Out of touch: “The Case Against Travel”

Wow: The Case Against Travel | The New Yorker

A University of Chicago professor of philosophy has written a column in The New Yorker (the magazine of the elite) saying travel is pointless for most people and they shouldn’t be doing it.

Her thesis is that most “tourists” learn nothing from travel (an assertion unsupported by cited facts) – traveling is just a quick experience – and upon return today’s travelers have not learned much nor changed as a person. Therefore, their travel served no purpose.

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.

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-weekend-essay/the-case-against-travel

I agree with the basic idea that many travelers are traveling for entertainment and Instagram photos to boast to their friends about their country count.

(Added December 2024) Yes, many people travel in what may seem like a frivolous manner, unclear if they have learned anything from the experience. But is this wrong? Who are we to make a value assignment as to what is right or better? As a comment to my post – below – points out, in fact, by my own actions and approach to travel, I agree with her thoughts on making travel transformative. But I disagree that we should denigrate those who may have other reasons for traveling.

My perspective is very different. Having not traveled in life – and suffered career issues, in part, because of my lack of global schooling, I now approach this differently than she has asserted: I have read over a dozen books on world and country history, culture, art and geography, international business and finance – to prep for travels to Netherlands, Iceland and Norway, and spent 1.5 years learning to (mostly) read Norwegian (and still studying). I am also studying Spanish.

I read Rick Steves’ book “Europe 101: History and Art”. Through this process of study and travel, I have changed in fundamental ways – I now believe it is critically important for anyone aspiring to accomplish much in life to have global experience. History shows this has been true for thousands of years, as well. I used to be shy of immigration – because from my perspective, it was mostly causing my co-workers to have their jobs replaced with temporary imported H-1B visa workers. Today, as a result of my self-study – and limited travels – I have a far different perspective on immigration.

In the above column, the author is suggesting most people should not be traveling because they do not get anything “transformative” out of it.

The author, of course, is herself international and a global elite.

She was born in Hungary; at age 6 her family moved to Italy (her Mom was a doctor and her Dad rose up to run a major steel exporter). From her CV, she has an MA in Greek language (which means she likely studied and spent time in Greece), studied abroad in Paris (multiple times), studied abroad in Rome, and speaks Hungarian, English, German, French and Italian, and has reading/writing proficiency in Greek and Latin. Few achieve those language skills without spending time in language immersion in countries where those languages are spoken. She now works in the U.S. In her column, above, she mentions a couple of her global travels: “when I was in Abu Dhabi,”, and “on my first trip to Paris”. Undoubtedly, she has completed many more trips than those she mentions.

She is a global elitist.

She is “educated’ and “elite” – and she was “Transformed” by her travel experiences. She says that moving to another country leads to personal transformation but implies that normal travel does not. The rest of us peons are not going to be transformed by our travels – therefore, our travels are bad. And note that for many of us, moving to most countries is banned by visa and immigration rules – literally banned – due to our ages. For most countries, we are restricted to a 90-day visit. She, on the other hand, had the privilege to immigrate and travel when she was younger. She is a privileged global elitist and a snob. The rest of us will forever be beneath her stature.

(Not relevant background to her thoughts on travel but – after working at the University of Chicago, she had an affair with one of her grad students, dumped her husband, and later married her grad student. Today she lives a non-traditional lifestyle with *both* her former and current husband per Wikipedia.)

Her column strikes me as a plagiarized version with minor differences, from Daniel Boorstin’s comments on travel in his book “The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America”. See Chapter 3 of that book. He was also a professor at the University of Chicago (1944-1969), Director of the Smithsonian’s Museum of History, and Technology, and later head of the Library of Congress. He bemoaned that travel had become too easy and now everyone could do it. He admired the wealthy aristocratic travelers of the past – who could stop by and visit the Earl’s private art collection, and not today’s public art collections in museums which are “pseudo” art collections. Travel should only be for the elite and well to do!

A comment to the New Yorker’s Twitter post said,

“The relatively easy mobility of contemporary tourism creates a false sheen of cosmopolitanism, and a feeling of emptiness as a result.”

Travel is now too easy and accessible to the unwashed masses and no longer a badge of the elite. What a shame. This is a theme that academics have promoted for some time: See The Contemporary Tourist: Is Everything Old New Again? | ACR (acrwebsite.org)

Many more comments, most not supportive of Callard’s writing, in this Tweet thread.

Another commenter wrote, “Spent this morning in an argument, the result of which was me conceding that the claims in the piece prob apply better to older travelers (precisely the sort who would assert, ‘I love to travel’) than to young people, for whom I grant travel is more likely to be transformative,” she wrote.”

Ahhh, yes, old people are just living to die at this point and travel is just a spectator sport for them. Agnes Callard and similar folks claim to believe in diversity, inclusiveness and being open minded – but by their words and actions, they demonstrate they view the world through -isms and closed mindedness, and assign stereotypical attributes based on group membership.

Unfortunately, the above is what passes as intellectual thought, and these are the people who would like to ban travel from 2030 to 2050 (yes, there are elite who are saying that) by which time we will have solved the ClimateCrisis (it’s all one word now).

“Electric planes will not be operating at scale by 2050 so zero emissions means that for some period of time, we will have to stop flying.”

With suggestions that we should ban all air travel from 2030 to about 2050 when technical solutions might be available. Never mind the harms from this would vastly exceed benefits – it would destroy the entire aviation industry ecosystem, from pilots to maintenance, to closed airports – to no one studying aviation engineering in college programs. This would take decades to recover.

Banning travel is their goal: Climate activists seek to ban air travel

Based on the above column and background, Prof. Agnes Callard comes across as an elitist, a snob, arrogant and self-centered.

Her column seems part of an effort to denigrate travel: See also Air travel: Officials seem moving towards de facto air travel bans

Other Perspectives on Agnes Callard’s column (none positive):

• Summer’s here. Travel, for many of us, is not just wonderful but essential | Jill Filipovic | The Guardian
• Agnes Callard’s Socratic Case Against Travel | Psychology Today
• The Case for Travel – Common Reader (wustl.edu)
• Think Less, Agnes – Freddie deBoer (substack.com)

A comment to that last article has a good summary of where I think this is going: “those peasants can’t possibly get what we get out of these experiences, so taking them away won’t be a problem. The peasants find traveling “fun” and confuse that with life-altering experiences. But you *need* a purpose to travel because, in this case, climate change I would guess goes unspoken. It’s the John Kerry effect. The rest of us are supposed to give up our cars and our dogs and every other little thing that can be tied to “bad for the environment,” but John Kerry can take a private jet to *climate conferences* because his mission and his presence are so much more important than anything you could possible have to travel for, even in your pathetic little Prius. And essays like this condition people toward that attitude.”

(And that is a whole separate topic – I suspect many of us are fed up with technocratic and global elite who mandate rules on us little people while ignoring those rules for their own lives. See my extensive comments on Covid and Climate hypocrites over on my other blog.)