Jon Houston's Notebook

The Case Against Travel

The Case Against Travel

The Traveler’s Delusion

“Travel turns us into the worst versions of ourselves while convincing us that we’re at our best.”

This is the claim Callard is arguing for.

Notice that it is composed of two claims:

  1. Travel turns us into the worst versions of ourselves.
  2. We are convinced that travel turns us into the best versions of ourselves.

Why Think We Believe Travel Improves Us?

Start with the second claim: how do we know that we are convinced travel turns us into the best versions of ourselves?

Just look around.

We seem to believe that travel will enable us to:

  1. See interesting things.
  2. Meet interesting people.
  3. Become an interesting person.

Callard argues that travel does not enable us to do any of these things. In fact, the act of becoming a tourist makes us less able to do them than if we had simply stayed put.

This is what leads her to the first claim: travel turns us into worse versions of ourselves.

Definitions

Tourism

Tourism is the type of travel that aims at the interesting.

Tourist

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

How Does Travel Make Us Less Able to See Interesting Things?

  • We end up seeing a bunch of things we neither value nor aspire to value, so we engage in superficial locomoting.

  • The tourist needs validation from something outside themselves to prove that they saw something interesting.

How Does Travel Make Us Less Able to Meet Interesting People?

  • Travel inherently makes us spectators.

  • We want to connect to the locals, but by being there as tourists, we are inherently separating ourselves from the locals.

How Does Travel Make Us Less Able to Become Interesting People?

  • Nobody else really cares about your travels.

  • You know exactly the kind of person you will be after you return from your travels: the same kind of person you were before you went.

  • Even if travel changed you, you cannot go around saying that it changed you. That is for others to say. They will probably say it did not change you at all.

Why Do We View Travel as a Virtue?

Imagine life as unending sameness until death.

We would want to break it up, so we travel.

In other words, travel is a way of obscuring the sameness until death.

It turns out that in travel, you are nobody doing nothing. But we convince ourselves that this is not the case. In reality, however, we know that it is the case.

Questions

  1. Callard claims that travel does more to change the locations we visit than it ends up changing us. Is this a bad thing? How is it bad? Is it bad because it makes the place more like pop culture, as in the indie-band response? Is it bad because it changes the people, as in the North Sentinel Island response?

  2. Callard claims that we cannot determine whether we have changed; only others can tell us that we have changed. Is this true? Can I really not know whether I have changed? Are there other sorts of properties like this: courage, honesty, modesty, open-mindedness? If there are other personal properties like this, what would that say about travel and being a good person?

  3. How do Callard’s arguments apply to local tourism? If I go to a petting zoo, am I engaging in tourism? Do her arguments apply only to epic journeys?

  4. Callard mentions the following activities as things we enter into with trepidation: immigrating, matriculating, starting a new job, and falling in love. Why do we enter them with trepidation? Do we enter traveling with trepidation in the same way we enter into these other activities? Are there any other activities we could add to the list?

  5. Callard is clearly not talking about all kinds of travel. She is talking mostly about a way of viewing travel. She seems mostly to be criticizing the travel snob. Can we apply her arguments to other kinds of enjoyment: food, music, movies?