Traveling to the Third World

In the conclusion to The Tears of the White Man, Pascal Bruckner makes a case for travel that I find both odd and compelling. Odd, because he seems to support the view that "home" is necessarily boring and alienating, but the "other" i.e. the so-called Third World, is interesting, challenging, and necessary for the "first world" person to really find himself.

Compelling, because I have experienced what he describes as the experience of the expatriate, even though where I live, the differences with my home country are not as pronounced than they would be if I had moved, say, to Nepal. Another compelling notion is that of going to another country and feeling a sense of repulsion. I have experienced this, as well, but thought it to be an altogether negative experience. Bruckner says that this could be a point of departure for learning about a society different from mine, as well as an opportunity to bridge a gap between two cultures, albeit in a humble way.

Therefore,

The very failure of travel is its success. No discomfort can diminish my hunger for going abroad, or bring down the fever that rages in me. The more the other reveals himself to me, the more I push toward him without reaching him. Soon, the witless desire to be the other gives way to a desire for the other insofar as he is not me. Of course, this is still an illusion, but it is the best one to be under. In his passion to promote the unity of the human race, the traveler is right: He knows that loneliness in interaction is better than isolation in mutual hatred; that imperfect communication is better than a hostile silence; that a single fruitful conversation is better than many sterile monologues; that all speech that touches another person loses its bitterness and entails manifold affirmations; that to make people give up their arrogance and forge a thousand bonds of friendship it is more useful to magnify everything by hyperbole than to demolish it with rancor; that the wanderer who is always eager to escape himself is always more in the right than one who sits at home.

Bruckner speaks of a certain type of feeling or "heart" for travel. This is not the cosmopolitan that, as Alasdair MacIntyre says, "Is from nowhere and goes nowhere." Bruckner's traveler is going toward himself and the other, almost simultaneously.