Opinion | The Case for Tourism

Agnes Callard, a University of Chicago philosopher, infuriated various portions of the internet in June with an essay making the case against travel. Though really it was the case against tourism, since Callard exempted many forms of travel — for work or study, for personal or political reasons or charitable service — from her critique. What remained for her to savage was the contemporary there-and-back-again excursion: the checklist of foreign sights and places, the pursuit of agreed-upon Great Experiences, the expectation of some sort of personal transformation — all of it, according to her, an exercise in self-delusion.

Citing travel skeptics as various as Walker Percy, Ralph Waldo Emerson and G.K. Chesterton, Callard discusses tourism’s “locomotion” problem (“I went to France.” OK, but what did you do there? “I went to the Louvre.” OK, but what did you do there? “I went to see the ‘Mona Lisa.’”), its inevitably superficial non-encounters with alien peoples and experiences, its imitative, guidebook-driven estimation of what’s worth seeing in the world. Its core failure, she argues, is that it promises growth or conversion but generally returns travelers unchanged to where they began:

The single most important fact about tourism is this: We already know what we will be like when we return. A vacation is not like immigrating to a foreign country, or matriculating at a university, or starting a new job, or falling in love. We embark on those pursuits with the trepidation of one who enters a tunnel not knowing who she will be when she walks out. The traveler departs confident that she will come back with the same basic interests, political beliefs and living arrangements. Travel is a boomerang. It drops you right where you started.

As it happens, I read the essay just as I was about to embark, with my wife and four children, on an 18-day odyssey through Britain, the Netherlands and France. So I refrained from any comment on her thesis, assuming — like every other self-deluded tourist — that I would return more enlightened than before.

Now, back home and dealing with what Percy called the “problems of re-entry,” I can barely remember the man I was before our trip began, let alone recall whatever ideas about travel my former self might have entertained before we recklessly tried to take a 3-year-old through several European capitals and all the British countryside between Stonehenge and the Scottish Highlands.

But casting my mind back to that distant prior self, I dimly remember having two reactions to Callard’s essay. The first was that she was identifying a real problem — one especially associated with the forces of secularization and disenchantment, which have transformed the promise of travel by making mere tourists out of people who would have once been pilgrims instead.