Travel Can Make Us Humble

I began traveling in my late teens to see the world, learn about the lives of local people, and develop language skills. More than four decades later, it’s clear that travel has been one of my greatest teachers — yet there’s been an unexpected benefit too: Thanks to my journeys, I’ve become more humble.

I grew up being told the United States was the greatest country in the world and that Americans were smarter than everyone else. Travel has revealed the brilliance of people in countries great and small, and that might doesn’t always equal right. It’s also helped me appreciate all the places and people that make this remarkable country my home.

Perhaps most valuable, travel has taught me that my preconceptions aren’t necessarily correct. I graduated from college in 1986, during the Reagan administration, and had some prejudices about his supporters. That summer, during a 4,300-mile fundraising bicycle trip across the U.S., my fellow riders and I were hosted at times by churches whose members rose before sunrise to cook us breakfast and wish us well. I could sense that our political opinions differed, but their kindness, generosity, and open-heartedness helped propel us across the country. And that led me to seek to connect with those whose views I might not share.

In recent years, a novel psychological concept called intellectual humility has gained momentum. In brief, intellectual humility is the idea that not everything you believe is true and the willingness to accept this notion. As soon as I heard about this concept, a resounding yes resonated in my mind and soul! Not a single one of us, no matter how educated or well-read, knows it all.

“Being intellectually humble doesn’t mean that you will adopt the beliefs and values of those around you,” says Elizabeth Mancuso, a psychology professor at Pepperdine University who has researched the concept. “It does mean that you’re open to learning from them and continuing to have a conversation.”

What could be more valuable at this fraught time in our nation’s history? We’re living through a period when learning about a family member’s or colleague’s political leanings often can end a conversation rather than start one. So the idea of intellectual humility, this recognition that we might not have all the answers, can help us build bridges. It’s liberating to acknowledge that we can’t always be right. We’ll never know it all, and that opens a world of possibilities for understanding one another in fresh ways.

Traveling to foreign countries is one way to strengthen our humility muscles. Author and journalist Pico Iyer intentionally travels to places that challenge his world views. “I think humility is partly probably about the readiness to be surprised and transformed and instructed rather than to go into the world and have the answers beforehand. I think the beauty of travel is that you’re going to be humbled by experience,” Iyer told me. “I’ll go to North Korea, not because it’s a pleasant place, but because I know that everything I think I know about the world and life is not going to translate there.”

Yet we don’t have to go halfway around the world to become more humble, intellectually or otherwise. I live near San Francisco, so in a single day I can travel from Chinatown to the Italian enclave of North Beach, from the Russian churches of the Richmond to the Mexican and Central American restaurants and groceries of the Mission District.

But you don’t have to live in a city to find difference; you just have to get out of your normal routine and connect with people you may not meet otherwise. This could mean volunteering at a soup kitchen or going to a cultural event you might not typically attend.

I grew up hearing that I live in the world’s richest county, but travel has shown me that there are different types of wealth. We tend to classify countries in terms of their material wealth. We live in a first world country; others suffer in developing countries, or so we’re told.

And yet in some of what are seen as the poorest countries in the world, such as Nepal, I’ve found immeasurable richness: close family bonds, tight community connections, ebullient holiday celebrations. In desperately poor Cuba, people share an exuberant zest for life, a love of music and dance, and a belief that no matter how little they have materially, they’ll find a way to live life to the fullest.

The humility that comes from these far-flung journeys or local jaunts helps us embrace every moment. Because when we connect with those who are dramatically different from us, either in their politics, religion, or world view — or simply in the way we live — we have the opportunity to learn so much about the world, and ultimately about ourselves.

Michael Shapiro is the author of A Sense of Place and The Creative Spark. He writes for National Geographic and studied intellectual humility last year at U.C. Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center.

This article is featured in the September/October 2024 issue of The Saturday Evening Post. Subscribe to the magazine for more art, inspiring stories, fiction, humor, and features from our archives.