Why did tourists keep coming as Rhodes and Maui burned? It’s about far more than denial
As the world heats up, we need to confront what our urge to travel is really rooted in, says Moya Lothian-McLean, a contributing editor at N
“While Rhodes burned, tourists kept flocking in. Homes were being turned to ash, thousands of holidaymakers were being evacuated, and still the visitors came. In the wake of the Hawaii wildfires, which have killed at least 115 people, the island of Maui experienced the same phenomenon …
“Why do we travel? Maui residents told media of their horror at seeing tourists ‘swimming in the same waters our people died in’. Surely, that level of compartmentalisation in dogged pursuit of a particular experience goes beyond the pursuit of ‘leisure’? That’s certainly the view of the anthropologist Dean MacCannell. His 1976 book The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class argues that in a post-industrial, increasingly secular world, travel occupies a ritualistic space. Modern western societies are defined by the ‘freedom’ they offer us – but, he writes, this is accompanied by feelings of fragmentation and alienation. Sightseeing in far-off locales is, MacCannell observes, ‘a way of attempting to overcome the discontinuity of modernity, of incorporating its fragments into a unified experience’ …
“Modern life is marked by its impossible and contradictory obsession with the ‘authentic’, as any lifestyle marketing bod will testify to. We see travel, rather than our everyday existence, as the portal to ‘finding ourselves’ …
“As the climate crisis intensifies, the moral aspect of travel becomes even harder to defend … We need a substantial and widespread shift in both understanding why we travel – beyond simply ‘for leisure’ – and unpicking our feelings of personal entitlement to the self-actualisation and connection we expect to find in far-flung places …
“This is why the tourists pile out of airports as acrid black smoke still chokes local countryside: service to the self. But shelving that self is the only way out – and perhaps would lead us back towards more collective forms of organising society that don’t require us to go on such quests in the first place. The problem is, that would require us to cut back, stay home more, forgo cheap travel in favour of pricier and slower overland international routes, or more local excursions. And when luxury has been repackaged as basic human need, who’s going to give that up?”