Travel can be very dangerous or very liberating, depending on who you are, since travel dissolves your illusions.
Weite Reise macht weise. Extensive travel makes us wise, less judgmental, more open-minded and tolerant. Travel sets us free from the ethnocentric delusion that our culture alone is the ultimate gold standard for everything.
It connects us to a larger, more humane and inclusive understanding of our fellow human beings.
This kind of travel changes a person forever and has always been among one of the most liberating of the liberal arts.
Travel can change us , if we want to be changed, by taking leave of our comfort zone.
It is more than taking in the sights, visiting museums, going to theaters, and leisurely strolling through picturesque towns hand in hand with that Special Someone.
It is spending time immersed in that culture, living among its people, talking and listening to them, and if you're a visiting student, living with other students in a dorm, or with one of those students' families and sharing its life.
This is the only way of understanding a culture from within and getting a sense of how its people see and interpret the world.
This exposure can be an exhilarating experience, and when you're young it's an unforgettable period in your life.
You're more open to everything than you'll ever be again when life begins to close in upon you and you suffer from that terminal illness of the hardening of the attitudes.
You're always observing and listening, speaking and interacting with all kinds of people as you gather impressions about their customs and manners, attitudes and outlooks, expectations and assumptions.
This daily living and looking at the world through their eyes can be a profoundly transformative experience that will leave you a different person.
It's only when returning home that you'll begin to realize how much you've changed. You're that person in the Allegory who, having escaped from the cave of your culture, "can't go home again" because your own culture, too, has curiously changed.
You see it now through the eyes of almost a stranger. It's no longer the touchstone of normality, but only one way among several of being "normal," a place where you just happened to be born and grow up.
The spell has been broken because travel has taught you that no one absolute norm exists about anything, but that everything is relative and arbitrary and authentic by simply being itself.
You see that other cultures are, indeed, different, but that doesn't mean that they're wrong, but just different; and that since they are different, they cannot fully be understood, let alone judged, and much less condemned.
You've learned that there are different ways of being right and being human, not just the American way, and that no one culture or people, even your own, has a monopoly on either commodity.
You realize that every culture sees the world differently. You begin to understand the relativity and arbitrariness of your world, your values and your way of life.
It is, in this sense, that travel can be very dangerous or very liberating, depending on who you are, since travel dissolves your illusions. And like everything else in life, it depends on what you want to do with this insight.
Not until you step outside of your culture - not just verbally, but mentally and emotionally, not until you leave behind your assumptions and values and immerse yourself in a different way of viewing the world, do you realize that the nature of things, their meaning and purpose, their importance and urgency, are not objectively given, but created by language and culture.
Only then do you see that every people, every tradition, does not see the world as it is, but as it would like it to be; that what each calls "reality" is but a collective dream which its members share; and that what you call truth may be only the familiar hallowed by time.
We sense these things darkly, and so, as a people, we distrust foreign languages. They draw into question our notions of right; subvert our bulwark of righteousness, cast doubt on ours as the Only True Way.
So, we control, domesticate, and render them safe. We reduce them to stereotypes and language "requirements." We limit their knowledge to the mundane and basic. We dare not risk long-term exposure.
For the same reason, we distrust foreign travel. It might change us if we let it come close. We want prepackaged adventure, antiseptically filtered in air-conditioned comfort through tinted tour bus windows, the unfamiliar kept safely at bay in our hermetically-sealed isolation.
Our foreign policy also shares this distrust of the foreign. We don't let so-called Third World countries be what they are to pursue their own destinies, but make them movable pawns on our corporate chessboards on which they're plundered, their leaders bought off, and their people betrayed into serfdom for its minerals, raw materials, or strategic location.
We preach tolerance for ideas as long as those ideas agree with our own, international understanding becomes public relations, as we recall our career diplomats who, seeing ourselves through foreign eyes, warn us of the damage we cause. They've been abroad too long, "gone native," lost their perspective, brought home for a rest, and posted elsewhere.
In a culture with little patience for whatever is different, we can expect little more of an educational system as defined by that culture.
Too much of our curriculum reinforces a jingo provincialism in its photoshopped view of American history, rather than teaching the good, the bad, and the ugly like the slavery of Black Americans, now forbidden to be taught, compliments of some White Supremacist GOP governors, while denying many of our Black citizens their right to vote.
Students don't want historical fairy tales or right-wing propaganda masquerading as history, but Vergangenheitsbewältigung, an honest coming to terms with our racist past and integrating those dark chapters into our national consciousness.
This is what a great nation does by facing its demons, since denial only sickens its soul. Better to exorcize those evil spirits and be free of them lest they fester in the subterranean vaults of our national psyche.
In teaching history, we neglect the panoramic multifariousness of other times and cultures that could save us from the myopia and hubristic pride of "Ozymandias, King of Kings."
We don't need more and more reasons about "why we are great." Such delusions are already too much with us in our xenophobic Fortress America. What we need is more and more air to dissipate the cultural claustrophobia of our ingrown, solipsistic view of our world.
To love it, we must leave it by not succumbing to it, getting detachment from it, for it is only by getting distance from ourselves that we come closer to ourselves by seeing ourselves as we really are.
Education worthy of the name should make us citizens of a larger world, impart an Olympian outlook, not reduce us to the worm's-eye view of a narrow tribalism!
Our education? If we are taught only what confirms the illusion of our grandiose sense of exceptionalism, we are already dead as a thinking people.
An education is opening ourselves up to every viewpoint, empathizing with all of them and speaking with those who hold other viewpoints while sensing their conviction and honesty.
It's listening to what they have to tell us about ourselves, and if we're humble and courageous, listening and learning from them.
To be sure, we should love our country, but our country is not the policies of a particular administration, party, or plutocracy which is running our country, for our country is our better selves as enshrined in those thrilling ideals set forth in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution with its Bill of Rights for everyone, not just goose-stepping White Nationalists.
True patriotism is not loving our country right or wrong, but loving it by wanting to make it better by returning it to its pristine self; by decrying a political party's shocking privileging of the already privileged and its heartless warfare against its own people, especially the poor and children, tens of millions of whom, to our eternal shame, must go to bed hungry.
Weite Reise macht weise. Foreign travel makes us wise by helping us outgrow that ancient Manichaean delusion which sees others as Darkness and ourselves as the Light. It is a nightmare vision which sanctifies hate, a view of our fellow mortals unworthy of us.
