New Eyes for a New Year: Rick Steves and the Power of Transformational Travel

Rick Steves delivers the wisdom behind travel, especially in our fraught modern era. A response to ‘The Interview: Rick Steves Refuses to Get Cynical About the World’ in the New York Times.

Photo: Courtesy of Rick Steves' Europe

“To me, there are two kinds of travel: There’s escape travel, and there’s reality travel. I want to go home a little bit different, a little less afraid, a little more thankful, a little better citizen of the planet.”

-Rick Steves

The image of Rick Steves isn’t exactly the most fashionable in my mind. I go out of my way not to dress like this guy. He looks like a dad your former teenage self would want to have dropped you off a quarter mile from school so the other kids couldn’t get a good look at him. With his buttoned-up shirt tucked into some tan cargo shorts, a bulbous fanny pack cinched tight around the waist, and a flowery scarf or cardigan sweater wrapped around his neck, he looks more like the kind of guy I find rehearsing Bible verses and soliciting to save me than an intrepid traveler.

Over the years I’ve preferred the raw, gritty, dark, and edgy takes on the world from someone more akin to Anthony Bourdain than the overly polished and far too happy-go-lucky Rick Steves. There are perhaps no two travel celebrities more opposite than Bourdain and Steves. I can almost hear Bourdain’s hypothetical critique of Steves, “The world isn’t that cheerful of a place, buddy. What are you smoking?” Nevertheless, anyone who’s spent as much time traveling the world as Steves deserves to be heard because he certainly has some solid, aged wisdom to distill to us, and, to my surprise, his outlook on the philosophy of travel overlaps significantly with my own.

While Rick Steves has always been at the periphery of my list of travel writers I follow, much resonated with me in his recent interview with the New York Times. Admittedly, I wrote him off for a long time as a bit of a dork, overly optimistic, and too obsessed with Europe. No one is this high on life, I thought. He always struck me as someone painting the world of travel in too rosy of a picture or at least downplaying or ignoring the negative sides of travel.

However, the interesting thing is that I haven’t encountered anyone with a bad thing to say about Rick Steves. That’s quite a remarkable achievement in an age where everyone seems to have a laundry list of grievances to air about everyone else. Everyone seems to love Rick Steves in the way that so many adore those other saintly and wholesome TV hosts such as Bob Ross, Mr. Rogers, and Steve Irwin.

Thus, I am late to the party of appreciating Rick Steves and was wrong about him so consider this a mea culpa moment. This interview made me realize I’d glossed over him too quickly. His observations about the angelic side of human nature and the power of travel are quite keen. Steves sincerely embodies so much of the wisdom of travel, what it can teach us, and how it can transform us to be better versions of ourselves. Where I once saw Steves as someone merely churning out another round of generic mass-produced European guidebooks to make a buck, I now view him with much more depth and respect. Indeed, he is worthy of the title of “travel teacher” as he self-identifies. But I also think the title of “PBS superdork” suits him quite well too.

Steves sees the world like a classic anthropologist, one full of rich diversity and perspective, with something important to offer the prideful American traveler. One important thing he offers is how to leverage “culture shock” in a constructive way,

I had this sense that people were threatened by other cultures that did things well, and there’s this pride in America. Let’s say you’re checking in at a hotel, and you have to write down your birthday. My birthday is May 10, ’55, so it’s 5-10-55, and they go, no, it’s 10-5-55. They put the day before the month. It’s a silly little thing, but a lot of Americans would be bummed out at that. They draw back and they clench their fist and they think, We fought and died for your freedom and your way of life, and I’m not going to sit here and let you tell me that it’s not month, day, year! Americans are threatened by this, and you’ve got to tell them, no, they’re not saying they’re better than you; they just do it this way, and we are not the norm. This is very important. We do kind of lead the world in self-evident and God-given truths, but we are not the norm, and I just love to expose people to examples of things they would never encounter at home. Culture shock is a constructive thing. It’s the growing pains of a broadening perspective. To me, there are two kinds of travel: There’s escape travel, and there’s reality travel. I want to go home a little bit different, a little less afraid, a little more thankful, a little better citizen of the planet.

“Things we would never encounter at home” is the sine qua non, we might even go so far as to say “law” of travel. There are simply far too many things “out there” in the wider world that we will fail to understand unless we learn to actively wander in other places with all our senses present. What I share most in common with Steves is a set of core sentiments about traveling: The belief that by pursuing travel and adventure we have the potential to become better versions of ourselves, less afraid, more informed, more understanding of others, and more curious about the world and other people. Travel is meant to humble us, is transformative, and can change us for the better, unlike those I’ve criticized in the past who’ve made a strange argument against travel.

Not all travelers are created (or transformed) equally, but we can learn from those who have wandered far and wide to show us how to enhance our perspective of humanity. The framing Steves chooses to differentiate tourists, travelers, and pilgrims is useful in this regard and helps illustrate the versions of travel mentalities we can inhabit,

Most travelers I know, they’re proud to be known as a traveler as opposed to a tourist: “I’m more thoughtful — I’m not just here to shop and get a selfie. I’m here to immerse myself in the culture and learn.” That is a traveler, to become a temporary local. A traveler learns about the world, but I think a pilgrim learns about themselves, and you learn about yourself by leaving your home and looking at it from a distance. You learn about yourself, I think, by trying to get close to God in your travels. I mean, for me the greatest church is walking on a ridge high in the Alps. The last thing a Lutheran’s going to do is raise their arms to the heavens, but I feel like doing that when I’m on top of an Alp! You just feel so good, and you just feel like this world is such a beautiful place, and it’s filled with beautiful people, and nature is so fragile, and it’s such a delight and a blessing. It changes you. It becomes pretty clear when you travel that we’re all in this together.

While I still occasionally struggle in my war against cynicism, I do share Steves’ dogged reluctance to be jaded about the world and I am glad to see someone who has traveled far more than I ever will echo what so many other travelers have said about human nature and other places—that most people are good and the world is a far more kind and generous place than many of us realize. This view is antithetical to many of us right now because it is in stark contrast to so much of what we hear in our media landscape, i.e., the bad news or selection bias in media. However, what makes this argument compelling is that it is informed by the collective experiences of many travelers at many different times and one that Steves solidly reaffirms.

I argue forcefully in my forthcoming book that those who wander this world should be the ones we listen to more often because they’ve been the courageous ones to journey “out there” and likely know far more about the reality on the ground than many of us who choose to “vegetate in one little corner of the world” all our lives, as Mark Twain put it. Too many of us walk around today overconfident that we’ve got the world figured out because we credulously presume technology is like an omnipresent and omniscient all-seeing eye on the planet, all the while most of us have barely stepped foot outside our own country.

There is also a deep cynicism and culture of fear that has permeated our society for a long time and has been encouraging us to stay put. This is a toxic and unfortunate brew. Misery may love company, but after a while, everyone lamenting about the state of the world declining all the time becomes a bit too boring, conformist, and defeatist for my liking. The core set of questions I ponder in my book are: What is the origin of our culture of fear? What if the antidote to alleviating many of our anxieties and fears is to visit other corners of the world? How do we encourage and enable others to “see the world” and become travelers, pilgrims, or wanderers rather than mere tourists?

The disavowal of cynicism by more of us is long overdue and I am thrilled to see someone like Rick Steves championing a more positive vision of the world. One of my heroes is Carl Sagan, another one of the rare humans who had the spine to posit enthusiasm for a better world rather than succumb to groupthink dystopias and armchair catastrophizing. In The Varieties of Scientific Experience, he wrote,

One thing that seems especially striking in contemporary culture is how few benign visions of the immediate future are offered up. The mass media show all sorts of apocalyptic scenarios, ghastly futures. And there tends to be a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy to these prognostications. How rarely is it that we see a projection twenty or fifty or a hundred years into the future into a world in which we have come to our senses, in which we have figured things out? We can do that. There’s nothing that says that we will inevitably fail to meet these challenges. We have solved more difficult problems, and many times.

“We have solved more difficult problems, and many times.” Indeed, Sagan knew his history as intimately as his science. Humans are incredibly resilient and we can figure things out, but not if we remain ignorant of who we are and persist in being too consumed by cynicism, fear, prejudice, and tribalism.

Perhaps, Steves’ most significant analysis of travel rests in this observation:

My challenge is to try to inspire people to be thoughtful. The most frightened people are the people who have never traveled, whose worldview is shaped by commercial news media. And the people that are not afraid are the people who have been out there and met the enemy. My most powerful travel experiences have been going places where I’m not supposed to go: Cuba, Palestine, Iran. The friendliest people, the most curious people, the people that need to meet me and I need to meet them. When they meet me, it’s tougher for their propaganda to demonize me, and when I meet them, it’s harder for my country’s propaganda to dehumanize them. It’s a powerful thing.

Steves beat me to the punch for this is essentially the thesis of my book. I suspect that Steves, as a child of the 1960s and 1970s, took to heart the powerful message that was central to the Peace Corps–established by John F. Kennedy in 1961—that a global citizenry and more peaceful world could only ever hope to be achieved if significant numbers of well-to-do nations and people remained connected, not just on economic terms, but also were devoted to interacting and engaging with one another socially, culturally, and spiritually.

What I envy about Rick Steves is that he isn’t self-conscious–he is fully authentic and unabashedly so. He’s truly devoted to his work, even if it has unfortunately tarnished his relationships. He knows how to meet people where they are and serves as a thoughtful and caring travel guide.

Many areas of the world remain dark and dangerous places and we are facing immense political, social, economic, and environmental challenges in the 21st century. We can’t be too pollyannaish about that. However, many areas of the world remain incredibly lively and free and it behooves us all to not forget that fact. These improvements to humanity didn’t just happen and we owe it to ourselves and the ones that improved the world to know how they did it. Not all is lost and having the right mindset and attitude is at least half the battle. Ultimately, what Steves embodies can be found in one of my favorite quotes by Marcel Proust,

The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.

Rick Steves offers us a timely inflection point for a resolution at the top of the new year: to cast fresh eyes on the world. It isn’t that Steves ignores the dark and dangerous places, as I had once assumed. It is that he chooses to be a candle in the dark—to highlight the fact that we have an angelic side of our nature despite the darker side. He recognizes that we have the agency to choose how we view and respond to the world. Will we remain angry, mistrustful, and fearful, withdrawing evermore from the world this year, or decide to carry on venturing bravely out into the world despite our cynical tendencies?

Thanks for being a fellow traveler with me through this read. Please consider subscribing, sharing, and supporting this project—much more to follow.

Cheers!

-JSB