Philosophical Fight Log: Day 7– Fight Tourism
A few years ago, a friend of mine told me a story about this amazing, world-class cliff-side lookout, somewhere in Thailand I believe, that overlooked the ocean. Apparently, for years, this secret location and its breath-taking view, was known only to the local, native inhabitants. A bit later, once travel became a bit cheaper and more available, this view was made accessible to foreigners, but to only the most daring and intrepid of travelers who had the courage, perseverance, and planning to make the difficult trek to this region and to earn the trust and loyalty of the local inhabitants who then showed them this secret location. Nowadays, apparently, there is a queue, where dozens of tourists, often western college students and unmoored twenty-somethings, now wait in line, as they are charged by the local tourism agency, to each go, one-by-one, to the edge of this beautiful and stunning cliff-side view, once special and sacred, in order to take their own pre-choreographed, selfie photo for their personalized Instagram page.
This phenomenon is hardly anything new, of course. For some time now, Mount Everest has notoriously been known for this same kind of superficial tourism, whereby rich CEOs, retired Boomers, and bored trust-fund babies essentially pay local Tibetan sherpas to function as human pack-mules, humping their gear to the top of the mountain for them so that these folks can check off another item on their ‘bucket-list’ and boast to their friends and peers of their ‘authentic Everest experience.’ The world of hunting, so I hear, has also, in recent years, undergone a similar transition to a tourism ethic, whereby folks now pay money to go out on some dude’s private sanctuary, oftentimes with a guide, and pull a trigger in order to bag a deer or some similar beast for trophy and bragging rights rather than for the challenge, skill demands, or life-or-death sustenance. And even within the space of modern-day warfare, a species of tourism can now be found.
Indeed, tourism, of one sort or another, is now everywhere, and the whole world, it seems, has become increasingly desacralized and increasingly disenchanted.
There are no true ‘wild spaces’ anymore. Nothing it seems, is really earned.
Nothing is really real.
In On Exactitude in Science, Argentinian writer, Jorge Luis Borges, writes of a fictitious world where the empire’s cartographers overlay a giant map over the entire kingdom, with a perfect, 1-to-1 relationship to the actual territory beneath.
…In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography.
Jean Baudrillard, in his famous, Simulation and Simulacra, of course, develops this idea further, noting how a simulacra (or copy) of something, can sometimes overtake the original, sometimes dramatically so, until the original is completely forgotten, yet the copy still exercises social and causal power in the world, sometimes dramatically so.
Nowadays, the entire world, it seems, is becoming more and more of a simulacra; an artificial map of an actual, original territory, one that is becoming increasingly forgotten, and increasingly inaccessible because of the map itself. Consequently, such maps and corresponding ways-of-being in the world, have now increasingly removed from the world, all signs of locals, of adventurers, and of pilgrims, and have fast replaced them with tourists, tour agents, and passive consumers.
This is all to say that in doing this fight, I hope I’m not merely engaging in a similar ethic of tourism, of thin superficiality, of merely skimming across the surfaces of things; passive, unobservant, and unappreciative. That said, I fully recognize and admit that I am still very much an outsider ‘cutting through the local area’, so to speak, but I would at least like to think that I am more respectful and appreciative of this subculture, of the art, and of the countless hours of blood, sweat, hard work, and dedication that folks doing this for a living actually have sacrificed. I’d like to think I’m more than just some writer simply moonlighting as a fighter for a brief moment, no different from one of those selfie-stick wielding sightseers, traveling half-way around the world to participate in a contrived moment where they themselves aren’t even really there to begin with. Indeed, I’d like to think that what I’m doing is something more than that, and that the authentic territory beneath the maps and beneath the surface of things can still be reached.
I hope then, for this fight, that I am properly being a pilgrim venturing through sacred land, able to make contact with something real;
And not just being another tourist.