Ian McEwan: “Tourism is a wonderful spectacle of mass derangement.”

Liam and Judy have set aside a few hundred dollars every month to pay for a big summer holiday with all the family.

“How about the south of France?” Judy says.

“Meh, too boring,” Liam says.

Back and forth it goes until they settle on a nice compromise along the Tuscan coast. Liam can ride his bike, Judy can swim in the sea, and the kids can go to the amusement park 30 minutes away. With one click of “Confirm,” a year’s savings evaporate.

The airport is a bustling, heaving business, and the kids fight over the window seat. And it’s downhill from there. The beaches are so busy that they cannot find a spot big enough for them all. The mountain bike trails are a muddy churn with hour-long queues at the top. The amusement park is more expensive than the flights. And, to top it all off, it’s colder than home. “What a waste,” they think.

The mass derangement

In this week’s Mini Philosophy interview, I spoke with the bestselling author Ian McEwan. We talked about his new book, What We Can Know, but, as often happens, the conversation meandered happily about. You can hear our full conversation in the Mini Philosophy newsletter.

One thing that McEwan and I touched on was his recent trip to Corsica, a popular destination among Europeans. Over his two weeks there, McEwan carried with him a copy of James Boswell’s 1768 book An Account of Corsica. McEwan was a man in two worlds, with one foot in the crowded, commercialized Corsica of 2025, and the other foot in a bucolic, agrarian idyll of Boswell’s 18th-century wanderings.

The stark dissonance between then and now invited McEwan to reexamine the strange, modern phenomenon of mass tourism.

“Tourism has now become almost like an uncontrollable affliction. And we can see the beginnings of a kind of revolt. People are marching in the streets of Barcelona against this invasion of their spaces. But other places — Cambridge, Oxford, Central London — are overwhelmed by everyone’s ease of travel and curiosity to be elsewhere, which I completely share. I’m part of it. I’m part of this derangement.

Tourism is a wonderful spectacle of mass derangement. How old are anatomically modern humans? 300,000 years. It’s only in the last 50 years we’ve had mass tourism.

It was quite hard to explain. On a hot day in Britain, go and look at Brighton Beach. I mean, it’s an amazing spectacle. People packed like a seal colony. Why? Why are they there? They’re doing it because that’s what one does. It’s nice to see, it’s lovely, but it didn’t used to be.”

3 ways to reclaim travel from tourism

I totally agree with McEwan’s point. I’m sure our fictional Liam and Judy will agree too. I want to see the world. I want to see the “Mona Lisa,” the Taj Mahal, the Great Pyramids of Giza, and Mount Everest. But so will most people reading this. The ease with which we can travel around the world means that all of the best bits of the world end up being much, much worse off for it. McEwan is part of the problem, I am part of the problem, and I suspect you are too.

But this isn’t to say that we can’t travel like Boswell did in the 1700s. We can still see the world without being victims of the uniquely modern torture of overpriced ice cream and ticket touts. Here are three suggestions that emerged from my interview with McEwan.

Slow down

When you spend a month’s salary on a holiday, there’s this pressure to optimize. You need a three-day itinerary with every hour filled with a new activity. “Sorry, Timmy,” Liam says, “no time to pee now. We’ve got to be in Pisa by 11:34 a.m.”

This is the alternative McEwan offers: “Boswell travels with donkeys, meets local commandants and fighting men, stays in convents, gives good accounts of long conversations. He’s really traveling. It’s tough. It’s difficult. Hard.”

The lesson here is to slow down. This is traveling with long conversations and a donkey. Boswell stops as long as he wants to stop and picks up when he’s ready. Now, of course, the practicalities of getting back by the Monday school run mean few of us these days can donkey our way around, but the point is to let the traveling lead you more. Have fewer plans and book things when you’re there. A hustling holiday is no holiday at all, and you’ll never do it all anyway.

Choose a better destination

“You travel because you’re expected to do it. Your children expect it to happen. And everyone does it. Imagine if you were talking to Boswell and saying, ‘Well, you know, for two weeks every year, people want to go and lie on a beach with very few clothes on.’ And Boswell will say, ‘Well, why would they do that?’”

Why would they do that? Why would you do that? Before you book one of the “Top Ten Most Visited Places in the World,” ask yourself: Why bother? When we travel and spend that much time and effort traveling, we should spend at least some time asking what we want to get out of it.

Before spending any money, decide what a perfect holiday actually looks like. Is it to learn something new? Is it to see some breathtaking natural beauty? Is it to rest and recuperate? Is it to experience an entirely new culture?

Almost always, the reason why you want to visit a tourist hotspot has something to do with status, peer pressure, or bragging rights. If that’s your thing, fine. But it’ll cost you.

The gems in the burbs

These days, a lot of Corsica, especially in the summer, can be a tourist trap. It’s lovely, but it’s busy. When Boswell visited in the 18th century, it was a place of farmers and untouched, slow living. You do not have to wander for three days into the Amazon rainforest to find untouched slow living. You just have to drive an hour away from the city.

McEwan says he “envies a world with no tourism,” and part of the envy stems from the ability to experience a culture and a people with the kind of immersion that is simply harder to find in the internet age. This is not the same as finding a “hidden gem,” because even hidden gems appear on a Lonely Planet listicle these days. This is about being brave enough to drive, train, bus, or even bicycle out into the “boring” and “everyday” parts of a country. As Boswell can guarantee, if you open your eyes and try to engage with the world you find, there’ll be nothing boring or everyday about it.