Delusional vs Aspirational Travel

Agnes Callard and "The Case Against Travel"

I may have bit off more than I can chew in deciding to respond to Agnes Callard’s “The Case Against Travel” in the context of working on a philosophy of travel. I’m convinced the only way to critique the argument securely in defense of travel — for the sake of lifelong learning — is to gain a grasp of her overall philosophy of aspiration.

An aspirational human is someone who wants to change — but doesn’t quite know the details of the new values he or she wants to embody. There is a desire present to assume a new identity, to become “someone else” (a better person), but knowledge is lacking, because you’re not already that person, who actually embodies the desired values. You’re in a paradoxical state.

In this interview with Adam Grant the psychologist, Callard starts off discussing the general difference between being motivated to change by ambition vs. by aspiration, but the conversation soon ranges much more broadly. It gives a good introduction to Callard’s approach to aspiration, to thinking, and to growing philosophically. (I’m reminded of Hannah Arendt, though I can find almost nothing relating the two philosophers.)

There is also Callard’s book on Aspiration, which I’ve now bought on Kindle (it’s been on my list for a while), and I’ll be reading it carefully. I’m interested in making sense of her broader philosophical framework not only for understanding her article against travel/tourism, but in the broader (and deeper) context of lifelong learning and in the context of “trying to be a better human in the Anthropocene.” Both are the aspirational goals of my writing here on Pose Ponder, and I don’t know exactly what either means. The whole point of writing is to put in practice my own lifelong learning and to figure out how to be a better human in the Anthropocene!

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The key quote in “The Case Against Travel” is the following. To situate it a little, the paragraph follows one describing Callard’s experience of visiting a falcon hospital in Abu Dhabi. As a tourist, she sees her visit as an “unchanged changer.” The “changer” part reflects her acknowledgment that tourists have an impact on the places they visit, potentially for the negative. But let’s focus on the “unchanged” part, because this is the core of Callard’s critique. People travel, ostensibly, to change or be changed by the experience, but they end up being “boomerangs,” who come back the same way they left. They don’t even really travel; they merely “locomote.”

Why might it be bad for a place to be shaped by the people who travel there, voluntarily, for the purpose of experiencing a change? The answer is that such people not only do not know what they are doing but are not even trying to learn. Consider me. It would be one thing to have such a deep passion for falconry that one is willing to fly to Abu Dhabi to pursue it, and it would be another thing to approach the visit in an aspirational spirit, with the hope of developing my life in a new direction. I was in neither position. I entered the hospital knowing that my post-Abu Dhabi life would contain exactly as much falconry as my pre-Abu Dhabi life—which is to say, zero falconry. If you are going to see something you neither value nor aspire to value, you are not doing much of anything besides locomoting.

Unchanged changers don’t even try to learn! Before you protest that “Of course I learn when I travel, and I bet Agnes Callard did, too, when she visited the falcon hospital!” we’ll need to hunker down a little and unpack the philosophical framework — and deal with the role of delusion also, later.

It’s a bit subtle, but there’s a crucial three-way distinction going on in this paragraph, setting out Callard’s overall philosophy. At the beginning of the essay, Callard had made a distinction between traveling for a purpose, when you have “a reason to be somewhere,” like for work or study, and tourism, which is when a “temporarily leisured person voluntarily visits a place away from home for the purpose of experiencing a change.” In the first case, a value (purpose) is well defined. In the second case, it’s not. Yes, there is a vague desire for “experiencing a change,” but it’s all too vague, and in the end, no change happens.

If Agnes had gone to Abu Dhabi with a deep passion for falconry already in place, it would have been travel for a clearly defined purpose. She might have enrolled in a falconry school and taken up residence in Abu Dhabi for a period of time in order to continue her education and deepen her well-explored passion. A second option is that she might have “approached the visit in an aspirational spirit, with the hope of developing my life in a new direction.” In this case, she might have aspired to be a falconer, but she didn’t really know what that entails. Callard leaves this second possibility all too vague herself. In the end, though, Agnes boomerangs, which is the third option. She visits the falcon hospital because “that is what one does in Abu Dhabi,” and she comes back home knowing her life will include “zero falconry.” She’s a mere tourist. She neither values, nor aspires to value, anything having to do with falconry. She has no desire, even tentatively, to take up any different future identity affected by the travel she’s done. She’s merely locomoting. No change occurs.

The three-way option is at the core of the whole essay, but in a fairly complicated way. Callard uses the quotations from Chesterton, Emerson, Pessoa, and (later) Walter Percy to make further points about aesthetics and ethics. These, note, are two of the five key categories of philosophical thought. The problem of not really knowing what one newly seeks out, which is central to the problem of aspiration, belongs in the category of epistemology.

I want to read the book and ponder some more within the context of my own larger projects of lifelong learning and trying to be a better human in the Anthropocene before writing more. But we definitely have a philosophy of travel going on here.

Confirmed.

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Before concluding, it’s necessary to take up one further defining feature of the argument. It comes out clearly at the end that the underlying (epistemological) problem with tourists is that they’re delusional. They think they’re traveling for the sake of change, for personal growth, for enlarged knowledge of the world, for empathizing with other people and cultures, and so on — but in fact they don’t really change by the time they come home. And it’s not just about intent. It’s a long-standing delusion that is maintained even after return. Importantly, we don’t see the delusion in ourselves (we can’t judge in our own case), but we do see it in others. Delusion is a terribly unphilosophical attitude, it turns out, and it goes all the way back to the time of Socrates.

Socrates is the wisest person in Athens, recall, as the Oracle of Delphi said, not because he really knows so much, but because (as Socrates eventually has to figure out) he actually knows that he knows nothing. It’s a second level, reflective, “meta” kind of thing. Unlike just about everyone else, Socrates is wise because he knows that he doesn’t know. And yet… he wants to know. Socrates is a rare, genuinely aspirational human.

But Callard ends her essay with a different Socratic reference: “Socrates said that philosophy is a preparation for death.” And she concludes: “For everyone else, there’s travel.” The two Socratic references are important, and they tie together. What’s the real problem of the delusion of tourists “seeking change”?

At the end of the essay Callard goes the next step from detecting delusion to considering why travelers (tourists) work so hard to maintain the delusion. The reason for the intransigence has to do with distraction. We’re invited to consider “how your life would look if you discovered that you would never again travel.” In that case, “the prospect looms, terrifyingly, as ‘More and more of this, and then I die.’” Part of the desire for travel, and the desire for change — though never realized — is the terror of dying without ever doing anything different, going anywhere, seeing anything.

Enter: the Bucket List!

IF we aren’t already “planning a major life change” at home — which would mitigate somewhat against the terrifying Ongoing This — we can accomplish an effective distraction by splitting and chunking time to the “before” and “after” of a trip, thus “obscuring from view the certainty of annihilation.” Travel inoculates against the terror, but it doesn’t actually cure if we’re mere tourists. There is not only intransigent delusion, but active distraction. We don’t change through travel, and we don’t change at home, because we’ve convinced ourselves we’re already en route.

The practice of philosophy (at home) would be a Socratic response, knowing that we don’t know, wanting something we don’t yet understand, working toward genuine change. As preparation for death, aspirational philosophy responds to the terror of the inevitability of death coming after “more and more of this.”

For anyone else, who isn’t philosophical at home, there’s… travel. The delusional distraction.

But for me, there’s still an underlying question posed, which is: whether and how a person might travel and not be a mere boomerang, a mere locomotor, a tourist, delusional and distracted; whether and how travel can be made genuinely aspirational, genuinely philosophical in its own right.

Photo by Daryl Fritz, Flickr.