Two Notes on Travel

Agnes Callard complains about travel. If you have ever shared the misfortune of a certain genre of conversation, you know she has a point. To leave it there would be the stylish thing.

Callard is right that travelling is nothing to be proud of. You can do a bad job at it too (sometimes travelling is something to be ashamed of). You go somewhere, look at the important bits, try to feel whatever you are supposed to feel. “To be a tourist is to have already decided that it is not one’s own feelings that count,” Callard reports.

What else? Travel is a state of temporary leisure, travel is a reprieve. We get a way to mark and split up life – before vacation, after vacation, a little empty patch sandwiched in between. This is a mistake. Instead, Callard says, we should notice that we are on a single uninterrupted trek towards, putting it cutely, “doing nothing and being nobody.”

Of course travel cannot save us. (It’s like most stuff that way.) One may suspect we’ve been set up. For Callard travel names an aspiration. "Aspiration" in the colloquial sense, not the particular kind involving proleptic reasons Callard talks about in other work. Then we could aspire less, and save ourselves the trouble. The case for travel is sad but sturdy. Traveling is a nice way to pass time. The world is biggish, and traveling can help you make a picture of it. It feels different being in one place or another. Some places have got special pleasures. At least they have all got different people in them. Those are probably the best – if not the only – reasons.

As for the original mistake: having a good picture of the world, unfortunately, will not make you particularly interesting. In fact it will flatten you out. I’m pretty sure it’s local commitments and importantly local prejudices that make people interesting.

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It should be much harder to travel. Long treks, highwaymen. Scurvy maybe. Cosmopolitanism is nice, I’m not sure it’s nice enough. We are making a trade. It is very hard for places to stay themselves.

“Stay themselves,” what does that mean? It sounds faintly like a dog whistle. I do not tend towards essentialism. I will not claim there is some deep, also fragile, quality of e.g. the British which must be protected, lest their palettes expand too far, such that their appetite for the venerable (and strictly hueless) chip butty is lost, and then the whole British thing slips into oblivion.

But it is very hard for places to stay themselves. I mean: a “place” is a useful idea, a name for a bundle of land, people, buildings, weather, random facts (“history” if you prefer), and other stuff too. These bundles are fragile. Here I am supposed to say something about McDonald’s. I have no complaints, no one has ever gotten confused about McDonald’s, everybody either likes it or dislikes it, they enjoy it either way. Instead I would like to complain about culture. By that I mean aspiration, all the respectable bits, and how they are constantly getting mixed together.

That's the stuff which makes a place. Places are not obviously different from one another. They are only so many ways to make a bundle – or rather, we are quickly insensitive to those more subtle variations which remain. And people are a lot like one another. If you wanted a nice heuristic you might say that they are all pretty much the same. It takes a place to make people so different from one another.

We like to observe (and it happens to be true): we are used to material produced under a set of intense pressures. Social media is the famous case; and a special case of social networks. Social networks are getting thicker. Places are more and more like each other because they are part of one consuming social world. People talk to each other, and notice they have a lot in common.

Is this so bad anyway? Maybe there are instrumental problems. Mostly the good stuff is fragile. Or: a good evolutionary algorithm keeps islands . I think it is worth having different kinds of places, and not just so that we can harvest them for a richer cosmopolitan monoculture later. Nor am I inclined to duck out taking “cultural diversity” as a natural good. But the right idea, I think, corresponds pretty tightly.

The good stuff is behind the curtain. It cannot survive the common view. Then keep those self-justifying, badly parochial flavors of aspiration, which recognize and deny a broader world – which each identify the “real world,” disagreeing violently as they do it.

How do you save a place? For a start, it should cost a lot to be there. In fact cities work like this. Unfortunately the thing it costs is money and the way you pay is rent. That is a really uneven cost (some people are rich, others less so). Suffering, on the other hand, is more even. In that regard air travel gets some stuff right (and is fast improving). Unfortunately a plane ride is over far too soon, so still too cheap.

Regret also falls evenly Opportunity cost. Excepting temperment. . That is what you pay when you spend half the year crossing the Appalachians, the Mississippi, the great plains and the Rockies. Let me be clear: if you have “NYC/SF” in your bio, this is what I want to see you do.

So out with planes. Boats can stay, though nothing too big or comfortable. What about rail? At the least it should involve a lot of transfers and sporadic scheduling and inflict a general and enduring sense of malaise. Here and elsewhere, Europe lags, the Americans are far out ahead.