As I can’t possibly pass a book that has the title “Nomad” in it, I devoured The New Nomads: How the migration revolution is making the world a better place (2021) by American-Austrian (and really French) author Felix Marquardt in three days. It’s a must-read for anybody who is a nomad at heart. Aren’t we all? No, there is a culture clash between those who are sedentary, most often conservatives who tell their young population they have a duty to stay in their homeland and who are wary of immigrants and the nomadic folks, liberals or libertarians for who migration has become a status symbol and who are much quicker to welcome refugees.
The book tells a lot of personal stories and migration from the point of view of those who emigrated to improve their own lives and make the world a better place, rather than those who anxiously watch immigrants coming into their countries.
Take Deborah, her brother Victor and their friend Mirian. They are from Madrid and moved to the UK, settling together in the northeast of London in 2014. ‘In Spain, even with work experience, motivation and self-confidence, I wasn’t getting anywhere,’ Deborah confides. ‘There, it’s all about who you know.’ I’m well-placed to realise that knowing the right people helps everywhere, but I see what she means. With the chutzpah this young woman exudes, she should have been well able to thrive in her own country. She continues: ‘I don’t want to live in a place that doesn’t value me.
I have met many people with similar stories during the time I was a nomad and I agree totally with the author that there are many advantages to migration, both personal and for the host country: education, a cosmopolitan attitude, innovation are only a few of them. You can become a nomad for self-discovery and even to feel at home, as paradoxical as that may sound. I have been to few places in the world where I felt as much at home as in Romania, studying Romanian with nomads from all over the world. For us nomads, it’s really all about the people who we are with rather than a particular geographic area or the place we were born.
Felix Marquardt discusses many different kinds of new nomadism: migrants, ex-pats, refugees, and digital nomads, but also points out the limits of these labels. Again I found myself agreeing with him. When I was a nomad, I was all of those, being abroad for studying, learning languages, tourism, and work. I wrote blog posts, met up with people I had met in other countries, and even got married abroad. Of course, I was never a refugee from war, but like so many other nomads I had to break free from my own country and culture which I found too limiting.
So, what’s the bad? You may experience culture shock, and not necessarily in places you’d expect, like Marie from Sweden:
[...] she has since spent many years in Africa and experienced plenty of acculturation there, but she remembers Georgia as ‘one of the biggest cultural shocks in my life, in a way more significant than anything I encountered in Africa’. [...] Here she was in a small, relatively remote town of the Bible Belt, yet everyone seemed to have a business, if not several. ‘The family I stayed with had a small broom company and a little wine shop. I was really impressed. It made me feel like I could start a business, too.’ She was also struck by her hosts’ generosity and hospitality. ‘They were truly adorable, warm people. Swedes tend to be somewhat distant, uninviting.’ Other things she wasn’t as keen on. Sweden is deeply secular (Swedes do go to church in droves on occasion, but from what I’ve seen, it’s primarily to sing – Swedes love their singing). In Georgia, everywhere Marie went, the ice-breaker of choice seemed to be something along the lines of ‘Which church do you go to?’ ‘I’m not anti-religious, but in Georgia, having faith means rejecting the theory of evolution. That was already pretty crazy in my book.’ But it was something else that threw her off entirely: ‘The segregation. People of colour and whites hardly mixed and some people were ostentatiously, almost proudly racist. Even for those who weren’t, it was simply unthinkable that I date a Black dude. In 2001!’ That settled it for Marie. Her future lay elsewhere.
A nomad friend of mine who had lived in the UK and Australia had a very similar experience: he experienced culture shock in his native Austria, in Kitzbühl, a famous skiing resort, where people were pretty much only interested in their work and local communities and where it was impossible to make friendships for an outsider. Apart from culture shock, there is the danger of nomadism becoming a banality. Like the scores of digital nomads who would keep doing the same things with the same kind of people but with different backdrops. Felix Marquardt criticises in particular digital nomads who present a fake picture of what it is like to be a digital nomad. I have been there too and totally agree with him, it’s definitely not about blogging with a laptop on an exotic beach and sipping cocktails. I once met a new nomad whose life goal was to visit all 195 or so (at the time, the number was probably different) countries in the world. While I am all for new experiences and openness, this seemed pretty shallow to me. There is something called diminishing returns, that such people should be aware of. I don’t know if that guy ever made it, but according to one website 199 people have made it so far.
And that brings us to the ugly. Marquardt doesn’t forget to point out the huge environmental (and social) costs of modern mobility.
The organisers of Brilliant Minds invited Greta Thunberg to give the opening keynote. She pointed out to those assembled that flying around the world in private jets to celebrate their own brilliance and pontificate about sustainability and ‘making the world a better place’ was denying reality. That contrary to what they seemed to think, this behaviour could actually be worse than saying or doing nothing at all. [...] Meanwhile, most climate change deniers in the world today are not very mobile, and most of them hardly ever fly (though until recently of course, the most influential of them were in the Trump administration and the US Congress, and as such were extremely mobile). The staggering irony of our time is that the carbon footprint of most climate sceptics is insignificant compared to that of the average environmentally conscious privileged liberal [...]
The paradoxical truth is that the liberal nomads who are concerned with climate change often contribute much more to it than the sedentary conservatives who deny it, but who tend to be conservationists (at least in their local environment). And it’s true, we liberals often love discussing issues but do precious little about them, just like all those big shots at Davos who love to invite interesting speakers but not act on their conscience. I have argued that this paradox can be resolved by evolutionary psychology. DeYoung has found two metatraits in the Big Five, he labelled stability and plasticity. From an evolutionary point of view these metatraits are derived from sedentism and nomadism, respectively:
This would explain why conservative farmer types are suspicious towards outsiders. Historically they were much more likely to be attacked by them than reaping the benefits of immigrants, such as open trade and innovation. It also explains why conservative farmer types are far more active in (and not just discussing) conservation, they are programmed to work the land. I have seen personality models in which they were described as defenders and caretakers, and those labels are quite accurate. We nomads rarely have the same dedication to our native land and soil, after all in the past we would have moved on when resources became rare. Marquardt, who is a forager type like me, pleads for more mutual understanding, even for Trump voters (and that’s a tough one for us liberals). Farmer types have to understand that immigrants and refugees mostly aren’t the threat their evolutionary instincts make them believe to be and liberal nomad types have to understand the patriotism and worries of farmer types as well as all the good things about them liberals tend to forget. When Syrian refugees arrived in Austria, I taught a class of young refugees for two years. I have heard from several of them that they got jobs here, many in the hospitality industry which often struggles to find staff. I haven't heard that any of them became a criminal.
There is one thing the book barely touches upon, though. If you are a born nomad it's hard to have a “normal life”. Felix Marquardt writes about how he has never been able to be a “normal parent”, however, there are many other aspects of life that are difficult for us nomads: routine jobs, hierarchy, and school among others.
For more on evolutionary types, check out my book Foragers, Farmers and Pastoralists : How three tribes have been shaping civilization since the Neolithic
For more about my personal experience as a nomad and forager type check out my book: Through the eyes of a hunter-gatherer: Memoirs of a forager in a farmer world
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