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Two of the most remarkable trips I’ve ever been on were to Myanmar and Israel/Palestine. Each was only about a week or so—the former as part of a month-long backpacking trip throughout Southeast Asia, the latter surrounding a conference I presented at in Jerusalem.
The two countries are different in almost every significant way: vastly different religions, cultures, political circumstances, cuisine, dress, architecture, history, etc. My experiences of both countries were also very distinctive. Myanmar felt charmingly (and, to be sure, unwillingly) behind the times, decidedly non-touristy, and eager to be understood on its own terms. The political situation in Myanmar boiled beneath the surface, with no visible signs of political tension or turmoil (save for the confounding and delightful vaudevillian show we attended in a Mandalay comedian’s garage, in which he courageously lambasted the government—something for which he has been punished in the past). By contrast, Israel struck me as a hybrid of apparent contradictions: both hyper-modern and timeless, a pilgrimage site and a homeland, presenting peace while also stiflingly tense.
And yet, despite the myriad differences between them, I have lately been catching myself thinking about these two countries in the same general context. The obvious reason for this, of course, is that each country is witnessing renewed violence stemming from their respective longstanding historical conflicts. In Myanmar, it’s a return to the military junta that nominally ended in the early 2000’s; in Israel, it’s yet another round of violence stemming from further encroachment in the Israeli settlements. Each has lost hundreds of its own to the violence. Despite a relative decrease in violence in both countries, the violence continues with no clear end in sight.
[I hasten to add that I do indeed have views—neither dogmatic nor unsettled—about the moral dimensions of the Israel/Palestine conflict that, if you know much about my political beliefs in general, you can probably assume with relative accuracy. But this post is not about that, and I’m not going to wade in those waters here.]
It may seem banal to point out that having traveled to a given place causes it to stand out in one’s mind when anything particularly newsworthy happens there. This is precisely why the whole world watched as the Notre Dame Cathedral burned a few years ago. It’s a top-tier tourist destination in one of the world’s most visited cities. It is not merely some community-specific historical monument; it is, at this point, a part of our global heritage.
The point, however, goes deeper than this, though I find it quite hard to articulate. But let me give it a shot here (and please do reach out if you want to discuss it more).
I think one significant part of what we seek when we travel—to be contrasted, as much as is possible, with tourism—is to draw connections between ourselves and parts of the world that are either obscure to us, or which are not fully formed in our minds, either because we simply don’t understand them at all, or because we know or suspect that we understand them poorly, with a lack of context, and various forms of bias and whitewash. One central feature of this approach, clearly, is to explore a region/country/city’s history in all its various manifestations. This is why we visit monuments, historical sites, museums, holy spaces, old towns, etc. (Philosopher Carolyn Korsmeyer writes beautifully about our desire for an experience with the ‘authentic’ or ‘genuine’ in this sort of way.)
This way of connecting ourselves to the history of a place is, however, fundamentally backward-looking: it involves, on some level, taking its history as fixed and given, as though it were a completed narrative. Or at least, this is the way things often feel at the time. We want to stand in the present, which typically feels organized and fully formed, and peer into the past. We want to tell ourselves and others “I Was Here”—perhaps especially when we visit places where atrocities took place, such as Sachsenhausen, the Killing Fields in Cambodia, and so on—to mark a connection with some event or place of past historical significance. For a variety of reasons, we want to be able to put ourselves in proximity with history—but, a history that (to some degree) has already happened.
Upon reflection, of course, we know that the contexts we learn snippets of are essentially ongoing—either, as in the case of Israel/Palestine, one that is fully continuous with its past conflicts; or, as in the case of Myanmar, one that involves a recurrence of violence that stems from its unsettled history.
As a result, it is not uncommon, long after returning home from one’s travels, to see history unfold in places in which we’ve previously forged connections. For example, a significant portion of recent violence in Jerusalem has taken place in and around the Damascus Gate—an area around which any visitor to Jerusalem (including yours truly) has probably spent a non-trivial amount of time. And there was recently violence at the Shwedagon Pagoda in Yangon, Myanmar—a place I spent a fair bit of time when visiting that city, and which stands out in my mind as a defining feature of my time there.
The phenomenon I’m describing is similar to hearing about violence in one’s own city, or in a town in one’s country that one’s visited before. But what’s different is that these local, domestic incidents already grab your attention. Our proximity and understanding are more fully developed, if still imperfect; and we don’t struggle to feel or appreciate the relevance of violence or chaos that erupts close to home. There’s just a sort of ‘attention-specific nationalism’ that most of us can’t help but demonstrate.
By contrast, it’s much harder for most of us to feel the relevant connection to violence elsewhere in the world unless one has the relevant context, visualization, or memory—unless you can imagine the space around Shwedagon, and what it must have looked like to see people fleeing from that scene; or what it must have felt like in the marketplace adjacent to the Damascus Gate when violence broke out near there.
Ultimately, my point is that traveling not only puts us in connection with the past—by way of understanding a place’s (past) history—but also fosters ways of connecting our (future) selves with the future history of that country, by allowing us to formulate a perspective that is nearly impossible to possess otherwise.
Of course, where we travel is a product of beliefs, desires, choices, opportunities, etc. And this, I want to insist, is a fundamentally political problem to wrestle with. Where we travel—where we choose to engage ourselves, and thus, where we forge connections that, in aggregate, strengthen individuals’ attitudes and attention toward such periods of violence—is a function of what we find attractive, interesting, accessible, noteworthy, and so on. But, for most of us, this is going to be determined by what we already cared about, knew about, or saw snippets of. It thus seems likely over time to create a sort of feedback loop, in which those things that attract us tend to generate greater bonds, which then tend to attract us more, and bring other people to those very same places. It’s why the burning of Notre Dame felt like a global-historical tragedy, even with no lives lost, while, say, the Rohingya crisis in a country most people cannot place on a map barely registers.
I wish I had a solution for this: I think the problem is fundamentally intractable for most people, unless we focus diligently on it (which isn’t easy to do). But I think diagnosing it and focusing on it is a step in the right direction.
Recommendations:
My first recommendation is to try to catch up somewhat—if only as a favor to me—on the actual process of eviction that occurs when settlements are created or expanded. I think most people just absolutely do not understand how that process works, and thus fail to understand one of the central defining features of the contemporary Israeli/Palestinian conflict.
Speaking of travel, the trailer for the upcoming Anthony Bourdain documentary looks great, and I just know it’s going to be a gut punch.
This episode of the Ezra Klein show with Agnes Callard is really provocative and insightful. She’s sort of the master of laying out satisfyingly counter-intuitive claims in a way that, if nothing else, helps you to see where and why you disagree. Just a great philosopher and a fascinating conversation.
I don’t really know how widely known Martha Nussbaum is outside of the academy, but she’s apparently well-enough known to warrant a New Yorker piece at least. At any rate, she’s a fantastic and wide-ranging thinker with a new book coming out soon, and this interview really helps to illuminate some of her many thoughtful points.
A few things I’ve watched recently that I can’t stop thinking about. The first is How To with John Wilson (on HBOMax). It’s very, very hard to explain clearly and quickly, but it’s a beautiful and funny celebration of the wackiness that is NYC. The second is Bo Burnham’s new Netflix special ‘Inside’. It’s an absolutely brilliant masterpiece on life in late capitalism, during a pandemic, from the perspective of someone whose job is to be creative and liked for it. Seriously have not stopped thinking about this since I first saw it. Incidentally, both John Wilson and Bo Burnham are essentially one-man operations; I wonder why that’s so interesting and appealing these days.
Also, the new season of I Think You Should Leave is coming back soon, which gives me an opportunity to share with you one of the funniest sketches I’ve ever seen in my life (though, I admit, it’s for a certain sort of comedic sensibility).
I was recently listening to old episodes Car Talk on NPR, and remembered how they used fake/punny names in the credits a lot. I managed to find a list of them online, which is very cackle-inducing.
–JVD