Category: Travel

“We no longer seek a cultural centre, the journey is no longer finite,” writes Ted Scheinman of today’s young travelers and their updated Grand Tour. Gone are the days when monied Englishmen would traipse around Western Europe, hunting for taste and refinement on the Continent.

Today’s travelers are not just the elites of Britain, nor are they so narrow in their geographic interests. They no longer visit a small constellation of European hubs in search of culture and history. Having left behind this Cassiopeia, they explore a limitless galaxy of vineyards and mountains, temples and villages, and yes, sometimes even museums.

Scheinman’s right to point out that today’s travel is less about finding the center of the world and more about centering your own world. I’d like to suggest that in addition to widening their geographic and cultural boundaries, today’s critical and savvy “Grand Tourists” also widen their own temporal and even ethical views.

As Scheinman writes, Richard Lassels (who coined the term “Grand Tour”) believed that “travel is central to the four areas of improvement and education: intellectual, social, ethical, and political.” Yet as Alexander Pope reminds us, travel abroad was and is often an exercise in luxury if not decadence. The English traveler of yore “Tried all hors-d’œuvres, all liqueurs defined, / Judicious drank, and greatly daring dined.” I have to admit, these lines remind me of some of my own wine-soaked experiences of summertime Italy.

But I’ve been reminded recently of how this original aim of travel as ethical edification is still alive today. This past July, a teenager posted a saccharine selfie taken at Auschwitz, the notorious World War II concentration camp. The Internet’s collective blood boiled at the ignorance of history and the appropriation of atrocious inhumanity as tactless backdrop. Tourists, so we learned, are expected to learn the errors of history, not simply to enjoy the view.

A similar but perhaps less obvious example is the Colosseum in Rome. As a teacher of the Latin education program to which Scheinman refers throughout his article, I have taken students to this Roman mega-monument (or perhaps magno-monument?) more times than I can enumerare. Around this building one finds sunburned men in gladiator costumes, waiting to take silly photographs with tourists. Most visitors are simply “doing” the Colosseum: they take a couple pictures, they march quickly around the inside looking for shade, and they make a few thumb motions from that movie about that guy with the sword or whatever.

But as museum placards, surviving literature from Augustine and Martial, and sure, even Russell Crowe in Gladiator remind us, we should be awestruck by more than the beauty of this massive stone theater. We should also marvel at the savagery of the Flavian emperors and at the forgotten victims who died cruel, violent deaths on the Colosseum floor. To do more than “doing” the Colosseum requires travelers to seek out tragedy and loss.

Learning about these travesties should never be an excuse to develop smug presentism. Yes, autocratic empires infringed upon basic human rights, and yes, the brutality of war merits a more contemplative reaction than a wide grin. But inhumanity is a historical constant. It is a hard lesson to learn, but one we must study vigilantly.

Travel itself may, in fact, be the best teacher of this lesson. Like Cicero’s historia, travel can be a modern magistra vitae: a “teacher of life” that both demands and provides our geographic, temporal, cultural, and ethical consciousness. It allows us to learn about the faults and accomplishments of the past, the problems and progress of the present, and the dangers and promise of the future. Travel shows us that these dimensions of history and experience, perhaps as Lassels himself originally conceived, are inseparable.

A man rests his head on a pile of dirty shirts and curls his legs up next to a heating vent. He is tired after toting the necessities of life around all day. Before he shuts his eyes for the night, he pulls his iPhone out of his blazer’s inside pocket and checks the status of his rebooked flight.

For Americans whose travels follow a constellation of airline hubs, a night stuck in the airport is a familiar experience. When hotels are too full or connections too early, it is simply easier to push benches together into a makeshift twin mattress.

These uncomfortable nights are the closest most Americans will ever get to homelessness.

The last month of polar vortices and wintry mixes has inflicted this quasi-homelessness on many travelers (including me). Men in tailored suits huddle on the floor in Concourse D. Sleepy young women in Ivy League sweatshirts scavenge for a bathroom, toothbrush in hand. Oily-haired travelers bathe themselves in public sinks, and we greet them with sympathetic smiles, not averted grimaces.

We accept airport vagrancy as an unavoidable and mildly unpleasant side-effect of flying, a miraculous kind of slowed-down teleportation. But why do we empathize so readily with those who suffer this temporary “homelessness” but remain comparatively callous to the homeless on our streets and in our subways?

According to an Aristotelian theory of emotions found in his Poetics, we feel pity (eleos) for air travelers stuck on the terminal floor because we recognize that they had no direct agency in their ill fate. And we feel fear (phobos) upon realizing that we, too, could find ourselves bleary-eyed, staring at the Jamba Juice closing at midnight.

From a sociological perspective, we understand that codes of conduct disintegrate in times of distress. Thucydides wrote about the uncivilized funeral practices in the aftermath of the plague of the Peloponnesian War: “Sacred places…were full of corpses of persons that had died there, just as they were; for as the disaster passed all bounds, men, not knowing what was to become of them, became utterly careless of everything, whether sacred or profane” (II.52). What we might take to be an unsanitary floor in the afternoon becomes the closely-guarded nighttime property of a vagrant traveler. That shift makes sense to us.

David Fleming at ESPN points to a more modern and lighthearted example: public defecation. At the 2005 London Marathon, Paula Radcliffe set a world record, but about four miles from the finish line, she “simply placed one hand on a metal crowd barricade for balance, used the other to curtain her shorts to the side and perched, precariously, over her shoes. Then, as they say in England, she proceeded to ‘have a poo’ right there on the street and in broad daylight, within two feet of a startled spectator.” Normally, we might curse at a public pooper, but here, we clapped for her.

Whether it’s a matter of Aristotelian psychology or competitive desperation, we can understand the need to break social codes at the airport. But of course, airport “strandedness” is downright luxurious compared to actual homelessness. It’s not so bad: terminals have heat and clean water. For those homeless travelers lucky enough to find an outlet, there is electricity — maybe even free WiFi to facilitate revisiting your favorite episodes of My So-Called Life. In fact, many travelers even choose this plush quasi-homelessness instead of booking hotels. For a tiny fraction of the 644 million travelers who find themselves sleeping on the floor, the worst outcome is usually a sore neck and a lackluster bagel the next morning (paid for with a meal voucher, of course).

But for millions of Americans, homelessness means living in unsafe and inclement cityscapes, ravaged by the same winter weather that left others stranded with heat, power, and an airline-branded blanket in O’Hare. But do we withhold pity because we tell ourselves we would never make the poor life choices that lead to sleeping on a bench? Do we not fear we might also end up bathing in a sink?

As air travel shows us, misfortune picks at random, and she sometimes picks me. Sometimes you.

When we next see truly unfortunate souls on our streets, let us remember these Aristotelian lessons of pity and fear. We should not withhold our empathy just because when we catch a night-long glimpse of our own homelessness, we are able to fly away from it the next morning.