Episode 135 - Travel

Transcript

David: 0:22

Hello and welcome to Overthink.

Ellie: 0:25

The podcast where your two favorite philosophy professors take you along the road, less traveled.

David: 0:30

I am David Pena Guzman.

Ellie: 0:32

And I'm Ellie Anderson. There's a common misconception that philosophers don't travel. Many think that we are sort of up in our ivory tower armchair thinking about abstract ideas with no real connection to the real world. And in one of the books that I really enjoyed reading in preparation for this episode, it's called Philosophers Abroad, the Meaning of Travel by Emily Thomas, Thomas points out that this misconception is likely due to two figures. Kant, who famously barely ever traveled outside of Konigsberg where he lived in spite of writing an entire text on anthropology in which he speculated about different races. And second Socrates who never actually set foot outside of the city walls of Athens.

David: 1:20

Yeah, I mean, fair point. If you're trying to paint a picture of the traditional philosopher by the standards of Socrates and the magician from  Konigsberg, you're gonna get a very reclusive image of who we are and what we do. Although, I think this also raises the question of what we mean by travel, because although neither Socrates nor Kant ever really left their hometown, I mean, they kind of traveled within their hometown because both of them love to go on walks. I mean, Socrates is a peripatetic philosopher, engaging people in the agora, and Kant was famous for going on these walks that were super regular, to the point that some of his neighbors and other locals would tell what time of the day it was by seeing the philosopher walking around. So it's a kind of like local travel, I would say.

Ellie: 2:09

Okay, David, so you are absolutely right that what we mean by travel is an open question, and that's something we'll be really getting into in the episode. Like what is travel versus just kind of moving around. However, I don't think by anyone's definition of travel, walking around the city you live in counts. So I think that's a bridge too far.

David: 2:29

What travel is not just literally locomotion. I'm not traveling to the store a little later today to buy some oat milk.

Ellie: 2:36

Yeah, yeah. No, I'm gonna, I'm gonna say you're definitely overthinking that one. But luckily we don't have only Socrates and Kant as our philosophical models of travel. Thomas points out that actually many philosophers traveled far and wide. Confucius, for instance, spent years traveling through states that are now part of China, and legend has it that his contemporary Lao Tzu wrote most of his teachings at a border crossing. The modern philosophers, Thomas Hobbes, Margaret Cavendish, and John Locke all wandered the European continent in political exile, and this is my favorite one in the 20th century philosopher, W V Quine used steamers and airplanes to visit 137 countries. That is a lot of countries.

David: 3:20

Oh my God. Quine is the kind of person that would brag about his passports having all these stamps,

Ellie: 3:25

He has a lot of stamps.

David: 3:26

But that's kind of weird coming from Quine because he very famously said that he was a lover of desert landscapes in his philosophy, but meanwhile, he's leading this very exuberant life, traveling all over the world. I don't know how those two things fit.

Ellie: 3:41

I don't quite get that because it seems like if somebody's traveled a lot, first off, yeah, they're traveling to a lot of different landscapes, but maybe he was seeking out the desert landscapes in particular. And second, I think more importantly, wouldn't we trust his opinion of landscapes even more because he has traveled so extensively.

David: 3:58

Oh my gosh. I was not clear enough in my claim because he meant desert landscapes in terms of conceptual minimalism in his philosophy. So I'm suggesting that there's some kind of tension between wanting minimalism in your philosophy and then having this kind of maximalist lifestyle as a traveler,

Ellie: 4:18

I see. Okay. Okay. I see. So a minimalist in certain senses, but a maximalist in others. So we've been talking about philosophers who did and did not travel, but obviously the bulk of the episode is gonna be philosophers on travel. Like what is the nature and benefits and drawbacks of travel? And before we go into detail on some views of this, one of the fun things about this Emily Thomas book that I mentioned is that she starts off the book with top 10 Vintage Tips for Traveling Well, by which she really just means quotes from different philosophers and travel writers about travel from like history.

David: 4:58

I love that you, she calls them vintage. If you want something to be relevant, contemporary and chic, just call it vintage. When it could be like as old as the fourth century, BC.

Ellie: 5:07

Yeah, exactly. Well, and also it's like, yeah, what this really is, is views of the philosophy of travel from throughout history, but like it's sounds a lot sexier to say top 10 vintage tips for traveling well, right. Okay. So I'm gonna give you a couple options. You tell me which writer you wanna hear from. Francis Bacon.

David: 5:27

Eh

Ellie: 5:27

Okay. Plato.

David: 5:30

No.

Ellie: 5:32

Okay. Yeah, I'm just gonna choose for you then because I will see those are the two, those are the two best known. So we're doing Plato. I'm sorry, I'm vetoing your, Plato because this one seems, this one's wild. Okay. Prohibit young people from travel.

David: 5:49

Oh,

Ellie: 5:50

No young person under- this is from the Republic. No young person under 40 is ever to be allowed to travel abroad under any circumstances, nor is anyone to be allowed to go for private reasons, but only on some public business as a herald or ambassador or as an observer of one sort or another. So, David, you and I, we are not even eligible to travel yet. You're getting up though. I will say though, you're almost ready to travel.

David: 6:15

We're two years from one another. Although actually this is reminding me, there's another place in the Republic, I do not remember which book, where Plato also says that their proper age to begin philosophizing is around 40 or 50. So both of those things have something in common, which is that there are activities that maybe don't directly benefit the Republic or the city state in terms of fulfilling your civic duty. I'm not sure. But just as you cannot travel until you're like in your forties, you also cannot be a philosophers. So Ellie I'm actually closer to both traveling and philosophizing

Ellie: 6:54

Yeah. You can travel both in body and and in mind. Okay. But yeah, I mean, I also think what's interesting about this to me is like you can only travel on public business basically Plato is like completely anti-tourism here, right? No travel for leisure. And maybe that's because it doesn't benefit the city. Sort of as you alluded to before.

David: 7:13

You can go on a diplomatic tour.

Ellie: 7:18

Today we are talking about travel.

David: 7:21

Why do we so commonly think of travel as expanding the mind?

Ellie: 7:26

How has the rise of tourism shaped our understanding of travel?

David: 7:29

and how should we understand the feeling of culture shock that we so often experience when we visit other places? At its most basic level, travel is nothing more than movement through space. Maybe it is locomotion.

Ellie: 7:49

Okay, so in according to that definition where you're getting this idea, well, Socrates Kant did travel.

David: 7:55

On their little walks. Yes, maybe the difference between traveling and walking around town is that travel is a kind of movement that in displacing our bodies, also enlarges our minds and perspectives changing us in very fundamental ways. This is a theme that comes out in a 1964 essay that was written by the Spanish American philosopher George Santayana called The Philosophy of Travel, where Santayana goes all the way down to the level of biology to think about why it is that we humans like to travel so much, why we are so attracted to visiting places with different styles of life and different customs. And he says that travel ultimately derives from the most basic tendencies of our animal nature. Echoing Aristotle, Santayana says that one of the things that differentiates animals from plants is mobility. Animals move around. We have limbs, we go places, whereas plants are rooted in place. He notes that it's thanks to our mobility that we animals have sensibility, habit, and of course intelligence. At one point he says that a lot of scientists like to think that we owe our intelligence to our hands because of that common story and evolutionary theory that our hands with our opposable thumb allowed us to create tools, and then that led to the enlargement of the brain. But he turns that a little bit, kind of literally on its head, and he says, well, no, actually, we owe our intelligence to our feet because it is through our movement in space that we have been able to develop this cognitive apparatus that we call the mind. And that's something that we find in all animals, except that with animals, you really just have locomotion and displacement. Whereas with humans, you have this higher form of movement, which he calls travel. And so travel is the highest expression in the human case of this core animal tendency. It's like our animal mobility at its highest level of development and for Santayana human travel leads to that expansion of the mind that we were just mentioning. He has a quote in this essay where he says, there is wisdom in turning as often as possible from the familiar to the unfamiliar. It keeps the mind agile. It kills prejudice, and it fosters humor.

Ellie: 10:32

Okay. And this idea that travel changes us for the better is a very important idea. Probably like the core idea in philosophy of travel, but one that some people really disagree with, and we'll get into both sides of that soon. Going back to what you said first though, about travel as a sort of essentially human pursuit. Emily Thomas notes in her book that people have traveled throughout human history. So for instance, first Inhabitants of Alaska, they arrived 15,000 years ago from Eurasia via the Bering land bridge travel isn't just like going on a plane and taking your fabulous vacation with an Aperol Spritz in Italy. It's also the first inhabitants of Alaska crossing the Bering Bridge.

David: 11:14

I think you're right that we tend to equate travel with tourism, whereas tourism really needs to be defined as a specific form of travel. And we're gonna talk about tourism later, but I think we shouldn't forget that migrants and refugees are also travelers, so are religious pilgrims, and you know those diplomats who leave Plato's Republic to go an official business as well as like foreign exchange students. These are all different forms of travel. What sets tourism apart is that it's a form of chosen travel, often associated also with leisure and entertainment and enjoyment, and that it's a form of travel that all things considered is relatively new.

Ellie: 11:55

Yeah, and when we're thinking about travel as, even if it's just focused on this sort of chosen travel, which is what we tend to think about as travel, even though that's not all that travel is, one of the ways, of course, that people justify travel is that it expands the mind. It expands your horizons. We saw that in the Santayana quote that you gave us a moment ago. Moral and personal development is considered key to travel. Francis Bacon, you didn't wanna talk about him earlier, but surprise, you're gonna hear about him anyway. Bacon wrote a 1625 essay on travel where he describes travel as an education in other cultures. And I think whether it's chosen travel or not, I mean travel is an education in other cultures. Renaissance philosopher Michel de Montaigne pointed out similarly that travel shows us the variety and diversity of the world by forcing us to observe new and unknown things. And one of the things that Monta focused on is how travel reminds us that our own customs aren't necessarily the best or the most natural, right. Montaigne traveled extensively throughout Europe, but then he has this one essay on cannibals that describes a Brazilian group who eats their dead. It's sort of like this vague Brazilian group. He doesn't exactly describe who these people are, but he actually defends the practice of cannibalism as no worse than French customs of torture. And  Montaigne didn't really go to Brazil. But Thomas points out that this essay is sort of inviting us to think about the benefits of travel as making the familiar strange and  Montaigne does. Yeah, he's basically just like all you French people think that cannibalism is like so barbaric and evil, but we in France have extremely barbaric and evil customs of torture. And actually maybe the practices of cannibalism in this unnamed Brazilian group are less torturous and maybe actually even morally fine. So there's a sort of invitation to expand our horizons that  Montaigne is inviting his readers into. While we're on the French philosophers, one of the main philosophers associated with the idea of travel is expanding the mind comes a little bit after Monta, and that is the 18th century philosopher Jean Jacque Rousseau. Rousseau thought that travel was essential for education. His book on education, the Emile and Big Influence on Kant, actually emphasizes how travel is essential for turning boys into men. And Rousseau himself traveled a lot, not always by choice. He was one of these philosophers who was exiled, and he thought that travelers should treat their voyages as explorations, enjoying each moment of the journey. So one of the things that Rousseau emphasized about travel's ability to expand our minds is that you're not going just in order to reach a destination. You're also trying to enjoy the journey. And he talks about the importance of like seeing the landscape around you as you're traveling, rather than kind of being shut up in a carriage. I think he would hate airplanes for that reason. Maybe he would accept trains, but he'd definitely be contra this idea that you just kind of get dropped into a place. And the Thomas book that I've been talking about puts Rousseau and Bacon's defenses of travel in a really interesting historical context. So she notes that there was a rise in travel in Europe starting in the 16 hundreds initially, mostly among British aristocrats who traveled to continental Europe. And this was partly because of books about exploration and travel. The 1600s then sees the rise of what's known as the Grand Tour and the Grand Tour. Yeah. And the Grand Tour is essentially this trip that would turn boys into men. The Grand Tour involved boys of 16 to 22 years old going on a big trip to Europe. They'd be accompanied by an older tutor on these, sorry, I was like so fascinated learning about all of these details. And the older tutor that accompanied them would usually be a priest or a university teacher. So it's just like professors like us going on Europe trips for two to three years with their 16 to 22-year-old British aristocrat charges.

David: 15:56

I didn't know they were that long.

Ellie: 15:58

Yeah, they're very long and over time in the 1600s, they came to have a pretty specific formula. They'd go from Geneva and Barcelona to a number of cities in Italy, including Venice. And the trip would typically culminate in Rome with a number of other cities along the way, and on the return trip. And the men on the trips would visit religious and historical sites. They'd see great art, you know, great churches, and hopefully return wiser than they went. But they weren't just seeing churches and art. They were also partying oftentimes, sometimes very hard along the way.

David: 16:34

Yeah. So was the grand tour an example of travel or was it the top 10 things to do in your city by Time Out magazine in the 1600s? Unclear.

Ellie: 16:46

It's more that,

David: 16:47

But you know what this reminds me of Ellie, that Erasmus exchange program in Europe that sponsors students from various European countries to travel to other countries in Europe for cultural enrichment, language exchange, personal growth. It's a huge program. A lot of European students will go on an Erasmus program.

Ellie: 17:06

You can't be in a European capital without being a stones throw away from an Erasmus student.

David: 17:12

Yeah, exactly. And I mean it's what inspired that very famous French movie, l'auberge espagnole, the Spanish apartment about these like French students who go elsewhere and meet people from all over Europe and are changed by their encounters.

Ellie: 17:25

dude, I love that movie. Oh my God, that movie is so good.

David: 17:29

And so it, it captures this, and of course it's inspired by Desiderius, is that his first name - Erasmus? Desiderius. The humanist from the 16 hundreds who himself did a lot of traveling through Europe for cultural and intellectual advancement. I don't think his tour was technically considered a grand tour, but it kind of like fits the bill a little bit.

Ellie: 17:50

Mm, mm-hmm.

David: 17:51

Although, you know, nowadays the Erasmus program, a lot of people say that it's just a way for young people to go to other countries and get laid with other students who are also traveling. I almost died when I heard a European person refer to their Erasmus program as orgasmus. They went on their orgasmus tour through Europe.

Ellie: 18:13

Oh my gosh. Yeah. No, I think this is like sort of grand tour vibes, except without the university tutors, you know, like leading you around. I mean, I guess, I guess actually, well, you still do have your professors, but they're not as involved in your life anyway,

David: 18:27

And they don't last three years,

Ellie: 18:29

They don't, yeah, they don't last two to three years. But funnily enough, I mean, on the point of sex, so some fathers saw the grand tours as ways of educating their sons about sex. The men would very often seek out sex workers while they were on their travels. And Italy in particular, which as I mentioned, was the culmination of the grand tour, especially Rome had a reputation in particular for inviting homosexual encounters. Very often these men would seek out male sex workers because Italy was seen as the hotbed of homosexuality.

David: 19:01

Not the hotbed. Gosh.

Ellie: 19:03

It's like, you know, they'd go away as virgins. They would have sex with numerous sex workers, both men and women. Some, I mean, not always, but like, yeah, often. And then they'd come back and then like find their wife and settle down. Right. And these tours, Thomas notes became ubiquitous in the 17 hundreds. And unsurprisingly, not everyone was for them. So the philosopher Adam Smith thought that the grand tours were a huge waste of resources because the young man should have been studying at university when instead they were frittering their time away with sensual pleasures. And he worried that the young men returned home, conceited and unprincipled. So they didn't achieve, they didn't achieve moral betterment, like they didn't expand their horizons in the right way. They actually just made the people worse.

David: 19:50

Okay. I mean, I love this history and the context that you've given us for all these debates about travel with the Grand Tours. I am really interested by this aspect of travel, which is the return home. You know, what happens to us when we go back home after a long tour through the world, or a limited time in another place? Because I do agree with Adam Smith that sometimes people can return home with a standoffish attitude as if they're suddenly better because they've traveled. And that has to do with the fact that travel is associated with wealth and with prestige. And so in places where travel automatically sets you off from your peers and your neighbors in terms of class , I do think that is a risk. And actually growing up in Mexico, there was often a stereotype that people who traveled abroad, which only very rich Mexicans can afford to do, always come back as what were the terms that you used from Adam Smith?

Ellie: 20:47

Conceited and unprincipled.

David: 20:50

Yes, exactly. And so I think that is a risk because of the politics of travel. But there are also times when travel changes you in a way that is different, where it culminates in a kind of estrangement from your own homeland. And a lot of psychologists use the concept of the W curve to make sense of this transformation of the self after travel. So if you think about the letter W, that's sort of the trajectory of the subject when we travel somewhere and then come back home. So we go to another place and then we experience a lot of stress trying to adapt. That's the first dip. In the first part of the W, that's like the first V. Then we're happy to return home. So we are happy again, that's the middle of the W. Most accounts of travel sort of stop there. But according to the W theory, we also have to consider that once you are back home, we also experience a second dip where our own past life can strike us as suddenly less interesting, less natural, maybe not exciting anymore when we return. So we have a second dip in excitement. And ultimately the point of readjusting to your past life is that you have to rise again. But it means that your relationship to your previous life has been fundamentally altered by the fact of having left it.

Ellie: 22:17

Yeah, I like this as an invitation to think about how. Our return home isn't the end of the journey, so to speak. Because one thing I also think about is the way that our trips get integrated into our lives in ways that we might not even notice, like that expansion of horizons. I think the idea that travel expands the mind, expands our horizons, is very cheesy, very cliche. I also think it's true, like I do think that that is what travel does. I think it makes our customs strange to us. It invites us to learn new customs. Even like thinking about, I've been thinking about this recently in terms of decorating homes, just like a simple sort of aesthetic thing or in terms of fashion, right? You can get so inspired by seeing homes in other places and how they design this. Like being in Copenhagen for a semester on my, what I call adult study abroad in 2023, aka, my sabbatical.

David: 23:06

You're adult orgasmus.

Ellie: 23:09

Yeah. That's okay. Well, that's, that's not, no, not so much. Anyway, what I was inspired by when I was there above all, was interiors. This way that the Scandinavians set up their spaces and it's like also Ireland. Same thing, like the Irish cottages that I visited were really inspiring to me. I do think that one of the beauties of that going away is coming back and having to recognize that the way that we structure even our days, is not set in stone being like, oh, wow. I did things so differently when I was away. Largely, that was because I didn't have any responsibilities. Right. Other than like seeing cool stuff and eating yummy food. If you're, if we're talking about leisure travel. But I think that breathing room that travel provides really does change our perspective. Like I think the stereotypes that we talk about with travel, whether it's changing our perspective, expanding our horizons, do have a lot of truth to them.

David: 24:03

The question here is, how exactly does travel change our relationship to the place where we're from? And then also, if we turn that into more of a value judgment, how should travel change our relationship to our homeland? Because this actually comes up in the Santayana article that we began with, where Santayana differentiates between the traveler and the good traveler. And he says that what makes a good traveler is that they know how to come back home after seeing how other people live and shift their relationship to their home in order to see the beauty rather than the strangeness of their own previous mode of life. So he sort of alludes to the fact that when you go to other places, sometimes you have this romanticized idea of what other lives are, but then when you go and see them, you realize that other people also have every day mundane experiences of the world. And so in a sense, it should lead you if you're a good traveler, to be okay with your life back at home. And this is where ultimately, I kind of disliked the Santayana argument because there is a kind of quietistic attitude that he brings in at the end of the essay where he encourages people who travel to come back home, not to change the way they did things before, or to see the contingency of those old ways of seeing and behaving and perceiving, but rather to justify their lot in life and just be happy with what they have.

Ellie: 25:56

David, the time has come to explicitly talk about tourism. Tourism is a particular form of travel that, as you mentioned earlier, is relatively new. It involves leisure. It involves a certain desire to explore a country, often with aesthetic aims in mind and secondarily cultural aims in mind. It is chosen and it's also a form of travel that many thinkers are highly critical of for various reasons. And I wanna start before we get into some of the philosophical ideas about this, with the viewpoint of the historian, Paul Fussell, I hope I'm pronouncing it right. Sorry if it's Fussell, but it's like Russell, but with an F. So I'm gonna say Fussell. He has a well-known book called Abroad, in which he suggests that tourism is different from travel. Travel has an unpredictable element to it. Whereas tourism involves the sensation of knowing where one is in tourism, one is secure in a way that is not with travel. And he actually thinks that there is no travel left, there is only tourism. And he says that the death of travel occurred in the 19th century when Thomas Cook got the idea of shipping sightseeing groups to the continent. So it's like the sightseeing group that really inaugurated the shift from travel to tourism. And in writing about this, Emily Thomas talks about tourism as getting in the way of otherness. When you're a tourist, you order food in your own language. You hang out with people from your own country, you don't need to look at local signposts for directions because you're on a tour and so on and so forth. And I'm so interested to talk about this with you, David, because I feel like even in the 20 years that I've been traveling significantly, we've witnessed serious changes that make this encounter with otherness even more avoidable than it was before. For instance, when I studied abroad in Paris in 2009, I did not have a smartphone. I had to use physical maps and read signposts and you know, sort of figure out where I was, orient myself, and I noticed this in Portugal last summer when my Google Maps went out. I somehow lost service. There was an SOS outage for like all Verizon carrier partners in Europe, and I was literally driving my rental car to the airport and I was like, oh my God, I'm in Portugal trying to drive to the airport. Literally, what do I do? I'm in the countryside. I can't trust that people will necessarily speak English. I don't even know what like road I'm on. I don't know how to get there. And so what came back to me was this sense of, oh, this is what traveling used to be like. But I also wasn't renting cars then and sort of like driving around and expecting I could find my way. And so it just sort of brought back to me this sense of like, oh my gosh, genuine encounter with otherness here. And then what actually happened is that I had downloaded the Google map and so I was able to navigate my way to the airport even without, without talking to anybody. So Fussell would be very disappointed.

David: 28:53

I know the trials and tribulations of traveling before the age of all these technologies and aids for making travel easier, which have completely altered the landscape of global living and global travel. And I mean, if we were to think about just the differences between tourism and travel, in light of what you said, it seems like one of the big differences is that. The way we go about organizing travel and tourism are very different. With tourism, you try to maximize enjoyment by packing your schedule ahead of time, and that's because often we do touristy things on vacation, so there's a very close connection between tourism and being off and thus wanting to maximize leisure. But beyond that, I would say that travel is less predetermined than touristic forms of locomotion in the sense that when we think about the figure of the traveler, we think of somebody who is flexible, who is worldly, who maybe has a somewhat cosmopolitan personality in the sense that they can go other places and adapt to whatever circumstances present themselves in the moment. Whereas a tourist is a character defined by inflexibility, right? When you think about like, oh, that person is such a tourist, it means that they actually don't know how to move on foreign territory. They don't know how to use the bus. They only use Uber because it's what they know. They only go to restaurants that they are already familiar with, like Burger King or you know, other chains. They are the kind of person that also flusters at this slightest difficulty or obstacle, whereas the traveler is maybe a little bit more elegant. And I do think that some of the things that you described, Ellie, like changes in technology, social media, and digital spaces and our expectations around travel are taking the elegance, that elegance in that particular sense out of travel. And even though of course, nowadays there are still other forms of travel that are not Tourism, right? Like there are diplomats. Migration is a major phenomenon in our globalized society. What's potentially been happening is that tourism is shifting the way we see even these other forms of travel where we now sometimes have expectations that maybe apply to tourism and arbitrarily impose them on other forms of travel.

Ellie: 31:27

I love this point. I think the way that you initially set up the tourism versus travel distinction, I do have some worries about ways that we might moralize that. And in particular, one thing that really frustrates me is when people from our sort of class demographic, you know, like 30 something professionals, millennials who are going to desirable destinations, have this knee jerk reaction against being a tourist. And I think oftentimes it's pretty classist. It's like, oh, we associate tourists with like the middle class, middle-aged Asian people who are traveling around in sightseeing groups. I also think it's like kind of xenophobic and racist. And when I actually think about what people of like friends of ours and, you know, even myself do, when we're trying to quote, not be touristy, it's still a very consumer economy. What we're doing is we're trying to go to the latest wine bar, the cutest restaurant, the most special shops. It's still super consumeristic, and I think that often it actually gives us less knowledge of the culture than if we did a guided tour through like an architectural tour or went to a historical or cultural event. And so I'm like very pro touristy things. We need to keep in mind, ethics of tourism and all of these sort of background considerations. But if we're talking about the debate between like, oh, I'm a traveler, I'm not a tourist. I'm on the tourist side there for sure. And there is nothing I love better than an architectural tour or a cultural event in a city that I'm visiting.

David: 33:02

Well, and there's also a sense in which the difference between tourism and travel is not up to the person moving through space, right? Like you don't get to decide that you're not a tourist if you're doing a two week trip

Ellie: 33:13

Yes. Thank you, David.

David: 33:14

It's a structural question. It's, and I do think a lot of it, I don't wanna reduce it to this one point, but I do think it's length of time whether you are going to a place for long enough that you actually have to incorporate the routines and ways of life of the locals in order to survive

Ellie: 33:34

I see. Okay.

David: 33:35

If you don't, so again, it's somewhat reductive, but I do think it's an important point. I don't care what your approach to travel is. If you're there for the weekend or there for a week or there for 14 days even if you manage to successfully avoid all the quote unquote tourist traps, you are a tourist. And the thing that's really frustrating to me about those like 30 year olds that you mentioned, Ellie, which are us also, and maybe have literally been us at some point in our personal pasts, because I have bragged about not doing those things. Is that, you know, all these people being like, I'm not a tourist. That is the most expected thing for people in that age bracket traveling. And so you're actually doing exactly what people would expect you to do, which is one way of defining the tourist.

Ellie: 34:23

Exactly. I think it's actually an even more alienated form of travel than just leaning into being a tourist. I think apropos of this, David, the time has come to talk about an essay. We could not have this episode on the Philosophy of Travel without Discussing, which is the Viral New Yorker essay from 2023 by the contemporary philosopher Agnes Callard. What's the title again? It's like, okay. Against Travel in which she makes the case that we should not think of travel as expanding the mind because it in fact just kind of entrenches our expectations. Because what we find when we travel is just like a verification of what we thought would already be there, which is like a point you also see in Baudrillard we talked about in our hyper reality episode, and or you just find yourself doing activities that you like, sort of don't really know how to understand or integrate in your life. And essentially the idea here is that change is the purpose of travel, but travel doesn't actually involve change. And she says, yeah, what we usually mean by travel here is tourism, which is the kind of travel that aims at the interesting, but it is self undermining. It can't actually achieve what we want it to achieve. Hence the name against travel.

David: 35:39

Yeah, and, and just to be clear, I mean I think there are many different arguments that one can make against travel. You know, there are economic arguments, it's very expensive, it's a waste of resources. Maybe we saw that with objections to the grand tour. There are political arguments against travel, you know, it's asymmetrical in terms of its access, in terms of wealth, national origin, et cetera. There are also very good ecological arguments against travel because of climate change, and the way in which driving and flying on airplanes contributes to that.

Ellie: 36:10

Yeah, a really interesting chapter on doom tourism in the Thomas book on that point. That's about like people going to places like the Maldives. It's like you have to go to this before it gets ruined due to climate change. And then it's like, yeah, but your travel's kind of helping contribute to that. Anyway, continue.

David: 36:26

Well, no, I was just gonna say that even though you can have those arguments, I think it's important to underscore the kind of argument that Callard is making because she's making an ethical argument against travel. Not in the sense that it's unethical because it's exploitative, but rather because it fails to meet its own ethical self-justification. And the term that she introduced us to capture this is the traveler's delusion, which is basically what you said, Ellie, that we think we change when we travel, but what we're actually doing is changing the people we encounter while we're traveling because we ultimately just impose ourselves and our mode of life when we go other places. And on her view there are, I think , two reasons for this. One is that often when we go to a place, we already have a set of expectations about what that place is going to be like, and then if it doesn't fulfill our arbitrary expectations, we sort of become disillusioned with the place she gives. The example of somebody going to the Grand Canyon and thinking that it's not as beautiful as the postcard that they had seen of the Grand Canyon. And another reason for the Traveler's delusion is that when we go to other places, we experience those other places already with the desire that in the future, somebody else back at home will certify the authenticity of our experiences while we travel. Which honestly, there are something, there is a lot about the Callard that I disagree with, but this point I absolutely agree with that people go places, they come back home and then they recount their travel experiences looking to other people to sort of give them a stamp of approval. As you said, that we are not tourists. We really had an authentic experience. And often the people that are asked to give that stamp of approval are people who have some kind of connection to the culture in question because I cannot tell you how many times I've heard Americans who go to Mexico and they're like, oh, I went to CDMX. And then they look at me and they're like, but I didn't just do the touristy things in the center of the city. And it's not that they want me to openly say anything, but they do want a nod from me as a brown person from Mexico to be like, you have successfully entered our authentic cultural epicenter welcome.

Ellie: 38:49

Little do they know that you yourself experienced a significant rite of passage as a tourist in Mexico City, which is that you were clocked speaking English on the subway as a tourist and had your wallet stolen by a local, and you were like, I remember after you're like, but I'm Mexican. They didn't know.

David: 39:09

Honestly, that that is an authentic experience of being in Mexico. It's getting your wallet stolen on the subway, and so if that hasn't happened to you, you are not part of the inner circle. Sorry.

Ellie: 39:21

Yeah, so on this Callard piece, it's funny because I remembered like not liking this essay and then when I reread it for this episode, I was like, this essay rips like, it's so good. It's really well written, but in the way that a good polemic, yes, I disagree, but I respect the game. I'm just like this is, you know, it's sharp and it's, it's really thought provoking. And so one of the claims that I agree with most is Callard's suggestion that tourism claims to facilitate change but doesn't really facilitate the kind of change that we think it does. She thinks it doesn't facilitate change at all. And I do think that the ability to sort of more seamlessly move through space with the rise of things like Google Maps or tour groups does prevent a certain encounter with otherness. But I really don't think that's the whole story. I mean, I actually think, like for one, I love traveling with Google Maps. I'll just say that this, going back to my point before, would I rather be a 19-year-old tourist in Paris or Thailand without access to Google Maps? Or would I rather be like a mid thirties person with access to Google Maps traveling around those places? For sure the latter. Like I think Google Maps is an incredible invention. I'm extremely grateful for it and the kinds of ease that it's brought about in terms of travel. But I think there are other ways, and including maybe this is one of them, even though I find it convenient, that sort of do prevent the encounter with otherness. But one thing I do disagree with is her claim that. One of the ways that we can see that travel doesn't change people is that we don't notice changes in our friends and loved ones. When they come back from trips, they're like, oh my gosh, this was such an incredible trip. It changed me. And then what you see is just the exact same person, and I think that's

David: 41:02

No, you're still with like antisocial tendencies.

Ellie: 41:05

But I think that's wrong. I don't think every trip changes us substantially, but I can think of at least three loved ones who have gone on trips within the past couple of years where I've noticed changes in them when they come back and those changes are for the better. I'm like, oh, wow this really encouraged you to see things in a new light. It did expand your horizons, and I would like to think that they've experienced that with me after certain trips as well.

David: 41:27

So this also gets to my objections to the piece. So my objections to the piece are the title, like the title of the piece is Against Travel. But I think that's a misnomer. This is not a criticism of travel, it's a criticism of tourism, which is a form of travel. And most of the examples that she gives, it's like, well, duh, that, that doesn't sound really that ethically or morally transformative. You know, she talks about herself like, go, I went to Abu Dhabi and I went to a falconry show, and it did not change me at all.

Ellie: 41:59

Well, and she was also like, I don't even like animals. And so I'm like, well, why did you go to the falconry.

David: 42:05

I know she's like, my life after Abu Dhabi still has the same amount of falconry, which is zero falconry, and it's like, great. Got it. But that's not the essence of travel. And so I think that's really a weakness in the article because she mentions Emerson, who famously described travels as a fool's paradise. So he was also a critic of travel, but she notes that Emerson himself recognized that his critique didn't apply to cases where you travel for art, for study or for benevolence. And so I wonder whether her criticism really is just of like cases where we travel to a different place for a short period of time and we don't really have to adapt. In which case she's not talking about travel, but she makes it seem as if she is, which is what allows this piece to be so polemical. She's ultimately targeting that philosophical tradition that sees travel as a way of dilating or deepening our experience of the world and saying that that doesn't happen. But I don't think she's actually proving it.

Ellie: 43:11

Mm. So we are in defense of travel. We're not against travel.

David: 43:18

We're against Callard.

Ellie: 43:20

No, I actually, I thought I would be in this piece and then rereading it, like I said, I wasn't, I think whether you're against tourism or not is the wrong question. Or even if it's not the wrong question, we have to think about what that question means. I mean, I personally love travel. I really enjoy being a tourist, and I think that sitting in that contradiction, like there are better and worse ways of dealing with that contradiction, absolutely. But we're not gonna think our way out of a contradiction, and we're definitely not gonna think our way out of that contradiction by being like, Ugh, I found this little hole in the wall coffee shop that no other tourists have heard of. Therefore, I'm not a tourist.

David: 43:58

Overthink is a self-supporting independent podcast that relies on your generosity. By joining our Patreon, you can gain access to our online community, extended episodes, and monthly zooms. If you'd prefer to make a one-time tax deductible donation, you can learn more at our website overthink podcast.com. Your support helps cover key production costs and allows us to pay our student assistance a fair wage. Maybe travel expands the mind. Maybe travel just forces our subjectivity onto other people. What we can agree about in connection to travel is that it's not always pleasurable.

Ellie: 44:38

It's not all Aperol Spritzes in Amalfi Coast.

David: 44:42

No, I mean, travel is hard. It's full of stressors. It's something that takes you outside of your routine, outside of your normal patterns of behaving, and forces you to confront yourself in new ways. I wanna talk about this book by Joseph Shaules, which is entitled The Intercultural Mind Connecting Culture, cognition, and Global Living. I taught this book last semester to my students and they absolutely adored it because it's a book about the difficulties of travel and how some of the deepest and most thorough transformations of the self that travel enables happen without us realizing because they happen at the level of unconscious processing. Now, the book begins from what is known as the theory of the incultured mind, which basically says that, look, we might all be humans and we might have some like basic anatomical and genetic features that are similar, but, when it comes to our psychology, our psychology is thoroughly mediated, shaped, and molded by the culture in which we grow up. So our ways of thinking, our habits, the way we relate to the world and to the self, our expectations about the way the world works are deeply, deeply cultural. And that means that our culture gives us a specific framework that is so deeply woven into our very sense of being, that it functions as our mental autopilot. That's the term that he uses for thinking about this. And so once you recognize that our minds are and cultured, you come to the realization that travel is more than a change of place. It is also a change of frameworks for the mind. And that's why travel has this power to destabilize us at our very core because it takes us out of our element. And it induces what Shaules calls citing the movie from the 1930s, the Wizard of Oz, Oz Moments. You know, it's like the recognition that, Hey girl, you're not in Kansas anymore. And so the book tries to give an account of how and why travel upsets our normal ways of processing information on a cognitive level, thereby throwing us into like one mini crisis after another mini crisis, giving us this sense that we are never in control, not just of our environment, but even of ourselves.

Ellie: 47:16

so this is fascinating because I feel like it provides a scientifically grounded rationale for some of those arguments going back to the Renaissance and modern periods of philosophy for how travel changes us. And I think sometimes when we think about travel as it catalyzing moral and personal development, it seems sort of abstract and it's like because, yeah, because you're thinking about your priorities and all of that, and this is like, no, really travel is just fundamentally forcing you to engage differently on a nervous system level. And I think, yeah, and like different places. I'm curious what you think about this, David.'cause I think different places involve this to such immensely different degrees and so there are certain places that I've gone to that are very far away that involves some of that, but not a ton of it. Like I think I felt pretty comfortable when I first landed in Copenhagen, whereas. Like there are two places, one of which will be totally unsurprising, but one of which maybe will be more surprising place that I've experienced most culture shock. India, right? Everybody says this when they go to India and I was like there with family members from India, but even still like there is no reducing the culture shock when you go to basically anywhere in that country. The sound was really affecting, to me there's just like constant noise everywhere. Definitely clothing. All the trucks there are decorated, which is really fun. There's a lot of different kinds of cars that you would see and for sure just like the constant feeling of being on display. Almost like to, to be honest, like being a blonde woman, like almost like being a zoo animal. Even when you're like going with Indian people, I think was, yeah, there. There it was just irreducible but another place. Okay. I don't know, maybe you're gonna say this like isn't culture shock, but another place where I would say I experienced like pretty significant culture shock was not in India, but in Indiana. Going to rural Indiana as a city dweller, even though I'm,

David: 49:16

As a liberal elite from the coast.

Ellie: 49:20

But like, I also look like the people there, right? Like I'm white and blonde. So it wasn't a sense of being physically different, but even though I sort of looked like the people there, there was like a really strong sense of cultural difference in some of these places. I felt like I was being looked at a lot. Like the way that I dressed was very obviously different, and so that was a strange experience too, of being like, oh wow, I'm in my country, but I feel like I don't know how to relate. Yeah, it, it was like, I mean, I'm not gonna lie, like it was like

David: 49:49

You're now in Kansas. That's your Oz moment.

Ellie: 49:53

It was like city slicker liberal, coastal elite. Like, yeah it's weird. And so there's like obviously a class difference, but also different cultural differences politically, religiously, but also, like I said, even on the level of food and and clothing.

David: 50:06

Well, and I like that you mentioned food and clothing and all these kind of banal, ordinary aspects of everyday living because those are the things that, according to Shaules, are the essence of culture shock. So he's very clear that experiences of culture shock are not. psychological ailments, meaning that they're not about beliefs and values necessarily. They're about the things that we do while we are on that mental autopilot without thinking that much about the world, so it's not as if I go to India and I think people here have shockingly different cultural and religious beliefs than me. I do not know what to do. No. It's rather than like, I don't know how to eat with my hands. I don't know how to get on the bus. I don't know how to say hi to people. Do I shake their hands? Do I give them two kisses on the cheek? Do I fully French kiss them? I don't know what to do. to do. One.

Ellie: 50:59

I remember showing up in Greece one time and realizing, this was pre-smartphones too, and realizing like, oh, I literally don't even know how to say hello, and I just held up a bag of chips to a vendor and then just like, like hope. Yeah. Anyway.

David: 51:13

And no, and I think that's a really good example because Shaules uses the psychologist, Daniel Kahneman's Dual System Theory of the Mind, where he says there are two systems of cognitive processing that are always going on at the same time. There is what he calls System one, which is fast, quick, everything that we do. Automatically without having to think about it. It gives us our quick impressions of a situation. It gives us our intuitions for how to move and act in order to get things done. It gives us a sense of what is normal and reasonable in particular context. It gives us an understanding of cause and effect, relationships, so on and so forth. And system one is quick and always working behind the veil of conscious awareness, whereas system two is more reflective, right? It's when you have to think about things and make decisions according to him, what happens in travel is that all those things that we normally don't have to think about, suddenly we have to think about, we have to think about how to say hello. We have to think about like, how do I use like a pit toilet that I've never seen before? Whereas I don't have to think about that, right? I just sit on the toilet and do my business.

Ellie: 52:23

Yeah, yeah.

David: 52:26

And he argues that what this creates is an unbearable psychological burden that leads to ego depletion because we are fatigued by constantly having to think about things that we normally don't have to think about. And because attention is, as many people have argued, a finite resource, the more attention that we have to pay to those basic aspects of social interaction, the less attention that we have for the things that we normally want to devote our attention to. Right? Like for thinking thoughts, for having conversations. By the time you get to like a dinner conversation, when you're traveling and dealing with culture shock, you simply don't have the energy.

Ellie: 53:12

Interesting.

David: 53:14

And I think this really neatly explains some of the features of culture shock. You know, the fact that when you have culture shock, you can't even really articulate what caused it, but it also makes you feel on edge at all times. You can't anticipate your own reactions to situations and you, and so you end up kind of lashing out sometimes against the culture that you find yourself in because you feel overwhelmed by the sudden pressure that your cognitive system is under. this is an important point about his overall approach, that he's really focusing on cases where there is a demand to adjust or to adapt. And as I mentioned, he specializes in like intercultural learning and he also runs this like foreign exchange program in Japan. And so a lot of his examples are about foreign exchange students who travel to other places, whether that's like Canadians and Americans going to Japan, or Japanese students going to Europe and North America. And what unifies most of the examples that he gives, some of which are really, really funny like a Japanese student who went to Canada and couldn't poop because she realized that the stalls in Canada, the walls of the stalls don't go all the way up to the ceiling or all the

Ellie: 54:33

way down.

David: 54:34

And like she's like, you can't uphold Japanese toilet etiquette in non-Japanese toilets. And so she had like issues with it.

Ellie: 54:43

Though as Montaigne says that travel reveals to us that our customs are no better or no worse than in other countries, but I will say I'm on the Japanese students' side here fully. I think it is a travesty that in North America we have that.

David: 54:57

See the top and the bottom of another person.

Ellie: 54:59

I do. Yeah. I don't wanna see some of these feet while I'm trying to go to the bathroom.

David: 55:03

Well, and the point I wanted to make here is that what all these cases have in common, whether it's migrants or foreign exchange students, is that you do have to figure out how to live there by the norms and rules and expectations of the local culture. And so this doesn't apply, at least not in the same way to the more classical case of tourism. And I think it gives us a way of understanding the difference between tourism and travel, which is that tourism inoculates us against this kind of overload of the nervous system because it doesn't put us in situations, right? It creates a curated space, a cocoon, that's a term that you used earlier, that actively tries to maximize our pleasure and our enjoyment. And part of that means protecting our system one automatic unconscious processing so that it doesn't get destabilized.

Ellie: 55:59

Yeah. And I think it's really easy for us to be like, oh my gosh, how disgusting of us to want to inoculate ourselves against otherness. But I think also what you're pointing to following his work is that like, actually there are real costs to this feature of travel. And so, you know, it makes sense that people would want to inoculate themselves against this. And I don't necessarily think that that's always a bad thing.

David: 56:23

No, no, that's right. And he ultimately does say that we need to learn better mental self-management when we travel, even if we cannot fully inoculate ourselves against this pressure on our cognitive apparatus. And he says that there are a couple of ways we can do that. One is what he calls mindfulness by which he just means becoming mindful and aware of how our system one works so that we can spot what is happening while it's happening, so that if I feel frustrated when I can't find the right way to validate my ticket on the metro in Switzerland, I realize that the problem is not Switzerland. It's just that, oh, I'm actually being overwhelmed. Let me pause and maybe ask for help. Another thing that we can do, he says, is be more intentional about the way in which we update our mental models of the world. When you're traveling and you encounter new things, try to make a mental note, oh, this is the way things work here. Let me try to remember this so that next time it happens, it becomes anticipated, and I don't experience it as that radical shock of novelty that might trigger, you know, those negative emotions associated with spending my attention on things that I should not be attending to. And finally he says we also need to just give ourselves up to the process of trial and error. And that means that we need to be willing to test whatever expectations we have of the world and go into those trials and tests with the expectations that because we're in a different place, they will be wrong. So we need to be ready to be overwhelmed and being ready for that might make the experience slightly less disturbing.

Ellie: 58:14

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David: 58:23

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Ellie: 58:38

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