loved the idea of alienation you use here and I think it's really useful for one model of travel, the travel for leisure model. But what about, say, travel for work? Has a migrant labourer from Bihar living in Lucknow also travelled, also been exposed to a new way of doing things, even if she did so for the purposes of earning income rather than spending it? This analysis is rooted in the kind of movement undertaken by wealthy people in wealthy countries, and doesn't consider, say, the Hajj, or the movement of flight attendants, or the workers on container ships that bring our goods from their sites of production to their sites of sale. To resist Agnes Callards model of travel another entry point is considering what she defines as travel, because people of all kinds and all places have moved for pleasure as well as necessity long before cruise ships and travel agents existed. (Which is not to say that it's not worth contemplating the false promises of freedom that those things provide in their glossy brochures and sponsored Instagram ads, or that the opportunity to travel has ever been distributed equally)
The purported morality of travel is something that I've thought about extensively, as someone who has had the opportunity to go to lots of places. Your Marxist critiques is a valuable one, but I also think about it like this: the value of travel is the reminder that not everyone lives as they live. This doesn't have to be achieved by moving your body hundreds of kilometres, probably in a carbon producing vehicle. There are different ways to live in your own neighbourhood, your own town, and maybe it's worth asking why you don't interact with them. But the moral value of travel, at least for wealthy people, only comes if that exposure to difference - more obvious if the working class that serves you is speaking a different language perhaps - is the beginning of considering their wealth as an anomaly, not due to their own deservingness. And for the poor, who are supposed to be identified with their labour, this encounter can be a reminder that they did not earn their poverty any more than the wealthy earned their wealth (sadly the world is riddle with such reminders, and I'm still thinking through what kind of action this might invite.)
There's also the historical anomaly of the last 50 years of travel as produced by subsidised fossil fuels at the cost of the planet. It would be unreasonable to expect this freedom of movement to be a permanent state of affairs; liberation of movement is not for everyone now, and I don't have a sense of how it might look in a fossil fuel free future. I'm not sure that 'freedom to move anywhere for anyone ' is exactly my picture of a just world, because I am so interested in making communotors that are rooted the the ecological and social reality of exact places, not anonymous ones. But that's a whole other can of worms and I've already written a novel (with much less forethought and carefully constructed argument than your piece) so I will leave it there...
loved the idea of alienation you use here and I think it's really useful for one model of travel, the travel for leisure model. But what about, say, travel for work? Has a migrant labourer from Bihar living in Lucknow also travelled, also been exposed to a new way of doing things, even if she did so for the purposes of earning income rather than spending it? This analysis is rooted in the kind of movement undertaken by wealthy people in wealthy countries, and doesn't consider, say, the Hajj, or the movement of flight attendants, or the workers on container ships that bring our goods from their sites of production to their sites of sale. To resist Agnes Callards model of travel another entry point is considering what she defines as travel, because people of all kinds and all places have moved for pleasure as well as necessity long before cruise ships and travel agents existed. (Which is not to say that it's not worth contemplating the false promises of freedom that those things provide in their glossy brochures and sponsored Instagram ads, or that the opportunity to travel has ever been distributed equally)
The purported morality of travel is something that I've thought about extensively, as someone who has had the opportunity to go to lots of places. Your Marxist critiques is a valuable one, but I also think about it like this: the value of travel is the reminder that not everyone lives as they live. This doesn't have to be achieved by moving your body hundreds of kilometres, probably in a carbon producing vehicle. There are different ways to live in your own neighbourhood, your own town, and maybe it's worth asking why you don't interact with them. But the moral value of travel, at least for wealthy people, only comes if that exposure to difference - more obvious if the working class that serves you is speaking a different language perhaps - is the beginning of considering their wealth as an anomaly, not due to their own deservingness. And for the poor, who are supposed to be identified with their labour, this encounter can be a reminder that they did not earn their poverty any more than the wealthy earned their wealth (sadly the world is riddle with such reminders, and I'm still thinking through what kind of action this might invite.)
There's also the historical anomaly of the last 50 years of travel as produced by subsidised fossil fuels at the cost of the planet. It would be unreasonable to expect this freedom of movement to be a permanent state of affairs; liberation of movement is not for everyone now, and I don't have a sense of how it might look in a fossil fuel free future. I'm not sure that 'freedom to move anywhere for anyone ' is exactly my picture of a just world, because I am so interested in making communotors that are rooted the the ecological and social reality of exact places, not anonymous ones. But that's a whole other can of worms and I've already written a novel (with much less forethought and carefully constructed argument than your piece) so I will leave it there...