During the coronavirus crisis, there has been a lot of lamentation about people having to keep their distance from others they meet in supermarkets, playgrounds or on the streets. Unfortunately, the easiest way to avoid people is currently blocked. This means traveling, which must be avoided as long as no hotels are open and the hospitality industry has to get back on its feet.
Travel is one of the great pleasures of human beings, as everyone knows for themselves and can be historically proven by the fact that with the advent of the railroad, "Europe was in a state of permanent movement", as the Scottish "Edinburgh Review" noted around 1860, when for the first time not only all capital cities but also smaller towns could be reached by rail. As a result, not only did tourists arrive en masse, which even Theodor Fontane complained about - "The whole world travels these days". It also gave rise to the tourism industry, which led to crowds of people being dragged to so-called sights and staring at their guidebooks, just as they do today with their iPhones.
Fontane found this behavior "idiotic", especially when tourists had "doing Europe" on their itinerary and only ticked off what their brochures listed. However, this view of human culture can and must be supplemented by the fact that in the years of the first mass travels, the first pioneers of a new science emerged, which was called anthropology and which was not just about what a person is, but about how everyone becomes the special person that he or she is. The first anthropologists traveled the world and visited foreign peoples, for example in Polynesia, in order to use their field research to overcome the old philosophical conviction of an unchanging type that can be seen in a person and to show the opposite, namely that members of the Homo sapiens species have a fluid and adaptable culture and can form throughout their lives. This is why they started traveling as soon as the technical possibilities were available. Humans can have the goal of finding themselves. But obviously they don't get there. That's not a bad thing. On the contrary. It is man's good fortune.
