Mark Twain was wrong. Travel is not as fatal to prejudice as hoped

Mark Twain, in his bestseller The Innocents Abroad, commented on travel as the great unifier: “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.”

A Hong Kong government investing heavily in tourism promotion to charm its way back into the good books of communities worldwide after our 2019 street riots and clumsy management of the Covid-19 shutdown would earnestly endorse the sentiment.

But the evidence suggests Twain’s intuitively persuasive argument is tragically wrong. Despite global travel at record levels – an estimated 1.4 billion international tourists were recorded last year, with 357 million jobs or 10 per cent of all jobs globally being connected to the travel and tourism sector – bigotry, prejudice and narrow-mindedness seem alive and well.

Two centuries of increasingly intensive international travel ought to have driven steady progress towards peace and international cooperation. Instead, we see ruinous wars and conflict, a rising tide of nationalism and opposition to immigration, as well as a surge in protectionism.

US President Donald Trump’s tariff assault on a world he claims has been “ripping off” the United States for decades shows that not only tourism but also international trade provided little inoculation against bigotry, prejudice and narrow-mindedness.

Why have we been so spectacularly wrong? First, many international tourists are poor ambassadors against prejudice. A family taking a limousine from Bali’s airport to their exclusive resort is unlikely to notice or wish to note the poverty they drive through.