The View From Somewhere Else

Andy Owen travels to see various perspectives from various perspectives.

- Andy Owen

This last year of lockdowns has led me to reflect on what travel has taught me. My first journey to another continent was a trip to South Africa as a seventeen-year-old, in 1994, the year Nelson Mandela became the first black president of the country. The trip had a deep impact on me. The inequality, the injustice, the dignified response, the vibrancy, the possibility and the determination to be better, became real to me in a way that only direct immersion in the sights, sounds and smells of a place can allow.

Exposure to how others live can challenge how we feel about how we live, and how we should live. Paying attention to the novel and the exotic when we travel – looking at them like an artist must do before she attempts to draw a subject – can help us pay the same sort of attention to the everyday when we return home, and help us better appreciate what we take for granted in our lives. I undertook just this type of critical observation on the way to the airport in Kampala, Uganda, as I witnessed the mass movement of people returning home in the purple hue of dusk as the fast-setting African sun ducked out of view. Within the masses a bare-footed old man carrying a tree’s worth of firewood on his back caught my eye. I assumed he would not be reflecting on the meaning of life as he struggled under the weight of his load and that he would be focused on just living. This exposed one of my biases to me, about how I think about others and make assumptions. I was looking subjectively.

In his book The View From Nowhere (1986), the American philosopher Thomas Nagel argued that one view is more objective than another if it relies less than the other on the specifics of the viewer’s makeup and position in the world or on the character of the particular type of creature they are.