The five departed souls of the Titan submersible suffered two tragedies. First, the tragedy of dying in a catastrophic implosion deep in the North Atlantic. Then the tragedy of posthumous ridicule. There seems to be a stark and bleak lack of sympathy for the men who perished. Instead a moralistic mob has found them guilty in death of the worst sin of our times: hubris.
Much of the discussion about these doomed adventure seekers is making me feel nauseous. The virtual chatter is even worse. The bony finger of judgement is being pointed. ‘Who in their right mind would pay a quarter of a million dollars to gawp at the ruins of the Titanic?’, ask armchair moralists. It feels like an orgy of puritanical derision, with some even asking if these decadent men with more money than sense got what they deserved.
Like Pope Formosus they have been put on trial after death, only in the kangaroo court of Twitter priggishness rather than in a cadaver synod. Their great offence was arrogance, apparently. Joy Behar, host of the American daytime TV show The View, bemoaned the ‘stupidity’ and ‘hubris’ of the Titan mission. That H-word is everywhere. This was a ‘holiday with hubris’, says one observer, which is when the insanely rich indulge their ‘dangerous fantasies’.
The cruel response to a human tragedy tells us more about ourselves than it does about the five souls lost to the sea
Just as the sinking of the Titanic was turned into a metaphor for the fallibility of industrial man, so the Titan tragedy is being talked up as a kind of retribution for the conceits and vanities of our own era. This doomed mission was ‘born of hubris’, says Ash Sarkar. Filmmaker James Cameron, who directed the 1997 weep-fest Titanic, says the ill fate of both that early 20th-century ocean liner and today’s imploded submersible was brought about by ‘arrogance and hubris’.
Some of the handwringing over the Titan mission is underpinned by a juvenile pseudo-Marxism. ‘God, the super-rich are so decadent and reckless’, cry middle-class leftists online, mercifully taking a break from mocking working-class ‘gammon’ to dance on the watery graves of the recently deceased rich.
And some of it is motored by the modern regressive urge to remind humanity that nature still has the upper hand over us. This tragedy was a case of ‘man vs nature’, said Alyssa Farah Griffin on The View. A writer for Teen Vogue says the sinking of the Titanic should have been a ‘cautionary tale of mankind’s belief in science dominating nature’ and yet still, even after we ‘f**ked around and found out a century ago’, people are willing to ‘board a large metal Tic Tac’ destined for the bleak seabed.
What miserable, misanthropic times we live in. I am appalled at the speed with which the Titan tragedy has been weaved into a moral narrative about the folly of risk-taking, the unreliability of science and the outright hubris of imagining that we can, or should, venture to the mysterious deep of the oceans.
The cruel, brusque response to a human tragedy tells us far more about ourselves than it does about the five souls lost to the sea. It confirms that we turned our backs on adventure, daring, exploration and modernity itself. Give me the danger-seeking of those five men over the meek and cowardly anti-modernism of the opinion-forming set any day of the week.
And don’t for one minute fall for the Marxian gloss on some of the virtual critique of the Titan mission. These bourgeois moralists sneering at the rich for exploring the dark of the ocean are just as likely to condemn oil exploration or shale-gas exploration or deep digging for coal. Every application of man’s scientific prowess, every one of our interferences with nature, is offensive to these Malthusians disguised as Marxists, whether it’s being done to facilitate a rich person’s ‘holiday with hubris’ or to create well-paid jobs for the working class.
I, for one, pay tribute to the men on the Titan. They were not just on their way to stare at a doomed old ship – they were venturing deeper into the sea than the vast majority of humans will ever go, presumably from a thirst for experience and knowledge. They knew the risks and went ahead anyway, so determined were they to know what it’s like to visit a strange, distant world. We need more of that spirit in this cautious young century.
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