If you’re still thinking about a quickie vacation trip to Europe this summer, don’t.
The COVID pandemic seems to be over (we hope), so tourists catching up on pleasure travel have descended upon the usual spots in their millions. Coastal cities such as Barcelona are appealing to cruise lines to limit their stops; locals no longer can handle the daily hordes who stream down the gangplanks like barbarian invaders. Iceland, population 375,000 or so, was overwhelmed by 1.7 million foreign visitors last year.
Italy? Fugget about it.
Erich Bridges
Clearly, tourism is a blessing and a curse, both for tourists and the destinations they visit. Tourists love to see the sights but hate jostling with countless others who have the same idea. Their hosts love tourist dollars but resent the visitor stampede.
And now comes a New Yorker piece — “The Case Against Travel” by Agnes Callard (June 24) — questioning the whole idea of travel as an enriching experience. Collard, a philosopher and professor at the University of Chicago, raised hackles by renewing the attack on travel as a way to explore our common humanity. She cites some heavy hitters who agree with her:
“G.K. Chesterton wrote that ‘travel narrows the mind.’ Ralph Waldo Emerson called travel ‘a fool’s paradise.’ Socrates and Immanuel Kant … voted with their feet, rarely leaving their respective hometowns of Athens and Konigsberg. But the greatest hater of travel, ever, was the Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa (who declared), ‘I abhor new ways of life and unfamiliar places. … The idea of traveling 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.’”
The ‘traveler’s delusion’?
Ouch. Didn’t realize I was such a philistine. I experience wanderlust on a regular basis and consider a year wasted if I don’t go somewhere far away at least once. The COVID shutdown was agonizing, but I still managed a trip to Turkey in 2021. I can barely wait for a planned return to the Middle East, one of my favorite destinations, this fall.
I caught the global travel bug during 35 years as a journalist for the Southern Baptist International Mission Board. That job — and calling — took me to more than 40 countries, and I have no intention of staying home just because I’m retired. But Callard thinks I’m deluding myself in believing I’m expanding my horizons or enlarging my empathy for fellow humans by going abroad.
“Pessoa, Emerson and Chesterton believed that travel, far from putting us in touch with humanity, divorced us from it,” she writes. “Travel turns us into the worst version of ourselves while convincing us that we’re at our best. Call this the traveler’s delusion. …”
Tourism, she continues, is “marked by its locomotive character. ‘I went to France.’ OK, but what did you do there? ‘I went to the Louvre.’ OK, but what did you do there? ‘I went to see the Mona Lisa.’ That is, before quickly moving on: apparently, many people spend just 15 seconds looking at the Mona Lisa. It’s locomotion all the way down. …
“Travel is fun, so it’s not mysterious that we like it. What is mysterious is why we imbue it with vast significance, an aura of virtue. If vacation is merely the pursuit of unchanging change, an embrace of nothing, why insist on its meaning?”
“Callard is talking about tourism, not travel. There’s a profound difference.”
Ah, but there’s the weakness in her argument. Callard is talking about tourism, not travel. There’s a profound difference.
Tourism — seeing the sights, getting the latest notch on your belt and the obligatory pictures into your camera while spending a fortune on trinkets, hotels and “excursions” — is not travel. It’s mere diversion. It’s vacation.
I’m not much of a tourist. Museums and visual wonders are great and sometimes fascinating, but I find myself yawning after a few days. Only a few sights have inspired true awe in my soul: The pyramids at Giza. Westminster Cathedral. The Great Wall of China. General Sherman, the towering sequoia tree that has stood for more than 2,000 years. The remains of the Second Temple in Jerusalem. Even these wonders, however, didn’t change me in any fundamental way.
But traveling far and wide does change me, because it gets me out of my narrow, cramped world of routines, small ideas, small talk and American cultural expectations.
Twain’s philosophy
I’m partial to Mark Twain’s philosophy of travel, which he developed in an age when few Americans without personal fortunes ever went abroad. Twain wandered all over the world, loved travel and believed in its power to make us better human beings — if we allow it to do so.
“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts,” Twain wrote. “Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.”
“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts.”
No one nailed narrow-mindedness more mercilessly than Twain. I consider him an expert on the subject. He particularly enjoyed skewering narrow-minded church folk. I don’t think he was an atheist, but it’s safe to say he loathed organized religion and its efforts to convert the heathen.
“Man is a Religious Animal,” he wrote. “He is the only Religious Animal. He is the only animal that has the True Religion — several of them. He is the only animal that loves his neighbor as himself and cuts his throat if his theology isn’t straight.”
And again: “So much blood has been shed by the Church because of an omission from the Gospel: ‘Ye shall be indifferent as to what your neighbor’s religion is.’ Not merely tolerant of it, but indifferent to it. Divinity is claimed for many religions; but no religion is great enough or divine enough to add that new law to its code.”
That’s where Twain and I part company, of course. Indifference is the death of faith. If faith isn’t worth sharing, it isn’t worth having. I believe the God of Israel, through Jesus the Messiah of the world, redeemed my lost soul nearly 50 years ago, and he wants to do the same for everyone else. I believe Jesus is not just a way to God, but the way, the truth and the life — as he himself said, if we accept John 14:6 as an accurate record of Jesus’ words. Our chief task as Christ followers in this world is to worship Jesus and to spread the good news (gospel) of his grace and offer of salvation everywhere.
That should always be a peaceful and loving enterprise, however. Twain, no doubt, had seen or heard about the worst sides of Christian missions and evangelism in an age of cultural arrogance and colonialism. Hence his cynicism about the whole program.
Fatal to indifference
That brings me back to travel. It is fatal to prejudice, bigotry and narrow-mindedness, as Twain said. It is also fatal to indifference, which is even worse than those three evils. If you know there’s a great big world out there that needs your love and understanding, and you just don’t care enough to go (if going is within your means), you are much to be pitied.
So get out there — or get back out there if it’s been a while since you went abroad. Don’t be a tourist; be a traveler. Take a mission trip. Visit the needy, oppressed places where tourists don’t want to go. Spend time in people’s homes. Listen to them with respect. Learn from them with humility. Help them if you can. Love them. If they’re willing to listen, tell them about the eternal hope you have in your heart. I’ve never seen someone turn down an offer of prayer, even if they believe in other gods or no god.
If nothing else, you’ll get out of yourself and your little world. You may even get some relief from the stifling, toxic culture wars suffocating American Christianity, where believers (conservative and progressive) relentlessly attack each other for not embracing the “correct” positions on any number of secondary issues.
Do you really think your all-consuming First World issue, no matter how important it may be to you, is God’s biggest concern in this world of staggering suffering, poverty, war and need?
Even Mark Twain would approve of that kind of mission trip.
Erich Bridges, a Baptist journalist for more than 40 years, retired in 2016 as global correspondent for the Southern Baptist Convention’s International Mission Board. He lives in Richmond, Va.