Easy Travel
I'm continually amazed at the off-handed travel that accompanies academia and the business and non-profit worlds. For example, my partner was recently asked to fly across the continent-- to sign a bank form. Using the mails would've taken a few extra days, which in the calculus of the age is an unacceptable delay.
People think literally nothing of jumping in a plane to fly wherever, for insanely minor purposes. While this is sold as great convenience, and "bringing the world together" so that we "can learn from each other" and such, the actual result of this off-handed travel is the exact opposite: travel is no longer valued as anything more than a convenience. When travelling thousands of miles consists merely of stepping into a tube, reading a newspaper for a couple of hours, and then stepping out of the tube, travellers lose all sense of distance-- both geographical distance and social distance.
There are all sorts of reasons why every city in North America (and certain segments of every city on Earth) are seemingly interchangeable, but surely one of them is the ease by which we can jump between them. We've come to expect that the hotel rooms, the restaurants, the stores, even the streetscapes, dress styles and social customs of the places we visit resemble those of the place we left, and why shouldn't we?-- we're only a couple of hours away.
What's happened is that a certain class of people-- the acedemics, business people government officials and non-profit managers who tend to be the ones who fly the most-- have been able to stamp their sensibilities on the rest of the world, most directly on their fellow elites in far-flung locations around the planet, but it trickles down in those societies as well. Easy travel (read: flying) tends to erode regional cultures and all the diverse viewpoints and sensibilites that come with them. Easy travel isn't so much "bringing the world together" as it is "making the world the same."
Travel-- real travel, which takes real time, real expense and real trouble-- tends to give one a sense of "journey," for lack of a better word. A transition away from the familiar and into the unknown and the strange. This kind of travel is difficult, in the physical and economic sense, certainly, but also in the psychic sense-- we have to wrap our heads around things that are unfamiliar to us. Doing so, we learn things, and begin to have respect for things outside our own scope.
My criticism of flying started as concern over climate change. But the more I think about it, the more I see that addressing climate change will have all sorts of positive outcomes, including, in this respect, newly valuing travel, distance and foreignness.
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