Why travel did not gather the world

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As India and Pakistan Face -I remember again that vs Naipaul managed to disturb both countries. And Argentina, East Africa, Islamic Southeast Asia, the Caribbean, Iran. Few writers have seen more of the world. Few have found it more eager. Some left this to the western sexism of a man who named his cat after the first Roman emperor. For others, it was just a lucid mind at work. Its prose itching because it tends not to abuse, not even adjectives, as much as the patient’s accretion of details.

In any way, something that could be called the Naipaul paradox is happening in the modern world. Foreign travel has been growing for decades. But so does nationalism. This “should not be.” Although no one except a fool or a Twain brand, he thought it was the trip necessarily “Fatal for prejudices,” was just waiting for a general decrease in enemies as people and peoples, he came in contact.

To see how this is going, look around. The tightening of the relations between China and the West since 2012 took place after an era of tourist and student traffic from one place to another. The British and the Italians are among the most prolific travelers in the world. The two countries have voted for propositions or parties that could be called nationalists for the last decade. In 1995, eight percent of the North -Americans planned a trip abroad in the next six months. In 2023, more than fifth were. In which of these two periods were the most internationalist United States?

Mark Zuckerberg’s belief that online contact “would approach the world” has dated laugh. But at least people say that. Rude, almost transgressive, feels that trips have also fallen like a uniter of the species. In Europe, it is still a line of applause for noon dinners and a percentage of Americans have no passports. Apart from the methodological problem here: The document was not necessary for some foreign trips until 2007, and what? When 3 percent had valid passports, the United States voted for George Hw Bush, the former China hand and the CIA man, the outermost of the presidents. Now that about half, Donald Trump is in the White House.

If the cross -border mix in itself thickened the cord of human sympathy, Europe would have a calmer past

Why did the trip fail? The kindest response is that other forces promoted nationalism, such as immigration, and that things would be even more tense now without the great increase in travel. Another is that most of the increase is the people who began to begin. Those who need the most abroad still dodge it.

Each of these is a plausible line, but so is a third one: this trip should never have had such heroic claims for it. If the cross -border mixture thickened the cord of human sympathy, Europe would have a calmer past. That is, it is completely possible to be a mundane jingo. It is possible to relate to another culture, rejecting it. Otherwise, the time Lenin, Ho Chi Minh, Zhou Enlai and the Islamist Forerunner Sayyid Qutb passed to the West, instead of increasing their awareness of difference.

The trip is enormous fun. In addition, it can be an educational deposit, if you arrive at a place with a basis. (And if you do not index what you see in person.) But a connection experience? A memory of the essential unit of humanity? If so, we should have hoped that national consciousness would be receded, not on the time of cheap flights, a dissolved iron curtain and a porous China in both directions.

To explain it, some will emphasize the difference between “tourism” and the real “trip”. Please. This has become a class distinction, nothing more, like this between “expatriates” and “immigrants”. In addition, Naipaul, at least before it became a big man’s animated drawing heightPut the leg work. He is the postwar English writer who makes the best of others seem to play at work. If he recovered from the world he traveled, it seems that he was not, for a time, exceptional.

Janan.ganeh@ft.com

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