The Projectionist

Ta-Nehisi Coates seeks to apply the lessons of America’s original sin where they don’t belong

“It is a feature of Islamic civilization … that the truth of life is to be found beyond and behind the high walls and the drab exteriors, in the tiled courtyards and the private chambers that are meant to keep others out and to keep secrets in. Few hurried travelers, few ghareebs (strangers) are taken beyond the walls and the courtyard.”

– Fouad Ajami, “In This Arab Time”

This is a propitious era for hurried travelers, for those who construe any form of exploration as an education. One of the frustrating tics of our society’s elite is the assumption that, no matter how brief or superficial, travel can only clarify and not confuse, that it always illuminates but never obscures. At the commanding heights of American life, it has become de rigueur for a certain breed of writer or activist or politician to make sojourns abroad and discover precisely what the traveler left home to find, nothing more and nothing less. Cultural gatekeepers are so mesmerized by the talismanic power of travel that they believe the mere act of visiting a foreign land can yield salient truths about even the most intractable conflicts in the world.

There are discrete liabilities to this convention at a time when the liberal spirit has gone into hibernation. The progressive vanguard has become a closed circle, cut off from contrary ways of thinking and allergic to heterodox beliefs. The consolidation of leading cultural institutions––and the growing ideological conformity within the media and educational and corporate establishments––has forged powerful mechanisms for controlling thought and discourse. In these circumstances, the incurious mind is not especially equipped to travel once it has acquired a passport.

In venturing abroad on behalf of a foreign cause, one must always beware the risk of moral solipsism––a concept describing a worldview that is preoccupied with its own understanding and virtue to the exclusion of everyone else’s. This can animate both individuals and larger groups whose indignation about some far-away outrage or whose impulse to identify with causes not one’s own mask fundamentally provincial motivations––the equivalent, to modify John Quincy Adams’s old injunction, of going abroad in search of monsters to destroy within.