“According to the law of custom, and perhaps of reason,” writes the great historian Edward Gibbon, “foreign travel completes the education of an English gentleman.”
Gibbon was writing about the Grand Tour, a tradition among the sons of Britain’s landed gentry and the wealthy classes of Protestant Europe. Before taking up the responsibilities expected of them at home, they traveled to the great centers of antiquity and the Renaissance, most often Rome. It was a kind of social pilgrimage, an education not found in books alone. By the Gilded Age, the custom had crossed the Atlantic, and Americans who could afford it began making the journey as well.
But Gibbon suggests that the Grand Tour was not merely a matter of custom. It was a matter of reason. I have the privilege of writing this while returning from my own Grand Tour of Rome and Florence. I was fortunate enough, and perhaps just financially irresponsible enough, to make the trip. After seeing those places for myself, I am inclined to think Gibbon was right, maybe especially for Americans.
America just celebrated her 250th anniversary. Earlier this year, I visited Philadelphia and Washington, great centers of our own civilization. It was a remarkable experience to stand in Independence Hall and imagine July 4, 1776.
According to tradition, Rome celebrated her 2,779th birthday in April. It is not our fault, but those of us from the New World possess an impoverished sense of time. America is young. Our political experiment is remarkable, but our memory is short. As a result, we tend toward short-term thinking. We measure time in presidential administrations.
Rome forces a person to think differently.
I took a single photograph that included monuments from Rome’s classical, medieval, and modern history. Standing on the Capitoline Hill, it is impossible to forget that three thousand years from now, people will still be living with our successes and our failures. The buildings we construct, the laws we pass, and the institutions we preserve or abandon will remain with our children’s children’s children.
How would our political decision-making change if Americans thought in millennia instead of election cycles? What would it look like to build with the knowledge that, three thousand years from now, Americans might either curse our existence or receive our efforts with gratitude?
Walking around Washington, D.C., reveals that Americans understand ourselves to be connected to Rome. I once believed our capital’s classical architecture, though beautiful, was a contrived attempt to legitimize America’s republican government by connecting it aesthetically to Rome. I no longer believe this to be the case.
Rome did not feel like a foreign place. It felt like an inheritance.
As an American, I felt connected to Rome’s republican tradition, its legal heritage, and the broader Western tradition that shaped our institutions. We are connected by centuries of people who preserved, adapted, and passed on Roman ideas.
As a Western Christian, both Roman Catholic and Protestant, I felt that inheritance even more deeply. Our Christian traditions, liturgy, and ethics were born in the city where Saints Peter and Paul died. To walk through Rome is to walk through the place where the classical world met the Christian, where an empire that once persecuted the Church became the Church which took the Gospel to the world.
A Westerner spends very little time in Istanbul before realizing how much he shares with Italians and Argentinians. We don’t realize how united the West is until we are confronted with the East. The language, the alphabet, history, architecture, traditions, and faith that shape the West are far older and more interconnected than we often give them credit. The West is worth defending, not because it is inherently greater than, say, the Christian East, but because it is our home.
And yet, for all its familiarity, Rome is not the United States. Vermont is not Alabama. Huntsville is not Birmingham. This may seem obvious, but because it is true, it means ideologies are insufficient.
An ideology begins with a universal idea and then filters reality through that idea. A communist sees reality primarily as a conflict between classes. A liberal sees reality primarily as a conflict between individuals. To live in reality is to recognize that no two places are identical, and solutions that work in one place may fail in another.
Young Americans often return from Europe lamenting what America lacks. I understand the impulse. Many Americans, myself included, return wishing our cities were more walkable, for example. But Rome was built before cars, while many American cities developed alongside them. The United States is 33 times the size of Italy. A place with different history, resources, people, and geography will inevitably look different. We cannot import solutions from other parts of the world, nor can we export America. We can learn from others, especially those most similar to us, but we must do the solving and building ourselves.
This is why the lessons of the Grand Tour matter for leadership. Travel teaches humility, because other cultures get things right, sometimes better than the United States. It teaches gratitude for the things that make us unique and for the things we do better than others. Most importantly, it teaches that we are heirs, not inventors, of everything that came before us. As Gibbon understood, these lessons cannot be fully learned unless they are lived.
And so, if you have the means, or perhaps even if you do not, I encourage you to go and see your inheritance too.
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This article was made possible by The Fred & Rheta Skelton Center for Cultural Renewal.
Image credit: Flickr-THINK Global School, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
