Newsletter: December 2024

I took the photo above in the Süleymaniye Mosque, inaugurated in 1557, and probably the finest work in Istanbul of Mimar Sinan, the greatest architect of the Ottoman Empire. (His masterpiece is said to be the Selimiye Mosque in Edirne, which I haven’t yet visited.) The mosque complex sits on top of a hill overlooking the Golden Horn. Grand without being ostentatious, Sinan created a graceful visual rhythm of domes of varying sizes culminating in a central dome that draws the visitor’s gaze upward toward heaven. Despite large numbers of visitors and worshippers, a feeling of serenity prevails.

The Süleymaniye is one of the “can’t miss” tourist attractions of Istanbul, listed as a top ten highlight in my Lonely Planet guide. But getting to the mosque was its own kind of treat. Descending from my apartment along the winding cobblestone streets of Çukurcuma, I passed antique stores crammed with housewares, old coins, decorative tiles, even random military helmets and fifty-year-old postcards. Turning down a side street near the water, I stumbled upon a film shoot, where a group of women dressed in mid-century chic were chatting between takes. Crossing the Galata Bridge to the old city, I passed the line of fishermen who crowd the bridge from before dawn and into the night, maybe as interested in each other’s company as in the prospect of catching any fish. The waterfront area is posh and tourist-friendly but turning up the hill toward the Süleymaniye, I quickly found myself surrounded by crumbling and abandoned wood houses and roosters strutting about abandoned lots. An old stone wall was lined with holes in which pigeons roosted. The transition from twenty-first century waterfront to crumbling Ottoman-era decay was almost immediate. And then, just as suddenly, scenes of squalor opened up on to one of the city’s greatest mosques.

I live in Istanbul now but, as an ex-pat, I’m closer to being a tourist than a local. It’s my first time off the North American continent since before Covid and so I’m getting reacquainted with the experience of being an outsider. And it’s had me thinking about the value (such as it is) of travel.

The twenty-first century has seen both an explosive growth in global tourism and, not coincidentally, an explosive growth in attacks on the very idea of travel for leisure. Cities like Barcelona and Venice are swamped with tourist hordes, who jack up prices for locals and crowd them out of their homes in a frenzy of Airbnb-ification. Picturesque locations are converted into so many backdrops for Instagram selfies. In a time of climate crisis, it’s unconscionable to take long flights simply for the sake of novelty.

And yet, people still travel, and in growing numbers. A person who has never travelled abroad or—worse yet!—doesn’t have a valid passport is viewed as narrow-minded or unadventurous. Travel, it’s said, broadens the mind, teaches us tolerance and respect for otherness, breaks us out of the calcifying creep of habit and routine. The critics of travel wouldn’t need to make their arguments if large numbers of people didn’t see something profoundly good about travel.

So what is travel good for? And where did the idea that it might be good originate?

The rise of modern travel coincides with the rise of a distinctively modern value: that of authenticity. Authenticity as a value finds its origins in an early nineteenth century Romantic reaction against the Enlightenment ideals of the eighteenth century. The leading figures of the Enlightenment—thinkers like Kant, Diderot, and Voltaire—celebrated the power and universality of human reason. Against this emphasis on universal reason, various modes of Romanticism insisted on the importance of sub-rational passions and the individuality of human experience.

The ideal of authenticity arose as a counterpoint to ethical universalism. An authentic individual is guided by his or her own inner truth rather than falling in line with the common, bourgeois values of the prevailing culture. You find variations on this idea as early as the late eighteenth century in Goethe and Rousseau, and into the nineteenth century with poets like Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Keats, American Transcendentalists like Emerson and Thoreau, and proto-existentialist philosophers like Kierkegaard and Nietzsche.

When you hear people today rhapsodize about their travel experiences, they often do this in the key of authenticity. They travel for the sake of an authentic experience, they find an unvarnished authenticity in the people and places they encounter, they cultivate something of their own individuality in the process.

Much of the criticism of travel sings in a similar key, accusing tourists of a false authenticity. How authentic is it, really, to have your travel choices motivated by the number of likes you get on Instagram? (In case you’re wondering, I’ve topped out at 293.) And, of course, there’s that paradox of travel that, by your very presence, you reduce the alleged authenticity of the place you visit. Nothing is less “authentic” than a horde of tourists snapping photos. A curmudgeonly piece by the philosopher Agnes Callard in the New Yorker last year is just one recent instance of anti-travel invective.

To my mind, the ideal of authenticity arises as a secular expression of religious yearning. The Enlightenment project let the genie of atheism out of its bottle. Before the eighteenth century, it was almost unthinkable for a European to be a professed atheist. By the nineteenth century, it was almost de rigueur. If that old time religion no longer does it for you but you still yearn for the spiritual uplift and self-transformation that religion promises, where do you look? Authentic experience offers to lift you out of yourself, to remake you anew, to wipe the dust from your eyes and give you an elevated understanding of your place in the world.

In that respect, the fetish for modern travel is an inheritor of earlier religious practices of pilgrimage (this idea gets developed in a fine recent essay by Tara Isabella Burton). In both cases, the pilgrim goes on a long journey hoping to be transformed, where the journey itself is the medium in which the transformation takes place.

Religious transformation aims, among other things, at transforming our experience of time. We mere mortals are time-bound creatures but God is eternal. In those moments when we’re touched by divine grace, we’re lifted out of our temporal experience and come into contact with eternity. A pilgrimage represents a break from ordinary routines with the aspiration to enter into a different temporal order.

Modern travel, as a leisure activity, also reconfigures our experience of time. On holiday, our movements aren’t constrained by the Monday-to-Friday and nine-to-five of work. There isn’t anything we’re required to do as tourists. We’re lifted out of ordinary time toward, well, maybe not spiritual transcendence but at least something out of the ordinary.

So much of the charm and authenticity that people allege to find in foreign locales comes from their freedom to inhabit those locales with a certain existential distance. I don’t just mean that this place you’re visiting isn’t your home or that you might not speak the local language. I mean that the people around you are bound by time in a way that a tourist isn’t. The locals are living in the midst of whatever daily routines their ordinary lives present to them while the tourist is temporarily liberated from routine. Ordinary life goes on around you but you’ve escaped from it.

There are obviously various awful ways of being a tourist. But that odd experience of being in a place without being of that place can also make room for experiences of great beauty. Kant describes beauty as a form of disinterested pleasure: a beautiful painting or a beautiful sunset can please you without you wanting anything from it. As a tourist, too, you float free from the utilitarian demand that you make productive use of your time and can instead take a disinterested pleasure in seeing the world move around you without yourself having to move with it.

And here’s the secret to this kind of pleasure, and maybe part of what’s implied in so much of the criticism of travel: you don’t need to travel to do it. You don’t need the Süleymaniye Mosque to experience the beauty in this world. You can also find it in your own literal backyard (if you have one), on any city street, in a shopping mall, in a diner. That experience of being lifted outside of time, of seeing the world around you as strange and wonderful—you don’t need to book time off from work or get on a plane to experience it. You can find it right here and right now.

Of course, it’s easier to break out of your habitual way of being in the world by dragging yourself away from your habitual haunts. (Also, the Süleymaniye is definitely worth a visit in its own right.) But if travel is to be something other than an interlude or a distraction, it has to teach us something we can bring home with us. Like the religious pilgrim, the aspiration of the tourist is to find a way to touch eternity and bring it into lived time. To find uplift not just in gazing at the dome of the Süleymaniye but also on the cobblestone streets of Çukurcuma. It’s a tall order, and its false semblance can make for some obnoxious post-trip stories. But if there’s value to travel, I think that uplift is part of the reason why. 

1. There’s some evidence to suggest that Earth might once have had a planetary ring of the king that Saturn is famous for. (source)
2. Trousers first came into widespread use as gear for horseback riding. (source)
3. Ice cores extracted from Greenland contain evidence of the Antonine Plague that struck the Roman Empire in the 2nd century. The plague coincided with a dramatic economic downturn in the empire, which in turn led to the closure of many silver mines in western Europe. The process of smelting silver spewed lead into the atmosphere, which drifted toward the poles. There’s measurably less lead in Greenland ice cores that date from the time of the plague and its aftermath than in the time before or after. Although it’s debatable how much the economic downturn was due to the plague rather than other factors. (source)
4. More money was spent on the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi than on all previous winter games combined. (source)
5. Malaria came to the Americas with Europeans. Not because malaria-carrying mosquitoes hitched a ride on European boats but because some Europeans carrying malaria in their blood were bitten by American mosquitoes that had previously been malaria-free but then became vectors for the disease. In effect, Europeans gave malaria to American mosquitoes and then those mosquitoes returned the favour by spreading malaria to people in the Americas. (source)
6. When the United Kingdom abolished slavery in 1833, they paid compensation to slaveowners for depriving them of their “property.” The debt the British government incurred in paying that compensation was only fully paid off in 2015. (source)
7. If you click the first link in the main text of a randomly chosen Wikipedia article, click the first link in the main text on the page that you get to, and so on, you will eventually reach the Wikipedia article on philosophy about 97% of the time. (It’s more complicated than that, but the video I’ve linked works through some of the complications.) (source)