On Not Being a Naive Tourist
Becoming a mindful traveler often helps reveal our blind spots about the world and opens our eyes to the reality of our humanity. Sometimes that can be unsettling.
“Travel isn’t always pretty. It isn’t always comfortable. Sometimes it hurts. It even breaks your heart. But that’s okay. The journey changes you. It SHOULD change you. It leaves marks on your memory, on your consciousness, in your heart, and on your body. You take something with you. Hopefully, you leave something good behind.”
-Anthony Bourdain
I once witnessed an Italian man pickpocket an Englishman. I was on a train from Naples to visit the ruins of Pompeii with my newly wedded wife while on our honeymoon. The theft was over in a matter of seconds and it was such a smooth, perfectly timed order of events that my brain hadn’t even processed what I was seeing until after he’d exited the train with the man’s wallet. The pickpocket carried a jacket in one hand and had it nestled up against the Englishman’s waist which carried some of the bulkiest trousers I’d ever see—and this is coming from someone who was in high school when those ridiculous elephant-sized pants, JYNCO Jeans, were all the rage.
This wasn’t the pickpocket’s first rodeo as he used the swaying motion of the tram to casually bump up against his victim a few times to habituate his victim to the jostling and close quarters of the train. Seconds before the train came to a halt, the wallet was retrieved and the pickpocket vanished into the crowd. The Englishman casually transferred from the standing section and sat down, completely unaware of his loss until another person informed him. His face was one of violation and humiliation.
I felt incredibly sorry for this man and was enraged with myself that I failed to act and do something. I had been actively practicing Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu and discussed my upset with my colleagues (many of whom were well-trained former Marines and police officers mind you) on what, if anything, I should have done. Surprisingly, they wisely informed me that what took place was probably the best outcome, all things considered. To begin, I was in a foreign country and potentially lacked some crucial information along with a host of social, cultural, and political insights. I had no idea whether or not the pickpocket had one or more accomplices with him and whether they were carrying weapons. Had I intervened, it could have only escalated the situation. Multiple people could have been injured or killed, including myself. At the end of the day, it sucks the victim lost money and personal identification. But those things could be replaced. Lives cannot be. Thus, this momentary lesson in travel had a significant long-term impact on shifting my naivety toward human reality.
Traveling isn’t just about seeing how beautiful the world is. It is also about confronting harsh truths of what humans are capable of. As a self-respecting anthropologist, I am not pollyannaish about human nature. At the core of my insistence that we all travel more is also the caution that we sincerely recognize and grapple with the ugly side of the world, not to become cynical and misanthropic but to diminish our preconceived naïveté.
As uncomfortable as it is to entertain these ideas, we must not forget that travel and adventure can end in tragedy and trauma nor should we take these facts lightly. I want us all to come to have a more accurate and sensible view of our humanity, and that includes understanding the bad stuff so that we can all learn vital information and take sensible precautions while on our adventures.
Travel can also make us feel dumb. But that’s kind of the whole point of it. Sitting in one small corner of the earth all our lives can give us a puffed-up ego as Mark Twain famously quibbled. But we don’t have to necessarily travel to all four corners of the earth to understand the value of taking multiple perspectives. Most of us can’t travel as much as we want and often get there through extensive reading—living through the eyes of a vast cast of characters in novels that soon make us realize there are incredibly diverse ways of seeing the world.
I’m fascinated by how we all come to choreograph our worldviews. Some of it we are conscious of. Most of the time we are not. So how exactly do we all obtain a more accurate worldview? Is that even possible given how limited our minds and experiences can be? If you had a major flaw in your worldview and didn’t know it, how open would you be to hearing someone educate you on the matter?
Most of us seem to instinctively recoil when anyone attempts to correct a deficit in our knowledge bank. Would you prefer it come from a stranger telling you this in a kind but unsolicited manner or someone close to you being sympathetic but direct? How would you prefer someone sit you down and tell you that you are wrong and being naive? Could you handle this truth about yourself? Would it be better if then you could share something about them that you think they could improve in themselves? Would that help the relationship or harm it?
The fact is virtually every one of us is wrong about something, many things in fact. Given the staggering amount of knowledge in the world, we’re probably mostly wrong, ignorant, or naïve about most of it. So why are we all so bad at helping each other update our understanding of the world? Why do we act defensively and cling so fervently to beliefs and ideas that are demonstrably wrong? When might we reach a point where we are all mature enough to not just handle the harsh truths about ourselves but eagerly seek them out to be corrected? Do we not all want a better model of how the world really is in our heads?
No one has a monopoly on knowledge on any topic. Each one of us knows something others do not. So why are we not spending more of our time trying to find the jewels of knowledge within each one of our minds? If knowledge is power, we’d expect humans to have developed a culture by now that prioritizes the unashamed exchange of ideas. Why haven’t we gotten there yet? Travel and adventure may be able to assist us here, but only if we are willing to be challenged and humbled by the world and make an effort to overcome our naivety and ignorance.
Our ability to overcome ignorance and naivety about the world is the long-term hope I have for getting more of us to travel. Travel and adventure often quickly teach us many things—how to temper our moods and egos, to momentarily make us less sure of ourselves about the wider world, and to realize that we have to work hard to establish better lines of communication with those both within our own society and across many other cultures and societies. We cannot sustain a global civilization without being willing to humble ourselves with our ignorance. And sometimes that means confronting harsh truths about ourselves.
Anthony Bourdain solemnly commented on his time in Beirut, when the Israel-Lebanon War in 2006 erupted while filming an episode of No Reservations, with these powerful words,
“In the few years since I’ve started to travel this world, I’d found myself changing. The cramped, cynical world view of a man who’d only seen life through the narrow prism of the restaurant kitchen had altered. I’d been so many places. I’d met so many from wildly divergent backgrounds, countries, and cultures. Everywhere I’d been, I’d been, as in Beirut, treated so well. I’d been the recipient of so many random acts of kindness from strangers, and I’d begun to think that no matter where I went or who I sat down with, that food and a few drinks seem always to bring people together, that this planet was filled with basically good and decent people if frequently under difficult circumstances, that the human animal was perhaps a better and nicer species than I’d once thought. I’d begun to believe that the dinner table was the great leveler where people from opposite sides of the world could always sit down and talk and eat and drink, and if not solve all the world’s problems, at least find, for a time, common ground.
Now I’m not so sure. Maybe the world’s not like that at all. Maybe in the real world, the one without cameras and happy food and travel shows, everybody, the good and the bad together, are all crushed under the same terrible wheel. I hope, I really hope—I’m wrong about that.”
My goal is to encourage more of us to see the world in much the same way that an anthropologist does, having a lens of curiosity, cosmopolitanism, and self-criticism in hand. I think the longer we are exposed to many vantage points in the world, we will see that it is neither rosy nor apocalyptic, but a strange blend of both sometimes and yet something indescribable. One trip around the world can be enchanting, the next complete misery and leave you questioning humanity. However counterintuitive it sounds, there is a great appreciation to be found there but we have to visit the world for ourselves to find out what it is ultimately about.
The challenge for the anthropologist and the traveler is to confront the apparent contradictions of human nature so that we may all come to embrace what this world is truly about—the good, the bad, and the ugly. Only then do I think we can begin correcting for a model of a global society based on human reality.
For consideration:
Do you have a travel moment that challenged your naivety?
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Cheers!
-JSB
Oh so true, the eyes that will not see. But my first head-on with 'the real world' came when I first traveled to Mexico in my early 20s. My boyfriend and I took a bus from southern CA to Mexico, hoping enroute to find that perfect little fishing village on Mexico's western coast. We jumped off for a while in Guadalajara, and naive me, I had never before seen poverty--probably at all--as a middle-class gringa. There, while walking around that huge marketplace that takes up an entire city block, I saw poor indigenous women sitting on the sidewalk holding cups for donations. They were beyond poor. My naive 20-something self was startled. It really affected me, and in an instant, my worldview changed. I realized how closeted, cloistered and sheltered I'd been for my entire existence.
This is perfectly written. Traveling is humbling and it's always a learning experience, even when the destination isn't that exotic. Every time you think you have things figured out the universe proves you wrong. While travelling I've received 100 kindnesses from strangers for every scammer I've encountered; and fortunately, for me the scams have always been for minor bits of money, overcharges for tours and cabs and similar, so the only real loss was pride.