My dear friend Whip challenged me with a writing prompt. “You’re world travelers now. How have your travels changed your perspective? What are the top five things you’ve learned about yourself or the world on your travels?”

I think that’s a great question, because it forces us to step back and think about the meta in a way that I don’t usually. I tend to be firmly grounded in the experience and what that experience means, but I haven’t really slowed down to reflect on the big picture.

So, thanks, Whip. It forced Dorothy and I to talk through this topic and have a lively conversation, which is always welcome. On a side note, the last time Whip and I spoke he shared his list of five things he’s learned from world travel, and there was zero overlap in our lists, which I thought was interesting. Beyond that I don’t recall the specifics, because they weren’t about me.

#1) It’s The End Of The World As We Know It And I Feel Fine

Empires rise and fall, and so will ours.

Some of those civilizations lasted over 1,000 years, although the Hittites only lasted a few hundred. But they’re all gone. Some died as wizened old codgers rattling out their last breaths and some died as teenagers. Teenagers are stupid. Many get over it, but a few get behind the wheel drunk and don’t make it home.

The US is Hittite young. Are we going to make it to adulthood or are we going to hit the ditch going 100? Right now the ditch is looking like a safe bet, but you know what? None of it matters. We rose, and if we don’t fall now we’ll fall eventually. That may sound like nihilism, but it’s not. As the Buddha said, “All things must pass.” That’s meant to anchor you in a humbling impermanence, a certain graceful sanguinity. Check.

#2) R-E-S-P-E-C-T

Everyone’s culture is beautiful and amazing.

Dorothy and I are Californians, a place that sometimes seems devoid of culture. Rather than feeling steeped in any particular cultural identity I think we grew up thinking of ourselves as generic Americans. Then we moved to New York City, home to a substantial expat community from what seemed like every country on the planet, a concatenation of micro-cultures separated by cross streets rather than a culture of its own. Unless New York’s jacked up version of American Exceptionalism counts as culture (I say it does).

But I don’t know that we appreciated the granularity of culture until we took a road trip from St. Louis down the Mississippi to Louisiana one Christmas. It turns out that reading about the Civil War from the safe confines of California doesn’t prepare you for the place itself, where it’s still a raw, painful wound.

It wasn’t the omnipresence of memorials and museums, it was the way people spoke about their history. What felt like ancient history in high school in California was so present. I toured Edinburgh Castle some years back, and the docent was pretty clear that they’re still pissed about the Reformation, so yeah. The Civil War wasn’t that long ago.

It became hilariously obvious when we toured Vicksburg and then Natchez as we made our way south. In Vicksburg the docent waxed eloquent about the Siege of Vicksburg and how they had held out until the end, the last Confederate stronghold on the Mississippi. He then tossed in a gratuitous observation about Natchez, their neighbors to the south who had just rolled over and surrendered at the first sign of a Union ironclad. I believe he used the expression round heeled.

Then when we toured Natchez the docent spoke admiringly of the wisdom of the city’s leaders who surrendered to the inevitable, leaving Natchez almost entirely intact, allowing us to enjoy the antebellum architecture years later. He then tossed in a gratuitous observation about Vicksburg, which had foolishly held on until the bitterest of ends, leaving the entire city in ruins. I believe he used the expression idiots.

When I mentioned what our Vicksburg guide had said, our Natchez guide laughed and said it was just a little friendly rivalry. Really? That’s not what it sounded like to me. It sounded like a long-running, unresolved argument about morality during wartime. But I’m sure it was just joshin’.

It’s not just that California has a different culture than the South, or that Mississippi has a different culture than Louisiana. It’s that Vicksburg has a different culture than Natchez. And if you zoomed in further, Natchez would most certainly look like a patchwork quilt, not a monoculture.

Maybe we weren’t Southerners, but the Civil War, however poorly taught in California high schools, was still part of our shared history, still part of American culture. When confronted with new information from the local perspective, we had a framework in place that allowed us to understand what we were hearing. Obviously, that’s been missing on our travels. Unwinding culture without any previous knowledge of our setting has been both one of our biggest challenges and our biggest joys.

The challenge is in trying to decode and unravel the various strands that make up a local culture, and the joy is in having any success in the attempt at all. Oaxaca represents one of the best examples of this. At first it seemed to be a monoculture. A distinct, specifically Oaxacan culture, but consistent in its expression. But digging a little deeper, we discovered that 16 different indigenous populations had contributed to the mélange that looked at first like a unitary “Oaxacan” culture. Some parts contributed by Zapotec, some by Mixtec, some by Mazateco…

There’s the cultural fractal again. We saw it at an even more zoomed in level in Tunisia, when I got my Berber tattoo. When we were talking about the meaning of the Berber symbols, my tattoo artist/ethnographer explained that there was no single, agreed upon codex. As she traveled the Sahara documenting tattoos, she found that the same symbol took different meanings in different tribal groups, sometimes only a few miles apart.

And that’s where the rest of the joy comes from, aside from cracking the code itself. There’s an enormous amount of joy in discovering the particulars of a given culture, the meaning and the beauty underlying specific cultural components. Why that pattern is used on ceramics. What that woven rug motif means. What that dance represents…

Here’s what matters: As important as dispassionate observation is to understanding what you’re seeing, you should never forget to let yourself get swept up in the moment. The purpose of beauty is transcendence. Which is everywhere, if you’re looking for it.

#3) Don’t Stop ’Til You Get Enough

How long you stay somewhere is fundamental to your experience of that place.

“Just living” in that way also brings us closer to the normal daily rhythms of local life wherever we are. We’re never going to truly experience a place the way locals do, but we get dramatically closer in three months than we would on a ten day tourist junket. Marinating in local life, and not just slamming the tourist hot spots, is part of what makes this such a lovely, profound experience.

But I think the most salient benefit of the time we spend in each location is related to the previous point about decoding culture. That process requires moving slowly, listening, researching, processing… It takes time to figure out how the puzzle pieces fit together. We were in Mexico for over four months before I could plausibly explain the differences in shopping patterns between Mexico and the US.

Three months isn’t enough to make us hardcore experts on local culture, prepared to write a book on the subject. Unless a blog is just a very slow book. But it’s enough to tease out some interesting connections and get a deeper understanding of a place than is possible on a tourist cadence.

#4) War! What’s It Good For? Lining Colonialist’s Pockets. Uh!

Colonialism has a longer history than I thought.

Imagine my surprise, as we traveled the world and partook of different cultures, to learn that colonialism has its own rich history going back to the earliest city-states. A lack of respect for borders may be one of our innate capabilities as humans. Maybe prostitution is only the world’s second oldest profession. After fuckery.

Phoenicians colonized the North African coast in 900 BC. Greece colonized not only other city-states in modern day Greece, but also in Italy and North Africa as far back as 800 BC. By 200 BC Rome had colonized the rest of Italy, and over the next 200 years added Greece, Spain, France, Britain, a chunk of the Middle East, and whatever was left over in North Africa after they beat the shit out of the Phoenicians.

And it just keeps going. The Arabs were big time colonizers, peaking between the 8th to 12th centuries. By the 1400s the Ottomans had turned colonization into administrative performance art, allowing the Western Europeans to offer a philosophical rebuttal anchored in brutality.

And while it’s obvious, it’s worth stating that every colonist at every point throughout history engaged in slavery. I certainly thought of slavery primarily in the context of the 18th century slave trade, and not as an historical constant, but you can blame my California high school for that.

I’m not sure if it’s comforting to know that colonialism has been with us all along and isn’t just something the French made up because they’re French. But it’s certainly eye opening to confront the scars that exist, at one level or another, just about everywhere. It’s one thing to be in Morocco, where there are still people alive today who lived under French colonial rule, and another to be in Tunisia and hear Berbers refer to the predations of Arab colonizers, who conquered the region in 647.

It’s been with us forever, and it never really goes away.

#5) Land of 1000 Dances

There are different models for being successful, as both individuals and nations.

Same Sex Friendship

As we traveled through Muslim countries, we were shocked by the extent to which same sex friendship was expressed physically. Men hugged one another, walked hand in hand or arms around shoulders, came in close for conversation, and generally behaved in ways that would be interpreted as gay in the US. Same for women. Friends reveled in one another’s company without having to worry about policing their perimeters.

We thought hard about how states that were so hostile to homosexuality could have fostered an environment in which same sex friends felt they had license to express their feelings for one another physically. “Homosexual activity” is illegal in Morocco and Tunisia, and while there are no laws against it in Turkey, LGBTQ citizens enjoy no legal protections from discrimination.

Sadly, the only explanation we could come up with is that same-gender attraction is so taboo in those countries that no real gay couples would ever risk public displays of affection. Thus, any such displays must, by definition, be platonic.

It would be a pure delight if same sex friends in the US felt comfortable expressing their affection physically, instead of trimming their sails to avoid the appearance of homosexuality. I think it would dramatically relax our culture. But I’d hate to think that the only route to that outcome went through violent suppression of LQBTQ+ rights.

Embedding Faith In Daily Life

One of the things I hate most about the US is the centrality of religion in our culture, and how that manifests as a particularly curdled piousness and hypocrisy. We love to proudly proclaim our religious bona fides while giving the thinnest of lip service to the values upon which those religions are built. We’ll fight to the death to make sure the town square has Christmas decorations, but god help you if you expect us to exhibit actual charity, compassion, or humility.

Over 99% of the populations of Turkey, Morocco, and Tunisia are Muslim. While Turkey is a secular state, Islam is the official state religion of both Morocco and Tunisia. None of these countries is run by priests, the technical definition of a theocracy, but civic life is absolutely driven by religious concerns and requirements.

And yet…

Where public expressions of faith in the US seem largely performative, the equivalent expressions in Muslim countries seem heartfelt and genuine. We found the same thing when we visited India, which also weaves deeply religious practices into daily life. These are people who are living their faith as an integral part of their lives, not sinning six days a week and begging for forgiveness on the seventh. There’s something truly beautiful and graceful about that.

I don’t want to live in a theocracy. Certainly not the one that wackjob American Christians would like to impose on me. But still, there’s something to be said for a culture that lives its values, even if those values are religious. Not a point of view I ever thought I’d understand.

There Are Valid Reasons For One-Party Rule

Cuba held many surprises, not least of which was the argument it made for the value of single-party rule. I go off at length on this subject here, but the gist is that I had thought that multiparty rule was a bedrock value, a principal of good governance. If Cuba ever converted to a multiparty system, as the US government demands that it do in order to lift the bloqueo, its grand socialist experiment would collapse. Which is, of course, exactly why we’re demanding it.

While that outcome might not seem obvious, the explanation is super simple: The moment there are multiple political parties the US would rush in to financially support the one most prone to do our bidding, turning Cuba into the US colony we have long desired. We would, through illegal means, buy the election and the government. If that sounds paranoid, you’ve never read any Cuban history, and you should. And if that sounds avoidable, I have nothing for you. That level of naiveté is unfixable.

But here’s the thing about Cuba’s single-party rule, which exists entirely to blunt the predations of the US government: it has delivered for its citizens, and, absent the bloqueo, would be thriving. Crime is low, the streets are safe, education is free through university, health care is a right, there’s low infant mortality, and there’s universal literacy. I’m not excusing the crushing of political dissent, just pointing out that Cuba isn’t the Communist hellhole we’re told it is. And to the extent that it’s an economic hellhole, that’s a thing we did to them, not a thing they did to themselves.

Would I like to live under single-party rule? Not at all, but I wouldn’t mind free education through university and universal health care. Besides, we kind of are living under single-party rule. That party is Late-Stage Capitalism, and it brooks very little dissent. But I’ve now seen a plausible argument for actual single-party rule, and I’d have thought that impossible.

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Every problem we have in the US has been solved somewhere, although maybe not with methods we’d consider American. We should be able to acknowledge the benefits we see in other societies and at least make an attempt to figure out a way to import the upside while dulling the downside. Obviously, that’s hard to do while everyone’s knees are busy jerking.

At a minimum, though, we should be able to look at other places and admit that while their values might be different than ours, those values often lead to outcomes that seem out of our reach. And wonder, at least for a moment, why that is. Maybe demonizing the other doesn’t get us anywhere but a false sense of moral superiority.

Which beats all hollow actually solving any of our problems.

#6) More, More, More

Bigger Isn’t Always Better (with apologies to Dirk Diggler)

Bonus time! This is the sixth of the five things we’ve learned on our travels.

In the US, the Market insists that the opposite of Growth is Decline: if you’re not getting bigger you’re dying. But that’s kind of obviously bullshit. Success doesn’t have to be reduced down to a Manichaean binary. Success can mean Enough, instead of always manically demanding More.

Oaxaca had more eyeglass stores per square foot than I’ve seen anywhere else on the planet. How can they all be successful? By defining success differently than we do. If my store sells six pairs of eyeglasses/day and pays my rent and delivers enough profit to be comfortable, why would I have to purchase my competitors and super-size my business? Where is it written that I must get bigger?

Refusing to buy into the Market’s definition of success does more than just create a retail landscape that’s balanced between large and small businesses in a way that we can’t muster. I honestly believe it makes for a healthier citizenry. Sure, there’s a lot of hustling in those economies, but it’s not like our version of capitalism has granted us a hustle-free existence. But there’s a healthy acknowledgement, I think, that sometimes enough truly is enough. We’re certainly trying to live that way, and have been enjoying the hell out of our distinctly un-American downsizing.

Thanks, Whip!

Dorothy and I really enjoyed the conversation that led to this post, and I hope it’s been an entertaining read. If you liked it, the good parts are Dorothy’s. If not, please blame Whip. I am but a vessel.