“We had had the experience of a lifetime but it was not the experience that we had hoped for; it was like a lifetime of disappointment compressed into less than a week, which actually felt like it had lasted the best — in the sense of worse — part of a lifetime.”
-Geoff Dyer, White Sands
Holed up in our homes for around eighteen months, my acquaintances without children seem to be venturing out into what we used to call “the world,” buying plane tickets, renting cars, and booking Airbnbs to the various places that they believe (we all believe) will calm anxieties: Cabo San Lucas, Taipei, Tuscany, or Santiago…it doesn’t really matter. Anywhere but “here.” Even as our global situation has fits and starts, I’ve got that old familiar pressure to “go see the world.” Do you?
Tourism — or what my generation calls “traveling” — is a relatively new luxury that has now become commonplace. In 1980, less than 1 billion people traveled on airplanes either internationally or domestically in the United States. By 2019, the annual number had ballooned to 4.6 billion people, which is nearly double what it was just ten years prior in 2009 (2.5 billion). Through most of the 20th century, plane travel was done only for necessity: business or military ventures. Our great-grandparents never traveled much outside of a 300 mile radius unless they worked for the United States Government or a missions organization. This impulse to visit somewhere far away is, of course, an invention of the past 40-or-so-years as global air travel has become more affordable and accessible. Social media has certainly played a role as now we need not be bored by a slideshow or scrapbook of someone’s trip to Estonia, but instead we get the highlights of one stunning shot of the Baltic Sea. “We have to go,” we say to whoever is near to us. It is now socially strange to tell someone you really have no desire to go to Johannesburg or Phuket or Edinburgh.
Traveling is now also included in how we think about friends or significant others. Seeking compatibility and accountability, we pair up with our “adventure buddy,” a spouse or partner, with whom we dream of traveling the world: a table for two in Rome, two glasses of wine overlooking the Mediterranean Sea, sharing a bench at the base of Kirkjufell Mountain, sharing a glamping tent underneath the skies of Zion National Park. These images (mostly given to us on Instagram) are no longer dreams we have, but expectations. How will we really understand what it means to be alive if we cannot walk around Salzburg or bungie jump on Stewart Island? If we can’t travel and experience the world, we’re not sure we can truly live. And the people we surround ourselves with must understand this, we think.
Here now is where I will make a distinction between “traveling” and “the Idol of Tourism.” Travel is wonderful: take a trip with friends, go see your family, explore a new city, get on a plane, get lost for a bit, feel like an outsider. Travel is wonderful and we live in a remarkable time to see the world and experience it. But the Idol of Tourism may be lurking. Tim Keller defines idolatry as “a good thing becoming an ultimate thing” — and travel experiences are certainly one idol of younger generations in America. Travel is the ability to go to new places without placing spiritual significance in the venture, but the Idol of Tourism is infusing your travel plans with such transcendental weight that you believe it will actually change your life — and that if you do not experience other cultures, you will not be the full human being you need to be. By all means, travel, but beware of a good thing becoming ultimate.
The difference can be subtle. Some of my greatest experiences with friends and family have come through travel. Getting out of our homes with people we love build memories and create intimacy. But from February 2020 until August 2021, I did not board an airplane. And as I have been grounded, I have thought a lot about the loss of travel, not only for our family, but for a lot of the world: is tourism a positive thing? I have here, just a few reasons to empty your travel plans of any spiritual significance:
1. Tourism can elevate and detach us from real people
We travel places to get a sense of culture, people, and history, but when we do so as a tourist — someone visiting in order to consume something — we rid ourselves of true presence and availability to the needs of a community. When traveling, we are not interested in giving the city anything, but taking from it, both physically and metaphysically. What this does is remove us from any ability to truly engage with human beings in any real sense. We leave our own communities, neighbors, family, and friends, to float above other communities as an observer, not a participant. “The tourist is a type of consumer,” the scholar William Cavanaugh writes, “a consumer of places” (Being Consumed, pg. 74). We enjoy the skyline of New York City without having to deal with the city’s never-ending staircases and subway delays, or we enjoy the beaches of Jamaica by turning a blind eye to the vast poverty we see on the taxi ride to the resort. This kind of tourism requires an inattention to the real city we flew to in order to enjoy a part of it that no person living there actually experiences.
In his book of essays, Consider the Lobster, the writer David Foster Wallace expands a thought on tourism in a lengthy footnote:
“To be a mass tourist, for me, is to become a pure late-date American: aliens, ignorant, greedy for something you cannot ever have, disappointed in a way you can never admit. It is to spoil, by way of sheer ontology, the very unspoiledness you are there to experience. It is to impose yourself on places that in all non-economic ways would be better, realer, without you…As a tourist, you become economically significant but existentially loathsome, an insect on a dead thing” (Consider the Lobster, pg. 240).
A somewhat dark footnote, but it’s DFW, so what did you expect? The point can be taken, though, as we understand the subtle ways travel can make us into the very opposite of what we want it to: instead of becoming more cultured and cosmopolitan, we become irreverent, dumb, blind, even — not actually understanding the economics and politics of the spaces we take up with our roller bags and sunglasses.
2. Tourism can inflate our ego
If you came of age in the 90s or early 2000s, you had a friend or several friends who backpacked through Europe. As illustrated in one of the better scenes of dialogue in the Noah Baumbach classic, Kicking and Screaming, everyone went to Prague. And most everyone who went to Europe came back a little bit of an ass. Because when we are tourists we stand above the culture and not inside of it. And because we are there for a matter of days, we are possessed with the illusion of understanding a place we truly have not inhabited. We think we understand the culture of a specific location just because we watched it for a little while. If we’re not careful, we become the dude who lectures a dinner party all about “the people of Vietnam” while guests silently look for something — anything — with which they can stab themselves in the eye. Look, not all travel makes us pretentious dweebs, but tourism seems to allow for more pride than humility. And as someone who is generally pretentious, I can’t imagine what I would be like if I actually had the money and ability to leave my house more.
We think traveling will make us better people, but what if it made us worse?This is something we tend to not think about when we’re scouring the internet for deals on flights and hotels. Ask yourself, as Geoff Dyer does, just how different are you having seen the Northern Lights than not having seen the Northern Lights? What, really, is the difference between the you who spent 10 days away and the you who did not? Does travel make you more humble and helpful to those immediately around you?
3. Because tourism is not available to all human beings, it is not a necessary ingredient to living a full human life.
The other subtle form of pride that comes from tourism is the ways in which we are not able to look down upon the poor souls who haven’t been to Dubai or Beijing or Munich. As World Travelers, we begin to think that those who are stuck in one place cannot offer us a “global perspective” the way other World Travelers can. But I have found much more spiritual depth, insight, and humility from those who rarely get on planes than from those that do. For all the amazing stories a world traveler can tell me, I consider some of the best wisdom to come from people who are placed, whether by choice or not. Is it possible that the poor widow who has never left her village actually has more to offer us in conversation than the globetrotter with a passport full of stamps?
Billions of people are unable to leave their home for all kinds of reasons: mental and physical disabilities, poverty, age, health restrictions, family obligations, work, or age. Don’t these people have a kind of wisdom the tourists do not? Are they not able to live a full human life without having “seen the world?”
4. Tourism, by definition, removes us from the practice and responsibility of the place in which we live
Over this season of required at-home living, I am certain I have become closer to my immediate neighbors than I would have had it never happened. Even having a child, while it has limited my ability to travel, has opened me up to conversations I would have never had if my son had never been born, and helped me keep my attention on a rooted life I do not think I had before. A measure of Christian maturity is: have I become more immediately available to love and serve the people closest to me or not (Matthew 22:36–40)? Have we actually become more loving and available and faithful or not? I’m not completely sure of the answer here (and should probably ask my wife, although I fear the answer), but my hunch is that tourism does not (generally) increase my availability towards those to whom I am responsible. Staying home does. The theologian Walter Brueggemann puts it this way, and it seems fitting to give him the last word:
“[The urban promise] concerned human persons who could lead detached, unrooted lives of endless choice and no commitment. It was glamorized around the virtues of mobility and anonymity that seemed so full of promise for freedom and self-actualization. But it has failed…It is now clear that a sense of place is a human hunger that the urban promise has not met…it is rootlessness and not meaninglessness that characterizes the current crisis.”
-Walter Brueggemann, The Land
