World Alienation and Global Tourism

"Before we knew how to circle the earth, how to circumscribe the sphere of human habitation in days and hours, we had brought the globe into our living rooms to be touched by our hands and swirled before our eyes."

-Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition

In 1492, the same year that Christopher Columbus sailed west towards India, the German merchant and mathematician Martin Behaim constructed the first globe of modern times, the Nuremberg Terrestrial Globe, measuring some 21 inches in diameter. The temporal coincidence of Columbus and Behaim’s endeavors speaks to an important phenomenon of the modern age that Hannah Arendt analyzed in the final chapter of her 1958 study The Human Condition. Arendt argues that the unprecedented enlargement of the world through the discoveries of early modern seafarers presupposed a more fundamental shrinkage of the world through the measuring activities of modern science. When Columbus and his fellow travelers embarked on their adventures, man had already elevated himself to a theoretical vista point from which he could look at the world as “a globe to be touched by our hands and swirled before our eyes.”

Man’s success in assuming a perspective beyond his being embedded in the world around him, an unearthly perspective that Arendt calls world alienation, is one of the fundamental preconditions of objectivity in modern science. But world alienation also describes modern man’s estrangement from his immediate earthly surroundings. With the globe in our living rooms, we have the world at our fingertips, but we no longer inhabit a place inside it. The modern age has enlarged the world’s physical territory while shrinking its experiential potentiality into a measurable dataset. Swirling the globe before his eyes, the mathematical theories of Martin Behaim embody both the knowledge and the melancholia of modern man.

[caption id="attachment_12853" align="alignnone" width="154"] Martin Behaim with his globe, 19th century painting from an unknown artist.[/caption]

One of the principal ways in which western societies have responded to the condition of world alienation over the past 150 years is tourism. Alienated from our immediate surroundings, we imagine immersing ourselves as tourists into foreign lands. While the beginnings of modern mass tourism can be dated back to the second half of the nineteenth century, tourism received important new impulses during the economic growth of the 1950s. In 1957, the year preceding the publication of Arendt’s The Human Condition, Arthur Frommer’s travel guide Europe on 5 Dollars a Day appeared and introduced to the world a new movement of low budget, long distance travel. Although Arendt never mentions tourism explicitly in her book, there are important lessons to be learned from her analysis of world alienation when dealing with Frommer’s promise of cheap travel and authentic experience overseas—a promise of which we have seen countless iterations in the heap of travel literature ever since.

The problem with Frommer’s promise does not lie simply in the fact that the millions of vacationers who are touring with Frommer immediately turn the recommended off-the-beaten-tracks paths into the new highways of travel. Rather, the existence of Frommer’s alternative travel guide presupposes a world that is, in all its common and uncommon aspects, translatable in the form of a guidebook. Before anybody sets out to travel to and discover Europe for him - or herself, Europe—or Thailand or Namibia, for that matter—have already shrunk to the format of a well-indexed pocket book, easy to navigate, but impossible to inhabit.

Arendt makes us sensitive to the necessary frustration of tourism’s promise to be immersed in the world through travel: the very embarking into the world as a tourist presupposes a technological and cultural infrastructure that has already necessarily distanced us from the world. No new journey into the world can escape the shadow of Martin Behaim, as he melancholically touches the globe with his hands, swirls it before his eyes, and reminds us of the fact that the world ceased to be ours at the moment we made it our object.

-Martin Wagner, Ph.D. candidate at Yale University