The Best American Travel Writing 2020

by Jason Wilson

The peregrini remind us that we go on pilgrimage not to consume experience, but to be consumed. To feel again the porous borders between our inner and outer lives. If our rational age has obscured what Seamus Heaney called “a marvelous or magical view of the world,” pilgrimage helps us find it again.

Critics have described the BRI as a new kind of colonialism or even part of a strategy of “debt-trap diplomacy,” seducing cash-poor countries with infrastructure projects that are unlikely to generate enough revenue to cover the interest on the loans that funded them. That is the unhappy situation at the China-funded Port of Hambantota in Sri Lanka, which the China Harbour Engineering Company took over after Sri Lanka fell behind on debt service. The Center for Global Development lists eight countries that face high risk of “debt distress” from BRI projects that they can’t afford.

In 1929 the leaders of the Soviet Union determined that Kazakhstan’s pastoral workforce would go to work on farms. This forced collectivization was framed as a civilizing mission to modernize a population whom many Russians had long viewed as primitive barbarians. Land formerly devoted to grazing was irrigated and turned over to wheat production, with the immediate result that around 90 percent of the country’s livestock died. The subsequent famine caused the deaths of one-quarter of the population of Kazakhstan and anywhere from one-quarter to one-half of all ethnic Kazakhs, a human-made catastrophe that ended nomadism as it had been practiced in the region for thousands of years. Kazakhs became a minority in the nation the Soviets had founded in their name.

The great commonplace of our time also happens to be true: the world is more connected than ever before. But if it is more connected, the world is also more administered—its people more coerced and surveilled, more susceptible to the designs of authoritarian leaders and more dependent on the fortunes of mercurial international markets—than at any point in human history. If the first fact has made some parts of the world freer, the second has made the rest of it less so.

San Diego is the Spanish name for Saint James, himself named after the apostle James, whose remains are rumored to lie at the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela in Galicia, Spain. The pilgrimage to that cathedral has remained in continuous usage from the early Middle Ages to the present day.

Three-quarters of the humans now stumbling across the planet are circulating within their own borders. New middle classes are being born. Old political dynasties are tottering. Megacities are exploding—and imploding. Stunning innovations collide with colossal disappointments. Entire systems of knowledge (traditional farming), accumulated over millennia, are being jettisoned. Urbanization is cracking apart old gender and religious norms. Environmental resources are in free fall. Chaos, longing, violence, hope, tearing down, building up, experimentation, astonishing successes and defeats. Nothing can stand in the way of this unprecedented force of yearning. By comparison, the hysteria in the Global North over international migrants seems a pale sideshow.