Far and Away: Reporting from the Brink of Change

If we want to avoid learning why the rest of the world at once loves and hates us, it is advisable to stay at home. I remain an American patriot when I am abroad, but I also see my country’s failures of dignity, empathy, and wisdom. You can’t fully interpret the American invective against immigration without visiting centers of emigration and refugee camps. You can’t understand the bizarre tyranny of the NRA until you have spent time in other countries (most other countries, actually) where sensible gun laws limit violent crime. You can’t discern how far America has lapsed in social mobility until you encounter a society moving toward economic justice. Travel is a set of corrective lenses that helps focus the planet’s blurred reality. When E. M. Forster was asked how much time he had needed to write A Passage to India, he replied that it was a question not of time but of place. He had been unable to write it when he lived in India, he explained; “When I got away, I could get on with it.”

Sometimes, these new perspectives are raw, but they are almost always useful. “All travel has its advantages,” Samuel Johnson wrote. “If the passenger visits better countries, he may learn to improve his own, and if fortune carries him to worse, he may learn to enjoy it.” I had started traveling out of curiosity, but I have come to believe in travel’s political importance, that encouraging a nation’s citizenry to travel may be as important as encouraging school attendance, environmental conservation, or national thrift. I recalled my high school singing tour in Romania and Bulgaria, when the reality I witnessed seemed so obvious, even though most reports contradicted it. You cannot understand the otherness of places you have not encountered. If all young adults were required to spend two weeks in a foreign country, two-thirds of the world’s diplomatic problems could be solved. It wouldn’t matter what country they visited or what they did during their stays. They would simply need to come to terms with the existence of other places, and recognize that people live differently there—that some phenomena are universal and others, culturally particular.

Relatively porous immigration serves the same ends. You cannot know your own country if you are unobserved; people from elsewhere help you to reimagine your problems, which is requisite to solving them. We understand them not only by voyaging out but also by receiving those who voyage in. Free passage from home to abroad and free passage for others from their homes to yours abroad are of equal value. Not love, nor work, nor favorable prospects, is a zero-sum game. Sharing good fortune replenishes it. We find our boundaries both through encounters with otherness and through being that otherness. Identity is both contingent and reciprocal.