Travel as Morality: Where Should We Travel?

In the series so far, we have looked at modern-day leisure travel from a range of provocative perspectives: travel as religion, adventure or chronic consumption, as imperialism, idealism or international development. The point of these at times pejorative polemics was to get us thinking about what travel is, which paves the way for more moral musings on the matter of what travel should be. This forms the theme of these final two essays.

Before we kick off, a word about normative ethics. (Don’t worry – it’s not as scary as it sounds.) Normative ethics, quite simply, are concerned with ‘should’ questions. Should we go to war? Should we have the death penalty? Should we legalise bigamy? And so on. ‘Should questions’ are funny things really. They allude to a kind of template for existence (e.g. ‘what you should have done was…’) where none really exists. Nevertheless, we are everywhere confronted with normative claims (e.g. ‘you should recycle’, ‘you shouldn’t pick your nose’, ‘you should get a haircut’) and travel is little exempt; the question ‘where should we travel?’ is of this same type. Bear in mind, though, that what is normative is also subjective; in the end, what you should do is up to you.

So where should we travel? Well, at the time of writing, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office advised against all but essential travel to over 50 countries, including Pakistan, Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, Zimbabwe and Haiti. Such places, we are told, are unsafe, but is this reason enough not to travel there? Here, as with any normative dilemma, we suppose there are pros and cons. There are x number of reasons why we shouldn’t travel (the risk to our safety, the cost of insurance, the concern of our family and friends, etc.) and y number of reasons why we should (supporting economies, offering aid, spreading democratic ideals, etc.). Ultimately, our decision boils down to a crude cost-benefit analysis; we weigh our gain against others’ using our own subjective scales and then take action accordingly. If the balance tips in our hosts’ favour, we may feel free to proceed. If, however, it is only us guests who stand to gain (as is the case for self-styled ‘disaster tourists’, gawping shutter-bugs with a Robert Capa complex), we might do well to reconsider.

Often, the normative issue isn’t one of danger and disaster; for some countries, the question of whether or not to travel is based on political considerations. Take Burma for example. On the one hand, we are told that tourism provides economic benefits to civilians and ‘raises awareness’ of their situation; on the other, we hear that it sources income to the military junta, thus furthering the cause of oppression. Should we travel to Burma, or Tibet, or the DRC? Again, the normative is subjective. Whether or not one chooses to visit such places cannot be seen as either a violation of or an assent to some essential moral standard. Rather, the decision is a personal one that is likely informed by a wide range of factors: our thoughts about democracy and freedom, our sense of adventure, our concern for how others may see us and so on. It is not about a right or wrong choice. Nor is it about perfect information (e.g. ‘don’t you know that [Country X] has the one of the world’s worst human rights records’) – the normative makes no appeal to reality. What should we do? Look once again at the scale, and make a personal choice.

There are some tourist destinations that are contentious for reasons other than risk or political instability. In recent years, the dense forests of Western Papua and the upper Amazon Basin have become sites for so-called ‘first contact tourism’, in which wealthy hicks cough up upwards of $5000 to come face-to-face with a previously ‘untouched’ people. Okay, so ‘first contact’ may be a myth – almost all the world’s tribes have had at least some interaction with ‘the outside world’ – but regardless, one is inclined to wonder how anyone’s personal moral scale can tip in favour of such a trip. It would be difficult to argue that the terms of this arrangement are anything other than slack-jawed adventure freak-show for me, bother and bemusement for them. This, then, is as close as we come to a normative consensus, for it is nonsense to allege that anyone other than oneself derives significant benefit. Indeed, only the intruder takes pleasure in intrusion.

So where should we travel? Well, the answer comes not in the shape of a neat list of safe and civil locations, but rather in the form of another question: how should we travel? As the present debates makes clear, it’s often not where you go that matters (even in a subjective sense) but what you do when you get there. (Compare, for example, cholera relief in Haiti with a cross-dressing pub crawl in Crete.) So how should we travel? We’ll return to this question in next week’s piece.

Travel as Morality: How Should We Travel?

In last week’s piece, we began looking at the normative ethics of travel, or what I otherwise called ‘should questions’. ‘Should questions’ come in many shapes and sizes, from the trivial (e.g. ‘should I put the kettle on?’) to the profound (e.g. ‘should I pull the plug?’). In the context of travel, we find a similar spectrum; there are little ‘should questions’ (e.g. ‘should I take a towel?’) and big ‘should questions’ (e.g. ‘should I really be here?’). Previously, we looked at the question ‘where should we travel?’, which, I argued, is best answered with another question: ‘how should we travel?’. This brings us to the thrust of this week’s piece.

To recap briefly, it is important to remember that ‘should questions’ have no ultimate answer (outside organised religion that is); in making decisions, all we have are our own subjective scales of cost and gain, right and wrong. Now this can seem a little scary for a species obsessed with order, and for this reason most folk hold fast to normative ideas, going so far as to try to convince others of the rightness of their own perspectives. My aim here, however, is not to impose my own answers to the question ‘how should we travel?’ so as to appease my personal doubts. Instead, I invite you to move beyond the shoulds and should-nots to a land that is governed by instinct. Allow me to explain…

This morning, when you got up, showered, had breakfast or whatever, did you ask yourself: ‘how should I act today?’? Of course you didn’t. And the reason is that for the most part we are totally immersed in our day-to-day activities, such that much of what we do is instinctive. To put this another way, we don’t need to waste time with the question ‘how should I act today?’ – we know automatically – and the same can be said for ‘how should we travel?’; when we are properly immersed in any activity, there is no call for conscious strategy. Immersion, then, is key. It does not answer ‘should questions’ so much as makes them disappear. And so, for the rest of this article, I want to think about some possible paths to ‘immersive travel’.

To be immersed is to be wholly engaged or absorbed in one’s environment, to recognise unity. For the casual traveller, one way to achieve this level of engagement is to study something of their new setting; a language is an excellent place to start, but one might also consider music, dance or martial arts, to name but a few. In each case, the learning process brings one into contact with both culture (in an abstract, historical sense) and the bearers of that culture: the people themselves. Crucially, this contact is reciprocal not reactive, born of unity not difference. Through study, then, it is possible to achieve immersion; the more one learns, the deeper one goes.

Like learning, work can induce immersion. Now the idea of working whilst on holiday may seem horrendous to some, conjuring images of sun-loungers strewn with spreadsheets and sand in your Blackberry. But ‘work’, in a more general sense, refers simply to any task or undertaking in which, to co-opt its scientific definition, energy is transferred from one physical system to another. To work, then, is to invest energy in something, and travel affords us countless opportunities for this. Voluntourism, as it has come to be known, comprises a wide array of activities, from teaching and care work to construction and conservation. Providing the project is well-realised (unfortunately, there is no guarantee of this), voluntary work can lead to a special form of immersion, in which the individual shares not only a social space with others but also their methods and motives. Again, unity prevails.

The prospect of immersion is not limited to long-term travel. Even if there’s not enough time to study yoga or lend a hand in leper colony, one can still look to immerse oneself in this new social reality. Chatting with people, hanging out, sharing a cup of tea – these are all ways of breaking down the barrier between guest and host. And through flows unity, immersing all around it. When we notice our common humanity, when our interactions are not merely instrumental but also empathetic, any question of how one should act dissolves in intuition. There are no abstract, antagonistic classes (i.e. ‘tourists’ vs. ‘other cultures’), there are simply people, other real people.

So, how should you travel?

Well, how did you act today?