cheryl
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Does travel really open your mind? - National Geographic
The idea that travel makes you a more open-minded person is rooted more in well-meaning fiction than in fact. One of the most frequently quoted justifications for seeing the world is a snippet from Mark Twain’s The Innocents Abroad: “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things can not be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.”
But if travel truly were fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, wouldn’t more of the 1.4 billion annual international tourists (pre-pandemic) have made the world kinder and less biased by now?
We asked reporter Ruth Terry to look into the science behind the empathy that travel is said to encourage. “The coronavirus pandemic and, more recently, the global Black Lives Matter protests have forced an uncomfortable reckoning—that all the travel in the world might not be enough to engender the deep cross-cultural awareness people need now,” Terry writes. “While experts conclude that travel may not inspire enough empathy to turn tourists into social justice activists, the alternative—not traveling at all—may actually be worse.”
The idea that travel makes you a more open-minded person is rooted more in well-meaning fiction than in fact. One of the most frequently quoted justifications for seeing the world is a snippet from Mark Twain’s The Innocents Abroad: “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things can not be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.”
But if travel truly were fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, wouldn’t more of the 1.4 billion annual international tourists (pre-pandemic) have made the world kinder and less biased by now?
We asked reporter Ruth Terry to look into the science behind the empathy that travel is said to encourage. “The coronavirus pandemic and, more recently, the global Black Lives Matter protests have forced an uncomfortable reckoning—that all the travel in the world might not be enough to engender the deep cross-cultural awareness people need now,” Terry writes. “While experts conclude that travel may not inspire enough empathy to turn tourists into social justice activists, the alternative—not traveling at all—may actually be worse.”