships in them future.

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?

Once again she conflates travel with vacation. Very seldom do people imbue vacation with an “aura of virtue.” Once again, who goes to Vegas for the virtues? Agnes is projecting her own struggle with the meaning of travel onto the entire population of the planet.

One is forced to conclude that maybe it isn’t so easy to do nothing—and this suggests a solution to the puzzle.

It’s way way way too easy to do nothing. I’d say one of the biggest problems of our modern society is just how easy it is to do nothing. We can work from home, watch Netflix, order delivery, doom scroll, etc. all without leaving our house.

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.

Her own analogy is wrong. Travel doesn’t split the expanse of time into a before and after. It at least splits the expanse of time into three sections: before, during, and after. She totally glosses over the actual traveling, the actual experience, as an afterthought. Even still, does the traveling really divide the expanse of time? Only in so far as literally everything divides the expanse of time. Your job, the day you got married, going to college, filling up your car with gas, driving through McDonald’s. Time is a continuous spectrum that is quite possibly indivisible, but even if it is, only at the Planck length.

You don’t like to think about the fact that someday you will do nothing and be nobody.

She is speaking for everyone, when she should be speaking for herself. The stoic phrase memento mori - remember your death - is an example of thinking about your death and returning to nothing. “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust,” is commonly uttered in our culture during funerals. Most prayers are made with a sense of gratitude towards life and all its offerings because we understand it will all be gone soon.

You will only allow yourself to preview this experience when you can disguise it in a 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.

It’s so much deeper than that, and hopefully I’ve made that clear by now. Traveling is not about trophies. Traveling is a recognition that there are amazing places to visit, people to meet, cultures to admire, foods to taste, music to hear, mountains to climb and rivers to cross. Travel is about studying this simultaneously enormous and tiny rock that we live on, making certain that we are where we are supposed to be, and nowhere else. Traveling is about dying without regret.

Socrates said that philosophy is a preparation for death. For everyone else, there’s travel.

This is quite possible the worst part of her entire article. As I stated above, Socrates didn’t write anything down, so ascribing any words to Socrates is a perilous affair, but it is generally agreed upon that he did say something to the effect of “philosophy is preparation for death.” However, I challenge you to find any source that attributes the second half of the phrase, “for everyone else, there’s travel” to Socrates, or for that matter, any philosopher.

Onward and Upward.