On Travel

Reflections on Human Biodiversity and Belonging

Clichés abound about the concept of travel, in some ways papering over the real benefits to the soul. One might come back from a study abroad semester having “found herself,” or claim that the very experience of touching down in another continent is a dissolving agent against the apparent distinctions between peoples. I contend that the fundamental relationship that travel done rightly relies upon is an adversarial one between you as the tourist and the world. This is not to imply any kind of hostility; the traveler navigates the novelty of a new place as a challenge to both habit and cultural solipsism. One travels to be far from home, a tautology that nevertheless bears stating, and that distance, both physical and metaphorical, is something to be negotiated.

I won’t claim to have traveled the world. I still have never been to Africa (soon to be rectified, hopefully), and I have never lived outside the United States for an extended period of time. Most of my activities on my trips have been of the decidedly “touristy” variety. I do contend that many of those with pretenses toward “non-touristy” traveling are lying to themselves about who they are, pretending to be “above” the adversarial relationship with the foreign land that I outlined above, but that’s a story for another time.

Firstly, I have to touch on the tendency of the tourist to treat the living, breathing foreign land, a collective organism that is never quite in stasis, as a museum piece. Tourism, as we understand it, is mostly quite a recent concept. While Herodotus is remembered as “the first tourist,” having written his travelogues closer in time to the construction of the Giza Pyramids than to us, travel nowadays is defined by the smallness of the world. The world pre-homogenization was defined in every way by its parochialisms and reaches out to us today through its physical remnants, paradoxically made maximally accessible to us through the global reach of air travel and payment networks, resting on a bedrock of imposed standards and norms.

From the grand dome of the Pantheon in Rome, whose vast expanse swallows the casual tourist observer whole like the heavens themselves, to the swan-like Himeji Castle, perched gracefully upon its promontory and offering a glimpse of a Japan much older than the unbridled modernity of the surrounding plain, we tour old things on our travels because they were built by men who were utterly confident in both the rectitude of their pursuits and their progeny’s presence to enjoy them. These are monuments to the values of their creators in an almost naively unapologetic sense, an earnest reaching for the skies that we, in our postmodern cynicism, are not capable of replicating. We could hardly even attempt to create such beauty, as we lack the necessary cultural technologies. Ageless the piers of St. Peter’s stand, stalwart as the works of gods or giants rather than men. Swipe your Mastercard to unlock a glimpse of a facsimile of the world that made those piers possible.

Even so, these are monuments of inert wood and stone. They are not the people that made them, let alone the people that live around them now. One may book a trip to Athens with the goal of seeing the Acropolis, but that trip will involve a lot of connective tissue. A tourist will necessarily have to interact with the living, breathing organism that is the place on the way to the inert stone pillars that sold him the trip in the first place, at a minimum needing to get food and transportation. Many (perhaps most) tourists go seriously wrong at this point when they begin to unconsciously grapple with that adversarial relationship, and this causes distress, which causes them to slough as much lubricant as they can into the gears of the experience. They may book guided trips everywhere, only eat where the menus are in English, and so on, and so they fail to learn a lesson that only travel can teach on the visceral level that one should learn it.

I will assume for now, reader, that you are, like me, a Westerner. I am pretty damn American, even by American standards, and I make no pretenses otherwise, so imagine that you are me touching down in Tokyo. The place is unambiguously not like where you came from. The megacity’s vast expanse swallows you whole, the world seemingly contorting like a black hole so that all trajectories lead to concrete and neon. These paint dissertations echoing values that you don’t understand, in three different writing systems that collectively look to you like chicken scratch. It’s opaque, but it is novel. This is even true of the ads. Who didn’t stand in awe of the signage in Kabukichō, even though nearly all of it would be utterly inane to a local? And Kabukichō caters to tourists, no less. Most of the city doesn’t speak English, and you will probably have to use Japanese-language resources to actually experience any of the culture. Nevertheless, Tokyo is easy mode, as the city is highly functional and simple enough to negotiate if you do your part. Even with it being easy mode by the standards of non-Western cities, the lesson is unmistakable.

You do not belong here. The place makes no pretenses that way, and while it welcomes you as a guest, it does not seek your input in defining itself. You are a highly visible alien in this space. It’s not for you and never will be. Hands unlike yours made this place, and they made it for families and companies and groups of friends milling about that are quite unlike yours at home.

I would not be so bold to expect otherwise. A guest in another’s home should not go about rearranging the furniture. Pay attention to the people of a place and not just its sights, and you’ll quickly notice differences between countries in how loudly the locals talk, how much eye contact they make, how much personal space they require, and so on, and that’s without any real effort to dig deep and understand them. The realities of culture and ethnicity are not limited to language and folk holidays; they are the lifeblood of that living organism of a place and the people that make its busy little cells. Travel, undertaken honestly, obliterates the notion that there is “one race - the human race.”

It’s the honesty part that’s the challenge. The world cries out to remind the honest observer that it is not a collection of deracinated economic units, but a hodgepodge of real peoples and cultures, embroiled in their own parochialisms, and struggling to varying degrees to maintain them against the inexorable tides of modernity. Those who have already succumbed to the tides, inundated with propaganda about fungible Homo Economicus, experience something akin to a religious revulsion to any suggestion otherwise. Superficialities will be elevated in their minds to replace the deeper truths being thrust upon their unwilling and unready minds: “everybody was so kind and welcoming,” “just normal people going about their day-to-day,” and other such tired tropes. That those peoples may pray to different gods, see time in a fundamentally alien manner, or even mask hostile attitudes toward your “forward-thinking” sensibilities behind the forced smile of a service worker who expects a tip never enters into the equation. Western observers writ large do not know it because their constructed worldview prevents them from honestly assessing what they’re looking at (and because, as touched on before, they are limiting their own interactions with the lifeblood of the place), but those observers betray a profound disrespect for the multiplicity of peoples of the world by flattening out all distinctions in their minds.

Nevertheless, the shores of the world teem with people who feel no such compunction about leaving their homelands and reconstructing them out of your society. Their own parochialisms are so strong that they are cultural solipsists. It does not occur to them that their cultures produce the outcomes that they decry at home, and so they gaze across the waves in hunger, eyeing that which their peoples did not build as “duly deserved recompense” for the natural consequences of their civilizational programming. They do not even rationally come to the conclusion that you are obliged not only to take them in, but to honor their blood feuds and subsidize their existence in a country that they did not build. Their deep solipsism makes those assumptions unconsciously underpin their actions. While you may visit a foreign land and recognize yourself as a guest, there on the good graces of a great other, they do not recognize the other as valid in its assertion of its own interests. The tourist does not see the living organism of the host country because he focuses on the sights and not the society around them; the migrant is likewise blind because he sees only opportunities for his own acquisition of wealth and status.

Between catastrophically low birthrates and replacement migration, we may be living in the twilight years of several ethnicities. The proud Koreans, as one stark example, may be virtually extinct south of the DMZ, if current fertility trends continue and are papered over with an imported caste of migrants. The beleaguered peoples of the world stand a chance at preserving themselves if they assert themselves as distinct stones in a human mosaic, not to be ground down and aggregated with the others and so robbed of their unique color. It would crush me to know that the Japanese, for whom I have built up great admiration in recent years, would not survive as themselves to the end of the century. How much worse would it be to know that as a Japanese person?

In Sultanahmet Square, in the heart of the old city of Istanbul, stands an ancient Egyptian obelisk, named after Emperor Theodosius, but predating him by nearly two millennia. It was relocated there by the Romans as a piece of imperial loot and continues to stand proud in that bustling square of the now Muslim metropolis. The street level is now considerably higher than the floor of the hippodrome that used to stand around it, host to baying crowds of Greens and Blues cheering on their champions and occasionally killing each other over them, and so the obelisk juts off its base defiantly out of a pit in the ground, the past demanding that the present observe that “I was here.” The chaotic street scene of today, complete with the touts and scammers and Chinese tour groups clacking away at their DSLRs, plays out daily all around this incredibly old piece of art, deterritorialized twice over. Is it a monument of ancient Egyptian piety, of Roman triumph, or of post-Ottoman cosmopolitanism? The inert rock does not shout the answer to you, only announcing its mere presence.

Not unlike the Statue of Liberty in Planet of the Apes, the fate of that obelisk, transplanted and subject to context that its creators could not have imagined, is the potential fate of the Empire State Building, of Westminster Abbey, of Notre-Dame de Paris, or of so many other civilization-defining monuments, that they may remain as the civilization around them does not, deterritorialized by the swelling tides of Homo Economicus and an army of scavengers upon its corpse. These dead bones of the West would lack the animating flesh of their civilizational context to be anything but nodes on a travel itinerary for some future tourist. And yet, something breathes in them still if the peoples and cultures that gave birth to them still stir. This does not need to be the twilight of any of the great peoples of the world: the Koreans, the Russians, the English, and so on, if only they choose to remain so and see themselves as an organism that must, in keeping with the drives that made it, choose life. The word “diversity” has been so thoroughly ruined by the postwar push for global deracination that I hesitate to use it, Orwellian doublespeak if ever I saw it, but a true friend to diversity would want to see that the peoples of the world preserve themselves as distinct peoples and ensure that the world stays colorful.

It is good for the soul of the Westerner to travel abroad and be among peoples unlike him, to subject himself to novelty to perhaps uncomfortable degrees, and to take stock of how much about him is a cultural and ethnic contingency. This creates respect for the depth of the distinctions between peoples, and the West, if it is to maintain its fundamental character, must demand as a non-negotiable that this respect be reciprocated. Our “guests,” often outright invaders, not only rearrange the furniture; they throw yours out the window and replace it with scuffed, scavenged pieces from the alley, scribble on the walls, and ship your fine silverware to their extended families elsewhere. The fraud, general deceit, naked contempt for the folkways of their host countries, and barely hidden postcolonial resentment make this state of affairs impossible to ignore or excuse. They even march through European Christmas markets and harass the locals into submission. They will tell you with a straight face, out of their own ethnic solipsism, that you have no valid interest in the maintenance of your own house, even though they “belong” in our house precisely as much as I belong in Japan. Respect the world and command that it respects you back; remind the “Global South” that the West has parochialisms of its own, and that they will be preserved in its homelands with force. Perhaps, upon rediscovering that we are legitimate in our assertions of those parochialisms, we will even create beauty again.