The Immorality of Travel Redux

by Robert McGarvey

“Traveling is the vice of the many and the virtue of the few. ‘Travel in the younger sort is a part of education; in the elder, a part of experience,’ said Bacon; but Bacon lived fortunately early and so escaped the modern cult. He never saw what we have seen: the devastation of fair countries, the desolation of old cities, the desecration of sacred shrines, by the intrusive presence of people who do not belong.“

It’s Francis Bacon, by the way, and as for the author of the above screed it’s not me, indeed it was written before I was born and before my father was born. It appeared in the June 1911 issue of The Atlantic with the headline “The Immorality of Travel” and there isn’t a byline.

I wish there were so that I could toast him or her for this scorching piece. This is simply dazzlingly insightful copy that could have – should have – been written this year as locales from Barcelona to Venice and Bali grapple with the ugly consequences of too much tourism. We deface Roman walls, we defile the sacred in Bali, we fall to our death snapping a selfie at a Bavarian castle.

Overtourism is destroying what we say we cherish and we are the ones doing the destruction.

Like this anonymous writer I have seen the desecration of cities, tourists wielding selfie sticks that become unintended weapons, and – perhaps most disturbingly – thick crowds of tourists pushing for space in front of Guernica at Reina Sofia or Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights at the Prado and they push not to get a better look at the art but for position for a selfie (and, thankfully, the Prado bans selfies so the Bosch largely escapes that indignity).

2024 becomes 1911.

The piece goes on:

“Travel is the great epidemic of the modern world, common to most races, wasteful of time and money, disastrous to the places visited, most unbeautiful in all its effects.”

Why do they bother to travel at all? I have no idea, other than that they seem to want to put a notch in their metaphoric pistol, been there, done that and their friends, they hope, will be envious and believe them cool. The friends probably won’t think them cool (cool? them?) but probably will want to take the same trip themselves or one up it. Travel metastasizes.

“One of the saddest features of the whole matter is the havoc wrought upon innocent regions by the pestilence breathing hordes of travelers,” howled the 1911 scribe.

The poster child for a destination that is imbued with innocence that now is being defiled by over 170,000 tourists annually is Antarctica, a place with no compelling reason to visit except to be able to make the claim that you’ve been. Psst. If you care an iota about the planet, just lie and say you’ve been. As a 2023 Atlantic story proclaims, “[It’s] The Last Place on Earth Any Tourist Should Go.”

Antarctica is just the iceberg’s tip.

The numbers pertaining to tourism make one shiver. In 1975 7.2 million Americans traveled internationally. In 2023, 48.96 million Americans traveled internationally. That’s 6x more but the planet has not gotten any bigger and the spots that draw us have not gotten bigger either.

Add in millions of Chinese tourists and fast growing number of Indians and what we get is a planet with too many visiting too few places.

The 1911 Atlantic writer is correct, by the way, in pointing out that travel is a comparatively recent phenomenon. In olden days people traveled on business or by necessity. When my Irish grandparents came to the US two things were true: they did not believe a good life was to be had for them in Ireland and once in the US they had no intention of returning to Ireland, not even for a visit, and they didn’t.

When tens of thousands of Africans pile into flimsy boats to get to the Canary Islands they do it because they have come to see their African homelands as unlivable. They are not on a holiday vacay.

You may ask: What am I doing to combat overtourism? I won’t travel to any of the many places that already are howling about too many tourists (and I hear their pain because they are right) and when I do travel overseas I will travel to places less trafficked by Americans, that plainly want tourists, and where I can stay a longer time.

What about you?