Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

And speaking of seeing, the plunging cost of photography is another gift to the richness of experience. In past eras people had only a mental image to remind them of a family member, living or dead. Today, like billions of others, I get a wave of gratitude for my blessings several times a day as my eyes alight on a photo of my loved ones. Affordable photography also allows the high points of life to be lived many times, not just once: the precious occasions, the stunning sights, the long-gone cityscapes, the elderly in their prime, the grown-ups as children, the children as babies.

Even in the future, when we have 3-D holographic surround-sound virtual reality with haptic exoskeleton gloves, we will still want to be within touching distance of the people we love, so the shrinking cost of transportation is another boon to humanity. Trains, buses, and cars have multiplied the opportunities for us to get together, and the remarkable democratization of plane travel has removed the barriers of distance and oceans. The term jet set for chic celebrities is an anachronism from the 1960s, when no more than a fifth of Americans had ever flown in a plane. Despite soaring fuel costs, the real price of plane travel in the United States has fallen by more than half since the late 1970s, when the airlines were deregulated (figure 17-7). In 1974, it cost $1,442 (in 2011 dollars) to fly from New York to Los Angeles; today it can be done for less than $300. As prices fell, more people flew: in 2000 more than half of Americans took at least one round-trip flight. You might have to spread-eagle while a guard slides a wand up your crotch, you may have an elbow in your ribs and a seatback in your chin, but long-distance lovers get to see each other, and if your mother gets sick you can be there the next day.

Figure 17-7: Cost of air travel, US, 1979–2015

Source: Thompson 2013, updated with data from Airlines for America, http://airlines.org/dataset/annual-round-trip-fares-and-fees-domestic/. Domestic travel, excluding checked baggage fees (which would raise the average cost for baggage-checking passengers by about a half-cent per mile since 2008).

Affordable transportation does more than reunite people. It also allows them to sample the phantasmagoria of Planet Earth. This is the pastime that we exalt as “travel” when we do it and revile as “tourism” when someone else does it, but it surely has to count as one of the things that make life worth living. To see the Grand Canyon, New York, the Aurora Borealis, Jerusalem—these are not just sensuous pleasures but experiences that widen the scope of our consciousness, allowing us to take in the vastness of space, time, nature, and human initiative. Though we bristle at the motor coaches and tour guides, the selfie-shooting throngs in their tacky shorts, we must concede that life is better when people can expand their awareness of our planet and species rather than being imprisoned within walking distance of their place of birth. With the rise of disposable income and the declining cost of plane travel, more people have been exploring the world, as we see in figure 17-8.

And no, the travelers aren’t just lining up for wax museums and rides at Disney World. The number of areas in the world that are protected from development and economic exploitation exceeds 160,000 and increases daily. As we saw in figure 10-6, far more of the natural world is being set aside in nature preserves.

Figure 17-8: International tourism, 1995–2015

Source: World Bank 2016e, based on data from the World Tourism Organization, Yearbook of Tourism Statistics.

Another way in which the scope of our aesthetic experience has been magnified is food. The late 19th-century American diet consisted mainly of pork and starch.²⁹ Before refrigeration and motorized transport, most fruits and vegetables would have spoiled before they reached a consumer, so farmers grew nonperishables like turnips, beans, and potatoes. Apples were the only fruit, most of which went into cider. (As recently as the 1970s, Florida souvenir shops sold bags of oranges for tourists to take home as gifts.) The American diet was called “white bread” and “meat-and-potatoes” for good reason. Adventurous cooks might whip up some Spam fritters, mock apple pie made from Ritz crackers, or “Perfection Salad” (coleslaw in lemon Jell-O). New cuisines introduced by immigrants were so exotic that they became the butt of jokes, including Italian (“Mamma mia, that’s a spicy meatball!”), Mexican (“Solves the gas shortage”), Chinese (“An hour later and you’re hungry again”), and Japanese (“Bait, not food”). Today, even small towns and shopping mall food courts offer a cosmopolitan menu, sometimes with all these cuisines plus Greek, Thai, Indian, Vietnamese, and Middle Eastern. Grocers have broadened their offerings as well, from a few hundred items in the 1920s to 2,200 in the 1950s, 17,500 in the 1980s, and 39,500 in 2015.³⁰