TOP・UPDATES・FOUR PILLARS・CINEMA/TV・GAMES・MANGA/ANIME・MUSIC・WRITINGS・FAQ・LINKS
TOP・UPDATES・FOUR PILLARS・CINEMA/TV・GAMES・MANGA/ANIME・MUSIC・WRITINGS・FAQ・LINKS
Today, traveling is no longer the privileged luxury of a "jet set." Sure, it remains a luxury that not everyone can equally afford to indulge in. But going to a foreign country is something that most people in the industrialized first world can afford. I was very privileged growing up and had the opportunity to do just this. And even compared to 20 years ago or so, when I remember visiting foreign countries for the first time, I see far more tourists and far more accommodations for tourists than I did as a child. And this gives me a sense of melancholy.
It's hard to express this without seeming like a hypocrite. My family did a lot of traveling when I was young. And I was fortunate enough to have a great deal of early education by doing so. For there is much that is beneficial in traveling: Yes, there is the pure pleasure of things like seeing beautiful buildings, landscapes, and artworks, eating great food, or trying some new kind of leisure. But there is genuine education and edification in these activities as well. We see that other places are less stereotypical than we might think and that a country or culture is not so black and white. We see others around the world as more human. At the same time, we might experience "culture shocks," and start to understand that much in our culture is contingent and not pre-ordained. That encourages us to be more critical of our own assumptions. This is the value of traveling.
But now that travel has become so easy and accessible, a difficulty arises: The problem of "over-tourism." Too many tourists flooding an area will rob its real, genuine cultural aura and turn it into something cheap and spiritually dead. What remains for us, culturally, at a place like the Leaning Tower of Pisa, the Eiffel Tower, the Great Wall of China, or any other place like it? There is something there, but those places are choking and suffocating under a thick layer of globalized homogeneity. You will go there and not hear the language of the country or see mostly members of that country around you. You will feel no coherent culture there. But now everyone feels the same way about these "overrated" and "obvious" tourist traps, and everyone wants to escape the crowd. So new places constantly get discovered and shown off on social media until they too get overrun in just the same manner. Tourists swarm over like an endless Zerg rush, until the creep spreads over the whole country. This is of course not even getting into the amount of environmental destruction created by all this travel through carbon emissions, littering, noise and light pollution, etc.
And let me make it clear: I have been one of these Zerglings spreading the creep and do not wish to speak from a high and mighty position. I hate coming across as a hypocrite, especially one who has been so privileged and then wants to deny the privileges I've had to others. But at the same time, I did often feel that there was something wrong about what I was doing when I traveled. I felt like an invader and a parasite. I felt I was consuming their culture and not producing anything. And I felt that there was something superfluous and awkward about my being in any foreign country. What was I doing there? I was experiencing things, sure. But was I contributing to a deep study? Did I have enough context to understand anything about what I was involved in? Perhaps it was for this reason that I often felt disappointed when I visited various places. It was rarely as magical or truly exotic as my imagination implied. But I felt that the onus was on me, as any place would appear like that if you visited as an alien to its culture, and all the more so if you did so as a "tourist," which inherently cheapens whatever genuine culture is there. In any case I always felt a kind of impostor syndrome being there. What right did I have to trample into some society that was totally foreign to me? An extreme thought, yes, but one that I think is representative of the alienating nature of tourism.
I question the motives of people who travel, including myself. Traditionally there is an assumption that if you are well-traveled, you are somehow more enlightened or intelligent or aware. This is a prejudice and it is by no means true. The most you can say is that people who travel a lot have a lot of money, and are we ready to say something as stupid as the idea that having a lot of wealth corresponds to intelligence, wisdom, or morals? Of course not. I don't think I even need to unpack all the reasons for that idea being ridiculous. The majority of the great thinkers of the past could not have come anywhere close to traveling to as many places as even your average, middle-class American has today. Are we really ready to say that they were all more foolish and less perceptive about all the important things we care about? I think not. Immanuel Kant, for example, never traveled more than fifty miles from his (admittedly very cosmopolitan) hometown of Königsberg. And yet he was one of the most consequential thinkers in the history of western philosophy. Granted, he also had a very special case of obvious autism, but the point stands.
People need external activity because they have no internal activity. Where, on the contrary, the latter does exist, the former is likely to be a very troublesome, indeed execrable annoyance and impediment.--The former fact also explains the restlessness of those who have nothing to do, and their aimless traveling. What drives them from country to country is the same boredom which drives them together into such crowds and heaps it is funny to see. I once received a choice confirmation of this truth from a gentleman of 50 with whom I was not acquainted, who told me about a two-year pleasure trip he had taken to distant lands and strange parts of the earth. When I remarked that he must have endured many difficulties, hardships, and dangers, he replied very naïvely, without hesitation or preamble but as if merely enunciating the conclusion of a syllogism: 'I wasn't bored for an instant.'
Arthur Schopenhauer, Essays and Aphorisms, [1]
Travel can augment our intellectual growth, but only if the growth inside has already happened. I think that those who cling to travel itself as some method to stir something within themselves are mistaken and their hope is in vain. If you can only have some awakening on the basis of changing your surroundings, I'm afraid that I have to see you as some sort of hylic. One can travel oneself into ignorance just as one can read oneself stupid. Maybe it is a kind of medieval prejudice that is hard to disentangle. In the past, one could only know things certainly about other parts of the world if one had the means and time to travel there. We simply do not live in that world anymore. There are a great deal of ignoramuses who live abroad these days. Globalization sustains them and their folly. In this quest to appear intelligent or "well-rounded" or special, people stock up on travel as kind of a perverse consumerism of global cultures. They have pictures of places they have been to in their house or, more likely, plastered over social media in the way others might have designer clothes and bags, and I find it just as ridiculous. They will never have the enlightenment they search after by merely traveling around if it does not come from within themselves first and foremost. And again, I don't want to sound high and mighty here: I have been that shallow, pretentious, spoiled person myself.
Without stirring abroad
One can know the whole world;
Without looking out the window
One can see the way of heaven.
The further one goes
The less one knows.
Therefore the sage knows without having to stir,
Identifies without having to see,
Accomplishes without having to act.
Laozi, Dao De Jing, Verse 47 [2]
With special regard to the interpretation of Dasein, the opinion may now arise that understanding the most alien cultures and 'synthesizing' them with one's own may lead to Dasein's becoming for the first time thoroughly and genuinely enlightened about itself. Versatile curiosity and restlessly 'knowing it all' masquerade as a universal understanding of Dasein. But at bottom it remains indefinite what is really to be understood, and the question has not even been asked. Nor has it been understood that understanding itself is a potentiality-for-being which must be made free in one's ownmost Dasein alone.
Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, Division One, Chapter V.38.178 [3]
And yes, I speak as someone who himself has been guilty of this very action. And it is not to say that I will not travel again. In the future I likely will have a very strong desire to immigrate to another country as well. So my message is not that you should never travel, although from the perspective of lowering carbon emissions I can't exactly say that that would be a bad thing. My advice would be to view travel as a pilgrimage, and to keep alive such a spirit. All travel should be accompanied by a deep spiritual sense of reverence and humility. You might travel less and take more time to spiritually prepare yourself for the journeys, but those journeys will be all the more valuable for it. There are a lot of places over the world where the sheer number of visitors has overwhelmed and sullied the original sense of majesty and grandeur, but Mecca is not one of these. It remains so because of the purpose and meaning attached to every pilgrim's journey there. I'm not saying that more places should adopt this kind of religious discrimination. I think it is great that you can visit shrines in Japan no matter what your religion is, for example. But I do think that it is our responsibility to hold ourselves to high standards as travelers in exchange for that. If you don't have the right attitude and comportment, you will be part of the swarm, turning the whole world into the same globalized monoculture.
1. Arthur Schopenhauer [trans. R.J. Hollingdale], Essays and Aphorisms, "On Psychology" 28, Penguin Books, 1973, p. 178-179
2. Laozi [trans. D.C. Lau], Dao De Jing, Terebess Asia Online, Verse 47
3. Martin Heidegger [trans. John MacQuarrie & Edward Robinson], Being and Time, Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2008, Division One, Chapter V.38.178