I'm getting old
I never used to complain about weird hours, no sleep, or long drives. I don't know if it's because I got married or because my inner crusty old guy is starting to become my normal outer self.
I also find myself becoming tired of travel in general, mostly because the more I think about it the more selfish it seems. This is less true of touring (where you're supposedly "giving" people something wherever you go, creating value, etc.) than normal post-college travel, but still applies. As I begin to accept my limitations and realize that I will not go everywhere in the world before I die, I also begin to see more clearly the consumptive nature of travel. Of what value is all this "experience capital" anyway, especially to anyone other than myself? Am I really going to bring home some wonderful knowledge from far away that will improve my local community? That's a pretty Platonic idea and one which is all but obsolete in contemporary globalism.
It's more likely that by traveling I'm only spreading the gospel of consumptive late capitalism. It forces a weighing of the potential benefits (to me) of worldly experience, versus the potential benefits (to my community) of staying and investing in a real home. Some might claim that their enlightened transience allows them to be "citizens of the world" and have a community that spans the globe, but I contend that most of those people simply have no real community at all, and are stretched too thin to be much more than cultural leeches to the localities they come in contact with. Their "doctrine of placelessness" is also often accompanied by virulent delusions of their own importance.
I suspect many of these people are trying to escape what they perceive to be a kind of determinism in placefulness --- whereby your homeplace becomes inextricable from your identity, and therefore limits how much of your self you can intentionally construct. Having a local connection is a block to the long-held elite-white-people value of culturelessness (unless the "local" connection is New York or London, which are just nodes in the Space of Flows). I think that's actually a good thing. If that makes me "provincial" or a "yokel," I don't really care.
posted by M. Weed at
9:06 AM
8 Comments:
Interesting.
So what's the limit to your distaste for personal consumption? Is it wrong to seek experiences that give pleasure only to ourselves? Should we deny ourselves any pursuit of pleasure apart from the community, finding all our joy in giving to others with no thought for ourselves?
Also, as an aside, how do you define "community"?
1. This is a rhetorical question
2. No
3. No
I never implied otherwise in the post. I've said this before: what has to be considered is not a binary question of right/wrong, but a twofold interaction of personal idolatry (possibly programmed by the culture), and the extent to which the pursuit of stuff OR experiences denigrates or harms other human beings. No one acts in a vacuum, ever. Personal motives are not the be-all end-all of what is righteous.
4. Acts 2:44-47
Sorry if I misunderstood what you were saying here.
In your post, you describe a trade off between community investment and the "consumption" of travel.
I agree that there's a trade off here; I just don't think people travel enough to make this a concern. It seems to me that reducing travel would result in at best marginally more community investment as compared to very significant reductions in consumption of worldly experiences.
As such, I thought that your objections stemmed from your devaluation of individual experience relative to community investment, which is why I commented as I did. However, it seems from your reply that this is not the case.
The only alternative I can think of is that you must believe that peoples' traveling significantly affects their ability to invest in their communities, and the experiences are generally not worth this damage. If this is so, could you expand on why you think this is the case?
Incidentally, I'm curious about your statement that travel "spreads the gospel of consumptive late capitalism." What do you mean by this?
To attempt to clarify if I may, I don't think Matthew is speaking against the practice of travel so much as the philosophy of travel which is held prominently by young and well-educated Americans.
This is of course the demographic we belong to. It's also the one satirized by "Stuff White People Like," and to get an idea of the kind of philosophy I'm talking about it might be helpful to read this post from that blog.
Travel is considered a virtue in itself, a way to establish a person's identity as more cosmopolitan. By frequently traveling you gain leverage over others because you're more cultured, and because you are not tied down to one place like they presumably are. Your perspective is thus broader and more valid, and you're more important.
Or anyway that's how the story goes. This is travel as a lifestyle much more than an occasional practice, and I think part of what Matthew refers to as "the gospel of consumptive late capitalism."
So Matthew is not saying that time spent traveling is not worth the opportunity cost, so much as he is saying that living a philosophy of "placefulness" - of belonging to one geographic community - contributes more positively to more people's lives than does a philosophy of placelessness.
Thanks Nick. Somehow you put it in words that I understand. I guess Matthew's prose is too deep for me.
I guess this kind of commentary puts me on edge because it brings up my still unresolved intellectual conflict between individualism and communitarianism, and where the Christian message falls in that spectrum. i.e. see my post Community and Capital from April 22.
I don't think my prose is too deep. I think we've been trained in different discourses and vocabularies. I don't like that continuum between individualism and communitarianism either, and I ESPECIALLY don't like it when it turns into a capitalism vs. communism or free market vs. authoritarian kind of question... or when people raise the spectre of "Marxism" as if Karl Marx is the bogeyman. I'm not personally interested in solving problems through legislation and civics, and I'm not interested in "the greater good" (whatever that is). I am interested in calling INDIVIDUAL people in my culture to take responsibility. If I didn't believe in the power of the individual to be a change agent, I wouldn't talk or blog about this stuff. I think that freedom without responsibility isn't freedom at all. Pursuing personal joy is good and right when it's done with responsibility, i.e., in true freedom.
I also don't think Christianity actually has a position on the "continuum" anyway --- true Christianity represents the twin ultimacy (cf. Mark Potter) of fully individual, and fully communal. Or put another way, the Christian individual loses nothing in being fully part of the community of faith, but gains much. And this applies in all realms; material, intellectual, social, whatever. This is unlike secular communitarianism (particularly communism or authoritarianism) where the individual is erased and becomes invisible.
That being said, I DO think that different cultures have different sin TENDENCIES. In America right now, I think our tendency is toward over-emphasis on the individual, and that this has become a kind of idolatry that is inextricable from the constant pressure to consume more and more. It's "spiritualized consumerism". The idea that we construct our identities through our consumer choices is TOXIC to an understanding of Christian twin ultimacy of the individual and community, with both having identities and MISSIONS that are given by God. Other cultures in other places may need to be told something different... e.g., God values the individual, God is personal, etc. I don't think that's our issue in this country.
So Nick did a pretty good job summing up why I feel the way I do. One other thing he didn't mention is the idea of "the gaze", or the way we look at and construct "the other". I think this is a huge unredeemed area of the American psyche. This isn't something that can be described through economics. It's a way of looking, of seeing people in other cultures that holds onto old colonial and imperial ideas about how we can "civilize" and "save" them. It's just that now we do it with "economic missionaries" (microfinance, medical aid, subsidies, whatever) instead of church missionaries. But the same flaw inhabits both, and it's the constructed wall between "us" and "them", with the idea that we can and will "save" them. That's an unbiblical way to think. I think that paradigm enables the glass walls separating the space of flows from cultural, historical localities. I think it enables rich white people to travel the world and never be confronted with anything that they don't have an answer for. It allows them to gain "experience capital" without ever giving anything up in exchange. It objectifies "the other" and turns people into animals, and the world into a zoo.
Matt,
Thanks for your thought-provoking response. While I have several emotional/intellectual reactions to what you wrote, I think that I'm going to take some time to process rather than replying immediately. That seems a wise course given our past failures to communicate.
After 21 days of traveling through European cities, I am physically sick from traveling. As for my emotional state, this post and comments have really helped in solidifying how I feel about "post-collegiate" travel. I must say that I will not really be able to put all my current emotions into words just yet...Le Grand Tour is an old concept, and history deserves a bit of time on being challenged.
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