the willingness to travel at all is a heartening sign of the victory of curiosity and adventure over fear.

We can?t stay safe from every harm ? to try would make us all insane.

Alice Miles writes in the 23 May edition of New Statesman about Professor Engin Isin’s view that modern citizens are neurotic, governments seeking to manage and soothe their anxieties, rather than challenging them. She counters

?One thing that contradicts this this rather dismal vision of modern mankind is our willingness to travel abroad: to get on the plane despite the threat of shoe bombers and technical failure, to stay in foreign places despite the difficulty of assessing the risks we might face there. True, many travellers hand the calculation over to travel agents and insurance companies and minimise the unknown by staying in internationally branded hotels, but still the willingness to travel at all is a heartening sign of the victory of curiosity and adventure over fear.”