This is conceived as an informal and spontaneous annex to my more extensive blog, Grand Strategy: The View from Oregon.

Subscribe to the Grand Strategy Newsletter for regular updates on work in progress.

Discord Invitation

24th April 2018

Post

The Experience of Travel

image

In Perennial Behaviors, Changing Explanations I discussed eating disorders, and had this to say about them:

“Wherever and whenever we see a practice that either persists or that repeatedly reappears throughout history, notwithstanding the fact that explanations or understanding of the practice may change, and the practice may occur in significantly different social contexts, this is a sign that the practice in question is deeply rooted in human nature – probably the practice is ultimately attributable to human biology; at very least, it cannot be dismissed as a social construct.”

Another obvious application of this idea is travel. While more human beings travel today than ever before in history, people have always traveled. We are a planetary species today, and have been since the last ice age, because human beings spread out across the planet in every direction and didn’t stop until there was no further to go. 

Historians are often forceful in asserting that we shouldn’t confuse, for example, medieval religious pilgrimage with contemporary tourism, but these two forms of travel are certainly perfect examples of a perennial behavior with changing explanations for the behavior. The perennial behavior of travel implies a perennial experience of travel, even if the explanation and understanding of travel is overlaid with many layers of meaning, and the meanings differ for the different participants in the common practice. 

Knowing what we know about human nature – because we are human beings living human lives – it strains credulity to think that Europeans of the Middle Ages on pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela or Rome or Jerusalem would have conducted their entire pilgrimage in a pure spirit of religious devotion, never marveling at the new things they saw, and never distracted from the religious duty of the journey.

Even if a pilgrimage were well and truly taken up in a pure and pious spirit, the human mind does not allow for such undivided focus over such long periods of time. No doubt that the arrival at the object of pilgrimage was a moment of great spiritual yearning coupled with great spiritual consummation – as beautifully evoked in Wagner’s Pilgrim’s Chorus from Tannhäuser – but there would have been many other moments in the pilgrimage when sore feet, strange ways, or remarkable buildings commanded more attention than piety. Indeed, there was a guidebook for medieval pilgrims, Mirabilia Urbis Romae, which described some of the sights of the Eternal City to travelers.  

In Aristotle’s terminology, the final cause of a pilgrimage is a religious duty, but there are also the material, efficient, and formal causes of the pilgrimage. Other forms of travel might have a distinct final cause, but will generously overlap pilgrimage, and perhaps entirely coincide, in their material, efficient, and formal causes.

The obvious example of travel today is tourism (full disclosure: I’m guilty), but there are many other forms of travel in addition to tourism. When scientists travel they call it an expedition; the final cause for an expedition is scientific knowledge. Some expeditions are legendary in their discomforts, and indeed some are fatal to the participants (much like a pilgrimage). There are, of course, curmudgeons like Claude Lévi-Strauss who opened his book Tristes Tropiques with the line, “Travel and travelers are two things I loathe – and yet here I am, all set to tell the story of my expeditions.”

When sportsmen travel in order to climb a particularly challenging mountain or to raft a particularly dangerous river, they may also call this an expedition. Perhaps some sportsmen think of themselves as scientists, fewer think of themselves as religious pilgrims, and no doubt many loathe tourists as much as Lévi-Strauss. The final cause of a mountain climbing expedition is the conquest of the mountain – because it’s there, as George Mallory said. But the final cause cannot sustain the journey in splendid isolation; travel occurs in a social context, and that social context results in commonalities of the experience of travel, whatever the motive for travel. 

While pilgrimage, tourism, scientific expeditions, and sporting adventures all have distinct final causes, and probably each attracts a different kind of personality, nevertheless the experience of travel is held in common among these diverse groups. All these diverse forms of travel represent instances of a perennial behavior, despite the different explanations given for the practice.

image

Tagged: traveltourismpilgrimageexpedition