The Case Against Travel

When I came across Agnes Callard’s The Case Against Travel in The New Yorker earlier this year, I was intrigued for two reasons:

• I’d read Callard’s Aspiration: The Agency of Becoming and found it to be an obscure but thought-provoking (and at times, beautiful) look at how we become better than we are.
• I’d recently tried (and failed) to articulate my own misgivings about leisure travel. I was curious to see how a professional writer-philosopher would fare.

Callard’s essay is more “historical survey” than it is “case against.” Her specific points of criticism (that tourism turns us into the worst version of ourselves while convincing us that we’re at our best, that it changes the people and places we visit more than it changes us, that it’s dehumanizing and self-undermining) all contain at least a kernel of truth, but she presents most of these points through other writers, offering only half-hearted argumentation in support of them. I suspect this is intentional: it’s not her case against travel; it’s the case. She’s just a docent, walking us through the gallery.

It’s tricky, making an argument against travel. From a philosophical standpoint, it’s too broad a concept to categorically argue for or against. From a practical standpoint, it’s so widely enjoyed and so culturally entrenched that even a good argument is unlikely to change anyone’s mind. But it’s a pastime worthy of interrogation, and I respect the attempt.

Callard is particularly skeptical of travel as transformative experience, writing that it’s “a boomerang. It drops you right where you started.” This is true of the average vacation, but in aggregate, my travels have landed me somewhere quite different from where I began:

• I’ve come to see leisure travel primarily as a means to other ends: personal discovery, cultural exchange, environmental appreciation, etc. These are wonderful things—some of life’s best—but I can find these things closer to home, often without the ugly tradeoffs inherent in travel.
• I see little difference between leisure travel and the materialism it’s often contrasted against (“millennials value experiences over things”). They’re both forms of consumerism, driven by an acquisitive impulse that is deeply human, but prone to excess and almost impossible to satisfy.
• I now believe that some places are so special that they’re better off without me going there. Places where my presence, however brief, respectful, or “mitigated,” is so environmentally or culturally harmful that it’s essentially vandalism. I can’t undo where I’ve been, but I can be more mindful about where I go, moving forward.
• I think the communities we call home are begging for us to be more present/involved/attuned, and many of us are begging for a deeper sense of community. Traveling globally and living locally aren’t mutually exclusive, but they do compete for attention, and I know I want more of the latter.
• I’ve lost my love for flying. While air travel accounts for a relatively small portion of global annual emissions, it occupies a much larger share of my carbon footprint, as it does for many Americans (roughly half of whom fly in a given year, compared to the global 80% who’ve never flown anywhere). The per-passenger emissions associated with one long-haul round-trip flight is greater than the annual per capita emissions of more than a dozen countries. Even on a “flight diet,” I’m the global equivalent of the guy driving the Hummer. I don’t want to be that guy.

To be clear, I still travel and occasionally fly. I still enjoy visiting new places. But I’m trying (with mixed success) to explore things closer to home, apply the traveler’s sense of curiosity/wonder to my immediate surroundings, and limit my flights to seeing loved ones rather than satisfying my own wanderlust. This feels like progress, but it also feels like an inadequate compromise between my personal preferences and what the world needs from people like me.

I’d hoped that Callard’s essay might help me resolve this intrinsic conflict—that it would further diminish my appetite for travel and have a similar effect on others. This is asking too much of a magazine article, but Callard hasn’t left us empty-handed. As I continue to wrestle with the ethics of leisure travel and other forms of high-impact consumption, I find wisdom in her book, which is itself a study of transformation and how to resolve intrinsic conflicts when they inevitably arise.

In her book, Callard suggests that rather than reasoning in spite of our desires, we can achieve better outcomes by reasoning toward better desires. For example, rather than thinking in terms of willpower and negative prescriptions (“don’t eat the cookie”), we can think in terms of wantpower (“learn to want the salad”). The latter is achieved through a gradual process of committing to new values and having the self-awareness and self-compassion to view it as such. To quote Callard, “aspiration is work, and we often want to be further along in this work than we are.” To apply this to my situation, the value I’m aspiring towards is not “less travel” but “more contentment,” which almost certainly involves less travel, but would be worth striving for even if climate change weren’t the defining issue of our time.

For those on a similar path—aspiring to something better for themselves and for the planet—where, if anywhere, does travel fit? Perhaps the best of travel can help us avoid the worst of travel, and even help embolden behavior change in an ecologically overburdened world. For me, nothing captures the best of travel quite like this quotation adapted from Marcel Proust: “the real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.” Callard’s essay reminds us that having new eyes is not as easy as we think, but her book reminds us that it’s possible, using strikingly similar language: “the aspirant is trying to see the world through another person’s eyes, namely, through the eyes of the person who has the value she aspires to acquire.”

The ability to see things differently is available to everyone, right now, no travel required. It’s a process that requires work, patience, and self-compassion. But when it comes to addressing climate change and ecological overshoot, we can’t mistake patience for complacency. Viewing climate action through Callard’s aspirational lens brings us almost to a paradox: the transformation we seek demands patience in the moment (we are where we are) and severe impatience in the medium-term (we want/need to be someplace very different by 2050). This is not our strong suit as a species, but it is not outside our grasp.

Special thanks to Toby and especially Lindsay for reading (many, many) drafts of this essay and generously offering their time and thoughtful feedback. I couldn’t have written this without you!