I have to admit to a certain contrarian streak, so when I saw this John Cleese tweet blaming nationalism on lack of travel, something in me awoke:
They say ‘Travel broadens the mind’
That’s why people who’ve never been anywhere are so sure their way of life is the best
They know their country is the greatest although they’ve never seen another
Never been anywhere? Wow, that’s harsh. Surely, they’ve been somewhere. They’re probably somewhere right now!
I don’t mean to pick on Cleese. He’s brought me a lot of laughs. And he’s in good company; here’s Mark Twain:
“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 cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.”
I’m always on the lookout for anything that sounds self-serving. It’s too easy to say “oh yes, my mind is very broad, because of all the places I’ve been.” Too easy to insert “one of the things I’ve learned by traveling abroad…” in front of any old argument to give it an aura of authority and worldliness. I’m not content to assert any kind of intellectual or moral superiority because I’ve traveled. In fact, this very paragraph itself is getting a bit too self-congratulatory for my tastes.
But the claim sounds plausible, on its face. In theory you should be able to have different sorts of experiences by going to different places, and having a broad collection of different sorts of experiences could plausibly make one “broad-minded”. But plausible doesn’t mean true. And even if travel does broaden the mind, the implications - that it will cure nationalism, prejudice, and bigotry - don’t necessarily follow.
There’s probably no good empirical test for “broad-mindedness” but I think we can start to investigate this claim by looking at some equally plausible ways that travel might not broaden the mind.
A Place For Everyone
There’s a certain type of expat who is attracted to Georgia because it is a conservative, “traditional” country. I don’t want to paint with too broad a brush, but there are expats who have specifically told me that one of the reasons they like Georgia is that Georgia rejects LGBTQ+ ideology. I am categorically not saying that all conservatives are prejudiced and bigoted, but if you’re moving to another country to escape the gay agenda, I feel like “travel is fatal to prejudice” might not be as universal as Mark Twain thought. (Twain, for his part, at the very least spent a lot of time in and around San Francisco with an LGBTQ-friendly group called The Bohemians - lest anyone claim that he wouldn’t have included tolerance for LGBTQ+ people in his conception of tolerance.)
In general, how likely are you to broaden your mind by selecting a country that you think suits your values and then traveling there? Not just to pick on conservatives, let’s consider the film “Where to Invade Next” by Michael Moore. Moore picked a bunch of European countries - Europe being a well-known hotbed of leftism and decadence - and highlighted one policy in each country that he felt was better than the American way. Is this really broad-minded, or did Moore just start with the thesis that America ought to be more like Europe and then go to Europe to cherry-pick examples to prove his point? Hard to say. I enjoyed the film, anyway.
But maybe even confirmation bias counts as broadening the mind? If you, a religious conservative with patriarchal values, travel to a conservative religious country with patriarchal values, and find that despite the differences in language, food, manners, mannerisms, cultural communication styles, architecture, parenting styles, and everything else, these people still fundamentally agree with you about the value of arranging society to coerce people into reproduction, then aren’t you technically still more broad-minded than a religious conservative who believes those things without having seen it working in a totally different social and cultural context? Like, sure you’re cherry-picking evidence to support your worldview - but at least you’re cherry-picking a broad range of evidence.
I’m sure there are analogous things going on with socialists going to socialist countries, or progressives going to progressive countries. If you’re choosing a destination to fit your ideology, or your personality, the chances of it meaningfully broadening your mind would seem to be lower. I had drinks with a communist in Kutaisi once who explained how much better Cuba was than the US, based on his time there, and if I remember correctly (I may not - this was 8 years ago) his argument was mostly based on equality and working-class solidarity. The way he described it almost made me want to visit - at the very least, it piqued my curiosity about a place I’d never considered going to before. I suppose I never would have met this guy if I hadn’t come to Georgia, so perhaps this is an example of travel broadening my mind? But probably there were communists in bars in New York who could have spoken to me fondly of their time in Cuba? I think having conversations with people, with an open mind, broadens the mind.
Perception and Interpretation
There’s an argument that perception is not possible without an interpretive framework. Your eyes see a mixture of colors and lines, and your brain goes “chair!” But this isn’t because the concept of “chair” is embedded in the chair itself, and then somehow transmitted to your brain by light rays. Instead, your mind has an interpretive framework that looks for patterns in visual signals and matches those patterns to previously-learned categories. Your eyes see, but your mind is what perceives (to paraphrase the great philosopher Gorillaz).
So here’s a question: when you travel, do you actually expand your interpretive framework - or do you just match all of your experiences to previously-learned categories? For example, take my famous lemonade story:
It was my first week in Georgia and I decided to take a walk in the late summer heat. My friends and I walked around in the sun for what felt like hours, finally collapsing into chairs in an outdoor cafe on the right bank of the river Mtkvari. I opened the menu, and like a sign from God, there it was: lemonade. Nothing could be better in the heat. I ordered lemonade, anticipating the sweet and tart, cold and refreshing, ideal summer drink. Finally, the waiter came to my table, carrying an ice cold bottle of…
…pear soda.
What do you think my response was: did I expand my view of what lemonade is, or did I sort Georgian “lemonade” into a previously-learned category?
Actually, the answer is, “both.” I took to the internet to do some research and discovered that the drink called “lemonade” is different in many places. Fizzy lemonade is pretty standard in, e.g., the UK, although at least there it’s typically lemon-flavored. So having had this experience has in some sense broadened my mind, since I now know that “lemonade” refers to different drinks depending on the country.
On the other hand, in my mind, Georgian lemonade is not lemonade at all. In my mind, it’s soda (you might call it cola, pop, coke, soft drink, etc. depending on which region of the Anglosphere you happen to come from). So in that sense, perhaps I have managed to remain at least somewhat narrow-minded, despite my travel.
There are lots of things like this, where I will simultaneously a) learn that other countries do surprising, typically minor things very differently and b) refuse to update my mental categories to include the way other countries do things. It’s one thing to know that Brits call fries “chips” - it’s another thing entirely to think of fries as chips. I suppose here I’m drawing a distinction between “knowledgeable” and “broad-minded.”
The Expat Bubble
Even if travel is correlated with broad-mindedness, this does not prove travel causes broad-mindedness. Perhaps broad-mindedness causes travel. Perhaps narrow-minded people are not narrow-minded because they never leave their home countries, but rather they never leave their home countries because they are narrow-minded.
I mean, just think about it: if you dogmatically believe your country is the best, why would you leave it? Why would you go visit some backwards country that’s nowhere near as good as yours? Why waste the money to fly somewhere inferior?
Actually, I can think of a number of reasons. Perhaps you are a businessperson, going abroad to close an important deal. Perhaps you are a missionary, sent by your church to spread the Good Word to the heathens. Perhaps you are a soldier, sent to guard a military base. Do these types of travel broaden the mind?
A lot of expats I meet who have a particular mission - embassy workers and businessfolk in particular - have a tendency to exist inside a rather specific “expat bubble”. To say they aren’t seeing the real country they’re living in would be an understatement. Once I was out looking for a Thanksgiving turkey and I met this guy at the supermarket who worked for the US embassy. He said he had an extra turkey and he’d give it to me if I couldn’t find one at the supermarket. I accepted his gracious offer and he suggested I follow him back to his place in my car. I told him I’d taken the minibus to the supermarket, and he looked down at me - the guy was at least a head taller than me; former special forces, I think - and said, “oh - they told us we’re not allowed to take public transportation here. Too dangerous.” The crime rate in Tbilisi was incredibly low - far lower than my hometown of New York City - so this statement just seemed absurd on its face. But this guy took it seriously, to the point where he seemed genuinely surprised that I, a random civilian who couldn’t even find a turkey for Thanksgiving, would venture out into the dangerous world of Tbilisi minibuses, while he, a soldier with size and strength and training and experience, was stuck driving his SUV with tinted windows back and forth from his walled yard in the embassy housing compound.
So that makes me wonder - if you’re traveling to a country where your whole experience is curated - by your company or its local fixer, by your embassy, by your command structure, or even by your travel agent - are you really getting the mind-broadening experiences? If you never have to drink an accidental pear soda, or risk a bus ride, or go out searching for a turkey, or do any of the other mundane things you do in your daily life - but filtered through the culture and language of another place - are you really getting insight into another way of life?
Wherever you go, there you are
I’ve lived abroad for eleven years. One of my explicit goals in leaving the US was to take myself outside of my comfort zone and have new experiences, specifically in order to broaden my mind. So… did it work?
In some sense, it did. I have had new experiences - experiences I wouldn’t have had in the US. I remember going out to get pizza during an early visit to New York after having lived in Georgia for about a year. I started rehearsing, in my head, the words to order pizza in Georgian… before I remembered where I was and that I could just place my order in English. I’d never had to develop the habit of mentally rehearsing how to order something in a foreign language for as long as I lived in the US. There are probably tons of other habits of mind that I’ve developed to cope with life outside my home culture - things I may not even realize I’m doing. I think I speak more slowly now than I used to. I’ve acquired new tastes - like Georgian sparkling mineral water, and Georgian cornbread. I’ve learned that a number of things that I previously took for granted are not, in fact, granted - they’re culturally contingent, or arbitrary conventions. Did you know that seasons start on different dates in different countries? That there’s a different version of “do re mi” that ends in “si” rather than “ti”?
But in another sense, as much as I’ve adapted to life here, I still think of the American way of doing things as the “default” or “right” way of doing things (with a few exceptions, like the metric system - I’m the rare American expat who has deliberately switched over to using metric measurements and reading/citing temperatures in Celsius). I mean, I don’t believe, as a moral or intellectual claim, that the American way is the right way. As a student of anthropology I have a certain commitment to detached cultural relativism, even when observing my own culture. And there are plenty of things where I believe that Americans are clearly and demonstrably wrong. But when it comes to a difference in methods, I just think of the American method as the “regular” one and the foreign method as the “different” one. As much as I try to fight this, it’s inescapable.
Take hamburgers. The modern hamburger is an American invention (although based, obviously, on a German dish) and I think of the regular way of making hamburgers in America as the way to make hamburgers. When I first arrived in Georgia, it was virtually impossible to get an American hamburger. Instead, a Georgian hamburger was typically a “kotleti” placed on a (hard) bread roll. Kotleti is a minced beef patty typically with lots of herbs, spices, vegetables, bread, and egg to hold it all together, which superficially resembles a hamburger patty, but has a completely different taste and texture. There’s no real reason why you can’t toss a kotleti on a bun and call it a hamburger - it’s probably closer to a hamburger than, like, a falafel burger, or a veggie burger. But - I swear - until I wrote this very paragraph, it had never even occurred to me to just refer to the result as a “kotleti burger”. Instead, I have stubbornly, repeatedly, for over a decade, in numerous conversations with my friends and family members, thought of and referred to this dish as “not an actual hamburger”.
And to be fair, the Georgian side of this scenario is symmetrical. Just as I am apparently stuck thinking of kotleti as a slimy hamburger with no bun, to many Georgians, a hamburger is a disastrous trainwreck of a failed kotleti. The meat lacks sufficient vegetable matter, and so instead of being soft and fluffy, it’s hard and gamey and grainy and dry almost to the point of being inedible. Rather than being loaded up with fresh cilantro, basil, and parsley, the meat is insipid and flavorless, meaning that the hapless, benighted Americans have to pile all kinds of crap onto the top of their dry, flavorless patty - sauces, cheese, pickles, onions, bacon, more sauces - just to make it palatable. And Georgians are not wrong: for someone expecting a kotleti - someone for whom kotleti is the standard, default, normal, “right” way of making a beef patty - a hamburger is a woefully deficient hot mess of a dish. Even now, when American burgers have become more fashionable due to the proliferation of Western restaurants, it’s not uncommon for Georgians to try to “fix” American-style hamburgers by making them more like kotleti - with, er, decidedly mixed results.
The hamburger/kotleti story tells me two things. One, people are always going to use the familiar as a reference point for understanding the new. This is just how knowledge is constructed. As much as you might broaden your mind by travel, it’s much, much harder to shift your perspective. So I think Cleese is substantively wrong in this sense: most people who think their way of life is “best” will continue to believe that, even if they travel - even if they live abroad for years - because their way of life is always going to be their default - always going to be the reference point from which they understand other ways of life.
Two, you don’t actually have to travel to broaden your perspective. You can be a cosmopolitan from the comfort of your own home! Travel helps, but just as I could probably have met a communist Cuba stan in a bar in Hell’s Kitchen, Georgians can try a real-deal American hamburger meal at the local Wendy’s. You can meet people from other cultures playing Fortnite or Among Us. Globalization is at the point where I think most people have to make a deliberate effort if they want to exclude other viewpoints and foreign cultural influences from their lives.
Ultimately, I wish travel could make someone less nationalistic, less prejudiced, and less bigoted. These are all problems that need solving. Unfortunately, I think this discounts both the extent to which people’s personalities are consistent throughout life and the importance of a person’s frame of reference in determining how they interpret new experiences.
Travel is great, don’t get me wrong - and it absolutely can broaden the mind. But I think the idea that it will relieve people of their prejudices, or make them reevaluate their own way of life, is asking too much.
Or, as the saying goes: you can lead a horse to pear soda, but you can’t make it drink.