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No, travelling isn’t character-building — it’s just fun（808 words）
By Janan Ganesh
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A long weekend in Lisbon, for the southern European weather and northern European dynamism. From a base in the old town, I test my calves on uphill walks to districts that qualify the Portuguese capital as Europe’s “in” city, according to the people who decide these things. I eat poorly in tourist traps and exquisitely at the hands of genius chefs. I take in the central monuments and the hidden wonders at the industrial end of the Lisbon shoreline. I put in the hard yards.
Lisbon is a great city that became more not less open to outsiders after the crash. I like it enough to return soon. But did I learn much or emerge an improved person? No. On my travels, I seldom do, and I am not sure that anyone does.
The more of the world I see, the less confident I am that there is anything innately or even generally educational about travel. It is worth doing because it is fun. Travel is for the senses, not the character. Fun is a good enough reason to do anything, as long as we do not kid ourselves that something more profound is at work.
The most prolific travellers I know are not deeper or smarter than anyone else and, if they are, there is more of correlation than of causation in the fact. At worst, travel can make them complacent. They tend to fall on personal anecdote: whatever they saw of a place constitutes the truth. They tend to under-rate the character formation that takes place at home: the break-ups, the bereavements, the mistakes. And our culture tends to flatter their pretensions.
Imagine you are an employer staring at two job applications that are identical in all respects save one. Candidate A spent a year between school and university seeing the world, like a Regency fop on his Grand Tour. Candidate B spent the same year stacking shelves in a local supermarket. One of the hopefuls showed self-reliance, practical nous and a certain grown-upness. The other is Candidate A. Yet ours is still a world that rewards the gap-year itinerant — often funded or backstopped by parents — with the job, where “well-travelled” is still a synonym for “clever”, where sophisticates still cite that snide statistic about the percentage of Americans who have no passport, as though nothing could damn the global superpower more.
Travel has intellectual associations it no longer deserves. It is a hangover from a time when so few went abroad, and so little knowledge about the outside world was accessible to those who did not, that people with a few international excursions under their belt could claim a genuine cultural edge. As late as the 1990s, in school playgrounds across Britain, any kid back from a trip to SeaWorld in Orlando would shimmer with Vasco da Gama levels of intrepid erudition. That innocent time ended when the internet was born. We can now not just read in granular detail about anywhere on earth, but see videos of it in 1,080-pixel definition. Our potential to be surprised — to be educated — by a visit to a place has diminished. I would go as far as to say that anyone who is consistently “discovering” things on their travels is uncurious when at home, not perceptive when abroad.
In the modern world, the only way to learn much more about a place than you could remotely is to live there for a sustained period, paying taxes and using local services. Mere travel is no great source of insight, which leaves just one reason to do it: fun. It is more than enough.
The writer Matthew Parris once told Margaret Thatcher that he planned to visit an island in the Southern Ocean to see the moon and the stars. “Don’t bother, dear,” she said. “You can see the moon and the stars from Spalding.” That stick-in-the-mud line, however funny, is not my argument here. I enjoy travel, including the bits you are meant to hate. I savour the clinical atmosphere of airports, the anonymity of hotels, the productive isolation of long-haul flights. If money were no object, I would go on regular London-to-Sydney trips just to nail big books in one sitting. As my British passport did not come through until my late teens, I could not venture abroad much as a child. I make up for it now.
But precisely because I take so much pleasure from travel, I can see through any attempt to cloak it in virtue. It would be like passing off an enthusiasm for casual sex as an anthropological research project to prove the essential oneness of all strangers. If I tried that line on you, you would laugh me out of town. But if I told you that my Lisbon weekend, a sensory joy, was something deeper, you might entertain the spurious idea.
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