Travel makes you stupid
Travel makes you stupid. Search for nearby refutations—a family member returning from their honeymoon, a high school friend posting updates on their backpacking trip—and be assured that you will encounter the lower limits of imagination and intellect.
An acquaintance, regaling listeners of his recent travels to South Korea, spoke breathlessly of the country’s technological innovations, assuring us that his hotel room featured a nearly-sentient toilet, while the grocery stores all had “robotic doors”. We too marvelled momentarily, before remembering that the automated door has been a part of public life for as long as we could remember.
A distant relative travelling to Paris recently asked her Facebook friends for “Recommendations” (a fairly new Facebook feature which we can only hope goes the way of the Gift and the Poke). As if to support Mr. Zuckerberg’s assurances of the power of his digital community, friends immediately jumped to her aid: “Eiffel Tower!”, “Notre Dame!”, and something called “The Lovre!”.
If your friends and relations fail to convince, walk down the streets of Reykjavik, where at any moment you can find hundreds of travellers stopping to take pictures of cats. Ordinary house cats, fundamentally similar to the ones that the photographers might find back at their homes or in their local animal shelters. What will these photographers think in five years’ time? They’ll be sitting some place, fretting about Scott Baio’s sadly predictable rise to elected office when their phone will buzz with a summons to nostalgia: “Look! Five years ago you were in Iceland, where you took 35 poorly lit and unfocused photos of this tabby!”
Another example from Iceland, if only because it is too perfect a demonstration of the argument (and it must be said that that poor tiny nation suffers disproportionately from its travellers). Over the summer, a group of tourists contacted the authorities in some alarm, warning that they had seen a polar bear travelling the countryside. This isn’t entirely unheard of, and so the national news media eagerly picked up the story, offering near-constant updates on the hunt for the beast. But the excitement was short lived: upon examining the evidence, the authorities declared that the marauding polar bear was in fact a grazing sheep. To appreciate the massive stupidity of this mistake one has to understand that the Icelandic sheep, though famously tenacious, is an incredibly diminutive animal, closer in size to a small dog than a Merino or Suffolk.
That travel makes you stupid should come as no surprise. Almost all forms of human knowledge are local, embedded in our habits and bound to our familiar routines. Navigation, communication, any engagement with your surrounding environment: these depend on a sort of knowledge that is only gained habitually. The ability to read, create art or ask the right question in the proper circumstance, all of these may emerge from a universal inclination of the human mind, but it is attachment to a place which enables them. Every “lower order” activity you might think of—satisfying your appetite, sheltering your body, bathing yourself—depends upon ritual practices accumulated over long periods of time in relatively bounded space. Even those forms of knowledge which are not local—abstract philosophical reasoning or theoretical physics, for example—require one to sit in one place and think (even the Peripatetics were pretty much stationary).
Some will object that this line of argument is prejudicial against the experience of migrants, a global population whose annual growth seems sadly matched by a growth in misery and extreme hardship. But to appreciate the plight of the migrant, one must begin by acknowledging what is lost in their travels. Whatever drives their movement, all migrants will inevitably have to sacrifice the knowledge that is deeply attached to their homeland. As they travel, things that were once apparent—“How do I go about feeding my family?”, “Who do I call in an emergency?”—will become suddenly uncertain, and life will become precarious.
Surely, though, there are some forms of travel which are enlightening—what about exploration, asks the twenty-something currently Tweeting her way across Asia?
If one is asking about the “age of exploration”, then it must be admitted that what Columbus and de Gamba and Cabrillo and the rest were discovering was their own ignorance. That is not meant as admonition, though you may want to consider how stupid the first European travellers to the Americas must have looked to the local people, starved and sickly and gasping about India. The sort of knowledge that emerged from historical exploration was, by its nature, built from a serious of mistakes, misinterpretations and misunderstandings. While we may rightly celebrate the bravery and curiosity of past explorers, it would be inaccurate to characterise their individual efforts as acts of intelligence, for it is only after several blunders and catastrophes that traditional exploration accumulated into knowledge. What some call “mapping the unknown” might just as well be called stumbling in the dark.
If, instead, one is asking about contemporary exploration, then it must be admitted that present-day exploration is a party of two: deep-sea divers and astronauts. It seems unfair to place such individuals in the same group as the patrons of the Carnival Cruise company (though the difference will surely be narrowed by the commercialisationof everything). But even these highly technical forms of exploration demonstrate two principles of knowledge. First, where knowledge is present in either task, it is the result of some prior activity or thinking that was affixed to a definite place (say the training routines one completes in a familiar environment). Second, where the contemporary explorer is not engaged in a habituated activity, they are encountering the unknown.
Any modern traveller who invokes the language of exploration is merely admitting their own ignorance. Yet such admissions are more damning than they might have been for the 15 th century conquistador or the 21 st century cosmonaut. Today, ignorance of geography, of peoples or cultures, cannot be blamed on mystery. Much that can be gained in knowledge through the accumulation of exploratory efforts has already been accomplished, and that which remains requires a degree of training and technique which surpass the means of most.
Surely, though, travel exposes one to new cultures, imparting ever greater degrees of empathy and intercultural appreciation with each mile walked? If, as travellers, we are not engaging in exploration, then perhaps we are doing a sort of anthropology, uncovering new facts about the habits of those whom geography has rendered strange? Yet the practice of anthropology by its professionals should discourage such thinking. This is because, for the trained anthropologist, travel is not a means to understanding, but a massive and irritating obstacle to the same. Anthropology might be defined as the sustained effort to overcome the ignorance of travelling.
The most common anthropological method is staying put. Arriving at a new locale, the anthropologist is overwhelmed by their own ignorance: nothing they encounter makes sense. It is only by rooting themselves in a place, however temporarily, that the anthropologist renders the foreign intelligible. It may be for this reason (in addition to vague apprehensions about the colonial legacy) that so many anthropologists have started practicing their craft closer to home. The nearer an ethnographer is to their own place, the fewer cultural obstacles they have to overcome in their quest to know a culture.
Let’s assume, though, that the contemporary traveller does not seek to embellish their efforts with the language of anthropology. Their intellectual pursuit is more modest: they simply want to understand things of which they are, at a purely personal level, currently ignorant. Mostly they want to see how other people live, and maybe glimpse one of Earth’s many manmade and natural wonders. They do not aspire to produce general knowledge, but simply want to fill in some gap in their own experience.
Curiosity is a noble trait. If it is neither necessary nor sufficient for the production of knowledge, it can still play a part, however tangential. But does the curiosity of the contemporary traveller ever conclude in a deep knowledge of a foreign place, a genuine empathy for its people or a skilled knowledge of its environment? This seems unlikely: by its very nature, travel precludes the intimacy required to know a place or a people.
It would be easy enough to demonstrate this point with reference to the overwhelming damage currently being done by “over-tourism”. None of this damage is intentional all of it is the result of ignorance. If you have no attachment to a place, you cannot possibly sense the damage that might be done by your presence: the way that travel-related crowding has made everyday life in Venice unbearable, or how countless small towns along cruise routes around the world have been hollowed out and reshaped to better accommodate their transitory visitors. There is also the environmental damage, that unseen wreckage caused by emissions and consumption alongside the obvious devastation wrought by trampling and littering hordes who unknowingly disrupt the natural rhythms of a place.
All of this is plainly stupid. It is perhaps unfair, though, to argue that travel breeds stupidity and then demonstrate that argument with reference only to the stupidest sort of travellers. But the argument holds, I think, even in the brightest cases. Consider Anthony Bourdain.
A trained chef made famous by his memoirs of the kitchen, Bourdain eventually became one of the most celebrated and influential travel writers (and television presenters) of his time. Following his sudden death in early June, Bourdain was celebrated as a prose stylist, a pugnacious critic, and—most often—as an empath of unprecedented talent.
These qualities pulse through Bourdain’s early writing on kitchen life, passages heavy with wit and detail and understanding but still somehow light enough to consume at a rapid pace. In the article that made his name, Bourdain declared that “Gastronomy is the science of pain.” He went on to describe the miseries and miserliness of the industry in a uniquely carnal style, all sweaty bodies despoiling animal flesh into perfection. The pitch is clear: we all eat at restaurants, but twenty years labouring in te kitchen means that I know something about food that you don’t.
Literary fame meant that Bourdain was no longer confined to the kitchen. Liberated and travelling the world, Bourdain’s writing (or narration in the case of his television programs) was suddenly bloodless. Many of the themes remained consistent: bodily pain, danger and a commitment to craft (whatever the subject, Bourdain’s writing always seems to come wrapped in a leather jacket). But the knowledge was evacuated, displaced by thrills and the sort of musings that always accompany travel, about how in fact we are all actually very similar except for the ways in which we differ.
Nothing captures this transformation like Bourdain’s late affection for the grossed-out foreigner scene. In television and in interviews Bourdain seemed to delight in displays of gastronomic fortitude, eager to swallow anything that might revolt his audience. Such displays are noxious not because of the food, but because they see an empathic and intelligent person engaged in culinary pornography, the sort of shock footage one might expect from a sophomore on Spring Break hoping to achieve viral fame. These moments reveal a sad shift in the Kitchen Confidential author, once devoted to celebrating the unmediated experience of culture, now revolted by it.
More damaging still is the digital shrine that has emerged following Bourdain’s demise. Having suffered in life, Bourdain must continue to suffer at the hands of his admirers. It is now surprisingly difficult to find articles online written by Bourdain himself, so submerged are they beneath the remembrances. When one reads the man himself, it is most often in the form of a disembodied aphorism. Like all Internet Quotations, these are most similar to fast food: they offer banal and temporary comfort and are of entirely mysterious provenance.
The website of one travel magazine is representative, placing the best of Bourdain beside photos of poor, big-eyed children from the non-Western world. “I wanted to see the world – and I wanted the world to be just like the movies” Bourdain tells us, managing to summarise the stupidity of travel rather well. It is not merely that travel precludes knowledge, but that the modern traveller actually doesn’t care about knowing a people or place so much as consuming them (and only if they conform to cinematic expectations).
Imagine a person raised in the contemporary age, a time in which there is an almost innate curiosity of and appreciation for the world’s many cultures. This person will have been repeatedly told of the intellectual benefits of travel. They may even have begun to assume that anyone who hasn’t travelled is an ignorant boob, that to become intelligent one must escape. Yet so far, there own travels will have brought little in the way of enlightenment. A vacation to Ireland will have left little impression of the massive cultural change currently unfolding there. A trip to Paris might have found them eating a lot of bread, taking a lot of pictures, but still fundamentally ignorant of the ways in which food, entertainment and culture have been altered by recent immigration to that city.
What is a person who longs for cross-cultural exchange and knowledge to do, given that travel seems to offer only shallow indulgence? The answer is simple: read Jonathan Gold.
The late food critic for the Los Angeles Times and L.A. Weekly also died over the summer, which meant that he was often commemorated alongside Anthony Bourdain. Yet it is impossible to think of two more irreconcilable figures. The physical difference is, of course, striking, and the two would have fundamental differences over Los Angeles (Bourdain seems to have loathed the city that Gold so movingly celebrated). But their differences are more fundamental.
To begin with, there is the difference in style. Gold’s prose is knowing, and in a way that is completely opposed to the Bourdain worldview. Bourdain often hurled allusions at the reader or audience, giving the impression of great learning without applying any of it. Gold, in contrast, brought his deep learning to a piece with much more deliberation, carefully explaining both the source of this outside knowledge as well as its application to the task at hand. Bourdain’s style was pugnacious, but also mercurial, often failing to establish why an argument mattered before moving on to the next fight. Gold’s reviews, by contrast, were brave: a review was just as likely to excoriate his own pretensions as the offending chef.
These differences of style emerge from a fundamentally different approach to people, place and culture. Gold has been rightly celebrated for his pioneering celebrations of the world’s food (in short, Gold wrote columns on the food of American immigrants before it was trendy to do so). Yet Gold stayed in Los Angeles his entire life. His writing is none the worse for it. In fact, Gold’s attachment to a place allowed him to understand what was at stake in the meals he ate. What often reads like intuition was more often the product of deep familiarity: an awareness of ancient and emerging fault lines within and across L.A. neighbourhoods, a keen eye for (and suspicion of) the role of performance and peacocking in his city.
But Gold’s knowledge wasn’t merely residential; he cared enough about his subject to read endlessly. Traditional recipes, regional histories, music and art: his reviews are stained with study. Gold’s sensitivity to place, coupled with intensive research, meant that he was always surefooted in new territory, able to discern what was old and what was new in whatever dish he might eat.
I don’t think Jonathan Gold ever wanted the world to look like a movie (living in L.A. likely inured him to such fantasies). The world didn’t need to look like a movie because there was enough beauty and flavor and weirdness in the strip mall down the block. Jonathan Gold offers an important lesson for an era mindlessly dedicated to movement: if you want to know the world, try staying put.