Travel and Vice

The case against the case against the case against...

No one does goodbyes quite like Donne. The preacher-poet is best remembered for his valedictions, most especially the ‘Valediction: Forbidding Mourning’ with its infamous image of two parted lovers as twin compass-points, supposed to reassure his beloved that their being parted as he sets off on a journey will not be mere separation but an ‘expansion’ of their twinned souls.¹

Valedictions are travel writing for extreme pessimists. They look not to what is seen on the other side of a journey, but what is left behind. Donne seems to have been intensely preoccupied by what he left behind, for better or ill, as in his poem for Good Friday 1613, in which he notes how inappropriate it is for him to be riding towards the West on a day when he should be remembering a significant event that happened to his East.

In another valedictory poem, ‘A hymn to Christ, at the author’s last going into Germany’, Donne does at least attempt to find some virtue in his distance from home:

I sacrifice this island unto Thee,

And all whom I love there, and who loved me;

When I have put our seas ’twixt them and me,

Put thou Thy seas betwixt my sins and Thee.

There is a note of extreme melancholy in the past tense of ‘who loved me’, especially when one remembers (as I did thanks to my intimate knowledge of the life and works of Donne, not thanks to the introduction to this poem on the blog I copied and pasted it from) that Donne’s wife had died two years previously. Much like the ‘Valediction: Forbidding Mourning’, Donne attempts to find some goodness in distance, here by asking God to distance himself from his sins, just as Donne is distant from England. There is much that is strange about this analogy. Is Donne suggesting that his sins are as dear to God as his late wife was dear to him? Or that he will forget his wife just as he hopes God will forget his sins? And who is the ‘our’ in ‘our seas’? It is suggestive of a writer trying to make the best of a bad situation, as he prepares for a sea-crossing before a diplomatic tour of Germany. If there is virtue in travel here, it is a virtue of losing well.

Perhaps it is unfair to compare Donne’s dread about a hazardous work trip with the modern love of leisure travel, which I will refer to from now on as Travel. Nonetheless we have gone from an understanding of travel which looks most prominently on all that the traveller loses (home comforts, loved ones, time) towards one entirely focussed on what we have gained or ‘got out of’ a trip, how it has helped us relax, work, or simply ‘grow’. Somehow, via the Grand Tour and package holiday, we have arrived at a situation where what the philosopher Agnes Callard calls mere ‘locomotion’ is often taken to be intrinsically edifying. Callard wrote this in a bafflingly controversial and largely correct invective against the belief in the self-transformative powers of moving between countries.²

It could be objected that the kind of Travel that Callard dislikes, the kind that tends to be propounded by men with blonde dreadlocks, is a minority pursuit. Most people travel because it’s fun. What this objection misses is that ‘fun’ is far from a pre-cultural category, and that the chunky Sketchers of tomorrow’s middle-American casual holidaymaker tread on the paths laid by the sandals of that blonde-dreadlocked Traveller. Those seeking fun and those seeking spiritual nourishment from their locomotion ultimately drink from the same well, which is the well of novelty.

A more serious defence of Travel, such as that made very eloquently by my friend Alfie Robinson, might have it that Travel allows us to experience diversity, when otherwise we might be stuck in homogenous environments which do not allow us to grow into the rounded, thoughtful, liberal subjects we ought to be.³ I will have less palatable things to say about this idea in a moment, but for now I would simply note that Callard is right that most Travel has nothing to do with diversity and instead pursues a change of background scenery to familiar pleasures.

Perhaps this seems a bit unfair, but I know it to be true because this is exactly how I have travelled throughout my rapidly-waning youth, flying everywhere (mea culpa), ticking off destinations, learning zero languages (mea culpa), taking pictures, and (mea maxima culpa) uploading them to Instagram, with captions equally free from insight and capital letters. What I gained from my travels was not really anything to do with the places I visited, which simply provided background or activities to fill the day, but an excuse to spend unbroken time with friends or family which the course of normal life makes difficult. The modern holiday is therefore the translation of the medieval holy-day from time into space: because so little time is sacrosanct, preserved from work for the enjoyment of friendship and community, we have to move ourselves away to enjoy these benefits.

Perhaps the debate between those who defend Travel and naysayers like Callard is much like that described by Alasdair MacIntyre in his 1981 book After Virtue, where each side talks past the other because they are starting from completely different moral premises, and have no shared language in which they could begin to talk. To take the obvious example, for proponents of abortion, bodily autonomy is an unassailable good, whereas, for opponents, the sanctity of each unborn human life is equally unquestionable. MacIntyre suggests a tradition of virtue as an alternative way of grounding moral judgements. Rather than viewing each moral problem as an opportunity to exercise a pre-existing rule or calculation, they should be viewed as opportunities to live out the virtues, each of which has its own history.

There are real virtues which can be honed by travelling: resilience and open-mindedness come particularly to mind. But the experience of travel itself, accumulating memories and photographs, is not inherently virtuous, and probably leads most often to vice, not least pride and, most saliently perhaps now, reckless disregard for the environment. And the benefits are scant, often taking the form only of snapshots. Even when memory is relied on in place of a photograph, I find that my memories have taken the form of photographs, and consist more of framed images of particular buildings or landscapes than they do of overheard conversations, or the sense of narrative giving depth to a place.

There is a long history of navigating between the virtues and vices of travel, in evidence for instance in Holbein’s Ambassadors, where all the evidence of the well-travelled humanists is set against a distorted skull; viewing the painting from an angle that makes the skull jump out makes this shelf of achievements, and the puffed-out chests of those who have accumulated them, appear flat. So too in Henry James’s novel of the same name, which reverses the direction of travel from the New World to the Old, and where the Americans in Europe are (if memory serves) far from edified, depending on your point of view. James’ recollections of Italian cities in his travel writings form a stark contrast to the present reality, as his idea of mass tourism was having to share a Venetian canal with another gondola. He records events which are all but unimaginable now, such as being woken at 2am in Siena by a man singing traditional Tuscan song, and hearing from his waiter the latest gossip about the aristocrats who still occupied the palazzi.

The world James describes is dead, killed by two world wars and the social upheavals that accompanied them. Like promiscuous sexuality, leisure travel is a hangover of the late 20th century consumer revolution which attempted to make the easy satisfaction of passing whims into some kind of higher good. Both free love and free movement are practices which many still partake in, but few could really explain why. Rather than being simply ‘pleasant’ or ‘natural’, they are hypertrophied exaggerations of typical human behaviour, enabled by various forms of technology (apps, contraception, aeroplanes, abortion). The exercise of these freedoms is held to expand the self, as many people and peoples are known intimately. As we cross borders (political, moral), so too do the borders of our selves grow, puffing up like the chests of Holbein’s Ambassadors.

What we are in search of in our misguided adventures through geography and sexuality is experience itself, the desire to sense something which justifies ourselves to ourselves and others. Travel approximates religious experience without ethical commitment. The travel poster advertises, with a vulgar immediacy unattainable to the stained glass window or fresco of Last Judgement, another world, itself attainable with vulgar immediacy. All our travels are shadow-pilgrimages, searching for some place worthy of the journey.

Because diversity tends to be seen as a good in itself, experiencing many things over the course of a single life can easily become its own goal. The travel influencer Lexie Alford, the youngest person to have travelled to every country on Earth, offers a grotesque extreme of this way of living, with her YouTube channel thumbnails presenting her trying a day of Ramadan alongside trying the best pizza in Naples. The ‘thumbnail’ is an appropriate metaphor for a way of life which dips its toe into various forms of living without commitment. Most of us do not put this into practice with such ruthless extremity as Ms Alford, but I can certainly see this tendency in myself, towards thinking that the greater the number or intensity of my experiences, the greater the worth of my life.

This desire for diverse experiences has in turn, in a sense, diversified many spaces into homogeneity. Walk the streets of the great Italian cities (which I have visited for entirely valid personal reasons entirely unrelated to the desire for Travel, plurality of experience or pleasure) and you will hear the same Babel of languages (predominantly English of a piercing American strain) that you would have heard in New York or Oxford. If everywhere were equally diverse, everywhere would be the same. I love London for its diversity, but it is a diversity of little homogeneities, the clusters of peoples one finds in different areas creating a patchwork of real colour. So too the diversity of a rich life is not one of thumbnails or lists, but of lasting commitment to place and people.

One can live well on a broad canvas, knowing many people and places, cultivating many habits and hobbies, living many lives. But the goodness of a life is no more related to the size of the canvas on which it plays out than the beauty of a painting. If anything, there is a special beauty in the smaller scale, the close focus, the hearth, the small life, not of a million thumbnails: the kind which might well be undiverse in outlook, which mixes with its own, but which in its homogeneity shines all the brighter on the world’s patchwork, the kind of life celebrated in the conclusions to Thomas Gray’s ‘Elegy in a Country Churchyard’ and George Eliot’s Middlemarch. This quiet, rural virtue may not be possible to us now, but we need not put fresh seas betwixt ourselves and the rustic moralist who, far from the madding crowd, lived faithfully a hidden life.

1. As in the kind of compass which lies ever-dormant in the childhood pencil case, a pointy obstacle for fingers rummaging for something more useful.

2. Anges Callard, ‘The Case Against Travel’, New Yorker, June 2023.

3. Alfie Robinson, ‘Is Travel Bad?’