Being a traveller

Travelling broadens horizons. Or so they say. But I rather think it depends. Let’s say you are already open, tolerant and curious. You travel, and you learn more, for sure. Yet I doubt that your attitude changes dramatically. You left home willing to learn and you return home with new information – but you are still open, tolerant and curious.

Your attitudes and values, I’ll admit, may be altered by the experience. Perhaps you are willing to concede that something held dear in your home culture is less important, valuable or meaningful than you thought. Perhaps something in the new country encourages you to add a new source of value to your treasured precepts.

I think that some have discovered through travel that possessions and status have become far less meaningful to them. On the other hand, a traveller might come back from abroad feeling that a connection to the land is far more valuable than they had hitherto believed.

These changes, though not superficial, are not truly transformative.

A person convinced of the incontrovertible superiority of her culture in contrast to all others, she will see the evidence that confirms her existing belief. She will discount evidence to the contrary. She might even be angered by suggestions that her own culture is not so very much more ethical than that of others. The visitor need not be generally prejudiced: she may only regard her culture as categorically superior to that of the specific nation she is visiting – she might be open to learn from, say, Bushmen, but not from, say, North Koreans. It will be hard for her, in either case, to recognise anything good about the place she finds herself in.

She returns home more deeply established in the beliefs she had before she set out. Her horizons have narrowed.