Would Culture Survive Without Travelling?
Culture would be one of the hardest-hit fields, should travel be seriously cut down as some of the public voices have now advocated.
Someone asked me once whether travelling makes people wiser. It is true that fate, or call it luck, has been kind to me in terms of my travels, and I’ve been able to see very different parts of the world over the years. I’ve stayed in some of them, performed at some of them and made friends in many of them. I answered her that it depends – it depends on why one travels in the first place, and how one travels. If one goes to another country or continent to watch the same sports as usual, drink the same beer as usual and stay at some members-only resorts, I don’t think it makes much of a difference to what that person will be. But if the manner of travel is even slightly different from that, let alone vastly different – let’s say, exploratory – I do believe now that it adds to the outlook one has of the world. To see the incredibly rich, and the incredibly poor, and to see traditions that would at best make only a passing acquaintance with the ones we’re used to is an experience that cannot deleted. For despite the ever-expanding corporate and through that, cultural globalisation, the world still hosts a remarkable variety of very different traditions and ways of life.
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But let me focus on the question I’ve posed in the title. A good part of my travels have come about as a cultural representative, or as an artist, and I have rarely come away from a trip without making new friendships or acquaintances. In fact, the majority of my significant professional friendships have come about by “stumbling” into them over my travels – they have often been artists and authors unknown to the international audience, but essential in their own context and milieu, or sometimes young and brilliant minds whose career is only starting. Indeed, I have found these relationships to be some of the most fulfilling and rewarding in my work and artistic pursuits. It didn’t take me long to understand that festivals and conferences are not just about the performances and speeches, not even in a small part. The main core and magic of them lies in the fact of happening to be in the same space with specific people and have time to talk them, and surprisingly often, finding common ground with them.
However, the whole scene came to a halt when Covid kicked in, and much of it hasn’t still recovered, be it for financial reasons or loss of enthusiasm or – in my mind, mistaken – idea that things can be managed as successfully and with less expense online. Of course, there is room for the online venues as well, but they can never replace the immediate physical interaction, for many of the very meaningful encounters in life are, in my experience, happenstance. This was another of the losses, and harms, and a hardly discussed one at that, that the Covid era brought about. Unavoidably, it seems, we all became more solitary in more ways than one.

As the focus shifted slowly away from Covid, the new emergency was the presumed climate crisis. It didn’t help the loneliness – voices that began calling for rigorous limitations on people’s right to travel, for one, and even a potential introduction of ‘a carbon passport’ much like the ‘vaccine passport’ of the pandemic. Hearing those calls, amongst friends and officials alike, I thought, for one thing, how those people had never considered the mechanisms by which contemporary culture works. Culture as a phenomenon is always built on exchange – between the author and the audience, but also between the authors themselves. It is the exchange that will keep culture alive and vibrant. We’ve come a long way in the modern post-WWII world in finding unity in diversity, in getting to know people from very different cultures and backgrounds, and yet appreciating the ways they’ve spoken and touched us. As history proves, the most appreciative audience to an author is not necessarily his or her native one, the same as one’s favorite authors aren’t necessarily the native ones either. Curbing international travel would likely throw us back a good few decades in such dialogues and interactions.
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In fact, travel has been part of cultural evolution much longer. At the time when air travel wasn’t that common, or even before it was invented, we often saw people of the same artistic trade gathering at certain centres of the craft, or around certain masters. What would the contemporary painting, for example, look like if Picasso, Miro, Modigliani and many others hadn’t gathered in Paris in the first decades of the 20th century, but had stayed at their home ground for the fear of disturbing the world? One can also think, in earlier history, of composers gathering in Vienna, or ponder what the Italian art would have looked like or developed into without great art centres like Florence, at the height of its time? In essence, travel has always been part of the European culture, and its history and beauty is often a story of expanding exchange. (Think of Gauguin who travelled to Polynesia or Gidé who travelled to North Africa, and what it eventually meant for their respective fields.)

How would translators really translate if they had never been to the home country of those works and never heard the language they were translating? Or can one really interpret composers without knowing the actual landscapes of their music? It is hard to imagine it would all be the same. Culture is more than likely to be a sphere that would suffer as gravely any, should the ideology of travelling restrictions bear (indiscriminate – which, judging from the pandemic, is more than likely) fruit. Even if the reasons of that ideology were valid – which sounds highly doubtful to an increasing number of ears – it would quickly introduce us to a kind of cultural solipsism, of limited exchange and collaborations and new ideas, which in itself is more characteristic of totalitarian societies than any other. (Authors were amongst the first to be disallowed international travel, for example, in the former Soviet Union.) Narrowed down culture brings about narrow minds, and narrow minds bring about a narrowed down society where thinking outside the box becomes increasingly difficult.
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And there is yet another side to banishing travel. There is, of course, also the economic effect it would have on countries like, let’s say, the Philippines, where tourism accounts for nearly a tenth of the entire GDP of the country, or Costa Rica, where, pre-pandemic, it accounted for about 5% of the GDP and about 7% of the employment. Such numbers can clearly even be higher, e.g. in Bahamas, where the according number has been close to 20%. Quitting travel could in many cases sink the economies, if not of the countries, then at least of its regions, with the poorer ones suffering first, and worst.
But more importantly than that, I do believe that travelling, unless undertaken in such closed quarters as described at the start, can make us at least kinder, even if not wiser. I am forever thankful for having travelled in small rural villages of northern India a couple of decades ago where the poverty of the places was in my face, as was, however, the simplicity and kindness of the people. I am thankful for seeing different cultures and landscape and ways of life. I am thankful for seeing the creativity in children and people in the workshops I’ve run in different places of the world, amongst them a recent war zone.
If diversity is really our goal, I believe it should be the diversity of perceptions and understandings, a diversity of dimensions that we should be aiming for, and travelling would still give us the best shot in advancing the ways in which we’re able to see the world. Or if unity is our goal, travelling is once again one of the best aids in achieving it, by recognising the common thread of all human experience, despite different settings and cultures. It can also help us better understand, by contrast, where we ourselves are coming from and what is the strength of our own culture, or the need to preserve it. It is only if the goal is merging the world into a mix of all the same things all over the place, or closing the minds to a shuffle of inspirations and influences, that the ban on travel would actually make sense. Seeing culture, in its different forms and manifestation, as what really gives us nourishment of thought and offers consistency and sustenance to the society, I reckon that the balance of the world hangs on a far greater variety of things than CO2, and I would beg to suggest this isn’t necessarily even close to the top of that list. The form can never sustain itself without spirit, as the classics already taught us, whatever the atmosphere.