And this is right up my alley. Issues to ponder, to turn over and over in your head, trying to get to the bottom of them. In many cases you get closer, but usually, there just aren't answers.
And one of the thing that discourages me the most about our culture these days is that people feel they have to have an answer to everything. A firm opinion, not an open-ended, well maybe this, maybe that opinion. And of course, most of the people who have the firmest opinions are the ones talking almost exclusively out of their assholes. Idiots, in other words.
So the reason I haven't updated my blog in two weeks, except for a brief rant a couple days ago on futbol violence, is that I've been chewing over an interesting issue that was brought up by an article in the travel section of the new york times. The article got under my skin a little, and then the 200+ comments, most of which I read, really got under my skin.
The article is on organized slum tours, where some enterprising local or expat takes a group of tourists to see a slum of one of the larger third world cities. The article mentions it being done in Rio, Mumbai, and Mexico City, and I know that it's also done here in Buenos Aires.
The impossible-to-answer question is this -- is slum tourism bad, or good? Really, that's it.
Like any conventional journalism exercise, the article presents two sides of the story, each side presented by one or more Qualified Experts. Someone who is a professor of Tourism and the Environment (which sounds like a sweet gig) thinks it is Bad. Someone else, who is the director of the International Center for Responsible Tourism thinks it is Good. Actually the later qualifies what he says quite a bit, but says it can be good.
Both of these experts make good arguments. The professor asks quite reasonably whether you'd want people walking by your door every day, snapping a few pictures, and moving on. What he doesn't ask, but obviously implies, is whether you, as a poor person living in a hand-built shack in a slum, would like to have rich people parading by gawking at you for a few minutes, and then moving on back to their fancy hotels and their fancy lives. He also notes that for many people the exposure to the slum just serves to remind them of how good they have it, by displaying at close range how bad many other people have it.
And sure enough, this hits me a little where it hurts. I have traveled lots and lots in mexico and now argentina and many other relatively poor countries. And I have always said that this is good, that it "puts things in perspective". And the perspective I would get, surely, is that I'm super-duper-lucky to have been born where and when I was, and not in the slum outside Mexico City or wherever.
From this perspective, slum tourism, and to some extent my own travels, are ethically suspect -- they represent the fortunate coming to gawk at the unfortunate, just to be reminded of their good fortune. Or put another way, the powerful using the weak to help them appreciate their power. Sounds pretty ethically suspect to me. And it sounds very plausible, and no doubt in many cases accurate.
The other chap, the director of the center for responsible tourism, says that slum tourism can promote awareness of poverty, which can be a first step in addressing and maybe some day alleviating it. He has a nice quote: “To just kind of turn a blind eye and pretend the poverty doesn’t exist seems to me a very denial of our humanity.”
The article doesn't have him getting into specifics, but I can think through this side of the argument. It's an extension of the idea that tourism, or at least certain kinds of tourism, helps foster cross-cultural understanding, hopefully leading to greater cooperation and less hostility among countries and cultures.
And I do believe that international travel can have this kind of positive effect. It is eye-opening for a lot of people to travel overseas, to interact with people of a different culture, to see the common humanity that we all share. I don't know, but I suspect that people who have traveled and gotten to know people in different cultures, are going to be more understanding and respectful of the interests of others. And probably less likely to start a war with them, less likely to hideously exploit them economically.
Think of the really Bad americans you know, or know of. The ones who just want to exert american power and influence around the world as much as possible. The ones who can really do some damage, and who have been doing damage. Are these people who have traveled a lot overseas, in particular to less-developed countries? People who have gotten to know, or at least been significantly exposed to, people from much more disadvantaged backgrounds? Probably not. (I do remember hearing that before his presidential campaign began, the only time our Current Occupant had left the US was for a brief vacation in Cancun. I'm not sure if that's true.)
So to me, the principal benefit of slum tourism is this -- by exposing the powerful to the less-advantaged, making clear that even the most poor are in most important ways just like the, maybe the powerful will be less likely to totally fuck over the weak.
I guess the new york times can't put it that way, but I think that is really what it boils down to.
There are practical questions about this positive effect, of course. First of all, there's self-selection. Perhaps only the people who were already sympathetic to the plight of the down-trodden are likely to participate in such tourism. And self-exclusion, too -- the really bad people, the ones who may do the most damage, are the ones least likely to participate in this sort of thing.
But there's a giant middle in there, and as in many cases, the giant middle has a huge effect, even if it's indirect. If we could have gotten the giant middle in the US to think about the Iraquis in 2003, rather than TV images of burning towers, then we would not have spent a trillion dollars turning that country into such a mess and making the whole world hate americans again.
And so if we could get the giant middle to think about the disadvantaged of the world a little more, rather than just themselves, perhaps our influence and activities in the world could be directed towards making the lives of these people better. And perhaps slum tourism, or some variant of it, could be a way of reaching that giant middle.
But back to the tourism professor, I totally agree, you absolutely don't want rich foreigners traipsing around slums gawking at the poor people as if they were animals in a zoo. That is just ugly. The second guy made the point that this kind of tourism needs to be done "respectfully", in small groups, with the consent of the community, and unobtrusively.
But honestly, I think this is a very big challenge. Most of these slums are really, really poor. Like these people frequently have an annual income of under a thousand dollars, under five hundred dollars even. Anytime you have that kind of disparity in wealth, I don't know how you can avoid the feeling amongst the poor that the visitors are flaunting their wealth.
One program mentioned in the article, in Mazatlan, Mexico, kind of combines slum tourism with very light charity work. Visitors can go and spend some accompanied, guided time in the poor community, but they have to participate in charitable activities, like passing out food. This sounds like a good arrangement -- the visitors are actually producing some tangible benefit for the community.
So, where do I stand on this? Good or Bad, Dan? I don't know, but I think it could be good, or could be bad. The devil is in the details, right? I do think there is great, great potential for this being pretty ugly -- rich people with thousand dollar cameras taking pictures of the poor in their hovels with open sewers running alongside. Very ugly. But I do think under the right circumstances this can be a positive thing for the poor community. And I also think that if the economically advantaged are more routinely exposed to the economically disadvantaged, in the long run the advantaged may be less likely to abuse their powers. But that was a very qualified maybe -- people can be very, very ugly, for sure.
So after thinking about this for two weeks, my opinion on this is still very very divided and qualified. In contrast to about 3/4 of the comments posted, most of which were posted the same day.
As I mentioned earlier, I find it very disturbing how americans these days feel they have to have a strong, rigid opinion on everything. And sure enough, most people posting comments came down very strong on one side or the other of the ethical spectrum. (I'm reminded of the kind-of-lame frankenstein on Saturday Night Live a few years back. Everything was either BAAAADDDD, or GOOOOODDDDD.) But some of the responses were clearly very measured and thought-through. If you look at the article, I highly recommend looking at the comments page -- it's actually much, much more interesting than the article.
I'll close with the comment that I liked the most. I found it rather powerful and kind of disturbing:
I lived in Mumbai in 2003, close to the world trade center in a large and beautiful residential tower. It was only a couple of streets away from the nearest slum and the people that lived there were essentially the 'support staff' of the wealthy who lived in the towers. They were cleaners, cooks, garbage collectors, elevator operators and street sweepers, keeping the district and its wealthy residents in tip top shape. I was always fascinated with the slums of Mumbai and would walk my shirts down to the local ironing men, on the edge of the slum to have them pressed. One day, my curiosity got the better of me and instead of handing over the clothes and turning back, I headed in, winding my way through the tiny lanes. I hadn't been walking for 2 minutes when a young man stopped me - and in halting english asked me what I was doing there. I said I was just walking and looking. He looked at me, then at the ground and replied, madam, you not see this. In an instant I was looking at the ground. I apologized, turned on my heel and left. My curiosity got the better of me, I wanted to see inside those homes, look through the doorways, see what 'they' did in there. I didn't think about their dignity, that these shacks were someone's home. I would never walk through a neigborhood in the US to see how the people lived, to look through their doors, to see what 'they' did in there. That young man taught me something about myself that day, I thank him for it, and I will never forget him.
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