Don’t take that summer trip for granted

One of the great, under-appreciated benefits of modernity is the ability to seek discovery for discovery’s sake.

It’s summer in the northern hemisphere: the time for many of us to hit the road, to be somewhere other than where we usually live. If you are on holiday, take a moment to reflect on the remarkable achievement that today’s widely accessible travel for leisure constitutes.

Humans have always travelled, of course. But for much of our existence virtually all travel was done out of need. This summer’s hit movie The Odyssey should remind viewers of two ancient reasons for displacement: war and pillage, and finding one’s way home. Homer’s epic also illustrates that throughout much of history to be on the move often meant to be lost. This is still true today when many of those who travel and migrate are exiled by conflict, climate stress or economic need.

Even more positive motivations to hit the road have historically been instrumental in purpose. Merchants have prospered by connecting far-flung places through trade — for profit, not for discovery. Nomadic peoples have cycled through locations that offer a temporary rich yield for hunting or gathering. Proselytisers, evangelists and missionaries have had religious or ideological dogmas to spread. Discovery was a side effect, not the purpose.

There have, to be sure, always been some who travelled for travel’s sake, to find what was new and uncover what was unknown. But they used to be few and far between, and almost always in the employ of someone with more pragmatic purposes. If someone became a mapmaker, envoy or seeker of new trade routes out of curiosity, that was rarely what motivated their patrons to put forward the resources required to send them on their way.

One of the great, under-appreciated benefits of modernity, enlightenment, and eventually mass consumerism has been to make it possible, at scale, to travel with the primary motive of curiosity and self-improvement. An early step was that the scientific expedition — discovery (mostly) for discovery’s sake — became established as something worthy of prestige and support. There was also the aristocracy’s grand tour — visiting the sights of Europe for pleasure and self-improvement — which forged a cultural template for the holiday aspirations of the later age of broad prosperity.

The most mundane version of travel for travel’s sake is mass tourism. This phenomenon is frequently criticised, and often for sound reasons. Contemporary versions of the grand tour tend towards kitsch. The climate footprint, especially of distant travel, is unsustainable. Then there are the ravages mass tourism inflicts on places too small to cope, from Venice to Norway’s Lofoten islands.

But we can accept these criticisms, and the need to find solutions, while recognising one powerfully redeeming feature of modern travel. Never before in history have so many had the opportunity to go somewhere else simply for the sake of experiencing something different.

The shock of the new — the chance to see how others live, to adopt another perspective on one’s own customs — is no longer something that is either painfully inflicted on us through war or exile, or reserved for a lucky few. Billions of people have the time and the money to take to the road freely, without risk of danger or ruin, through the simple means of a holiday to an unknown destination.

To seek discovery is a fundamentally humanist act. This may not be as obvious in your own holiday memories of queueing for museums, holiday parks and beach spots as it is with, for example, Michel de Montaigne turning Europe’s first encounters with Native Americans in the Age of Discovery into a social critique of his own society. But even if the scale is smaller, the fact of being exposed to difference is the same. Mundane experiences can be existential for those who live them. Many are those whose lives have been transformed simply by seeing with their own eyes that another life is possible than the one they knew at home.

This humanist potential can be undermined if the travel is compromised — whether because of social media’s pressure to document one’s presence rather than be present in the moment; or the temptation to replicate elsewhere the comforts of home, reducing travel to mere physical displacement.

Done right, however, travel for discovery’s sake unsettles our received wisdom. It increases our knowledge of the astounding diversity of human ways of life, and it makes it a bit harder to take for granted the way that happens to be our own. Every time that happens, it strengthens a little the bulwark we sorely need against forces intent on shrinking our horizons.