Over the last week, the tragic case of the Titan submersible disappearance has dominated headlines. For several days, there was a worldwide rush to trace and save the five people on board before the oxygen ran out - but ultimately, it was demonstrated that a failure of the pressure hull had caused an implosion, killing the occupants instantly.
If, like me, you move in left-wing circles, you'll almost certainly have witnessed comparisons being made to the amount of coverage that refugee boats get - in particular, this extremely disturbing instance, which happened just a couple of weeks before and vanished from news coverage pretty much instantaneously. The argument is made that it's disgusting that a group of people who were foolish enough to pay a lot of money to visit the wreck of the Titanic get this amount of media coverage when people fleeing for their lives get practically zero sympathy, and certainly nothing like the level of public attention and resources. I think this is an important point, and I have shared a post to this effect on my own social media profile.
However, as valid a concern as this is, I also think there's an extent to which it can go too far. I've been quite upset by some of the posts I've seen essentially suggesting that in the circumstances it would have been all right to just ignore the submersible and forget about its occupants. After all, they're only billionaires, right?
There have been some interesting articles written about why this particular case has struck such public interest - here's one such article which I thought made for interesting reading. I have my own take on the reasons why this particular case was felt to be so deserving of media interest:
1. The social status of the people involved
The hardest thing about calling out people who make this point that billionaires might as well drown is that I do think they're half right - if not a little more than half. The ultimate reason that refugees don't get the same level of media and public attention is because they are seen in our culture at the moment as almost sub-human. Our Government has an attitude towards the most vulnerable that is in my view nothing short of sociopathic, and just on an anecdotal level, when I've been discussing these matters with strangers on the internet, I've found myself quite genuinely shocked at how callous people can be. Within the last month, I've actually debated with someone who thought that people would risk their own and their children's lives aboard dangerous boats purely out of greed, without any fear whatsoever of what could await them if they stay in their home countries. Needless to say, almost no one would do that. It's hard to debate someone who is that far removed from reality, but I did my best.
Billionaires, on the other hand, tend to have a combination of two of the most toxic things within society; cruelty and stupidity. Cruelty because it's almost impossible to earn that amount of money honestly and ethically (it's so much more than a million that the human mind can't even really fathom the difference). Even if, theoretically, someone did, I don't believe it's possible to be a good person and still keep your billionaire status. I often wish I could do more to help the people who are struggling most, and the only reason I don't is that I just don't have enough money. If I had that much, enough to give huge amounts away and still be comfortably off, of course I would do it - I wouldn't even have to think about it. If you don't, with the amount of suffering around you, that is the definition of cruelty. And stupidity because it's my belief that insane amounts of power and wealth cause one to believe that one is invincible. There are examples of this all over the world, but in this case it manifests itself in the fact that five people paid more money than most of us could hope to earn in a lifetime to board a submersible that it was on record was unsafe. It's so well-documented how unsafe this vessel was, how many corners had been cut, that I don't think I even need to bother sourcing this fact; I think almost everyone will have seen the video of OceanGate's executive admitting this. Actually, not even admitting; boasting would be a more accurate term.
Ultimately, some very rich people decided to chance their luck. I feel sad for them, but the decision was idiotic (arguably far more idiotic than boarding a refugee ship actually - at least people who do that are making a choice between that or a potentially worse fate).
2. The history with the Titanic
I won't go into this one in much detail because it's detailed in the Guardian article I linked above, but I think the irony is part of it. The story of the ill-fated Titanic has captured public interest for more than a century now. The definition of the word 'titanic', originally referring to something of exceptional strength and power, is now commonly used to refer to something utterly doomed. The James Cameron film Titanic, which came out in 1997, is one of the most popular films of all-time, and I think there's something about that disaster that has stuck in public consciousness when comparable ones haven't. There's something strangely romantic about a submersible named after it and inspired by it suffering a similar fate.
3. The coziness of human interest stories
This is another thing discussed in the Guardian article, but stories about people in desperate situations always capture the public mood, from the Chilean miners in 2010 to the Thai footballers in 2018. I think this is a particular phenomenon that has accompanied the rise of the Internet. This medium lends itself to stories which people can desperately seeking updates on every few hours, and the corporate media has latched onto this to milk them for all they are worth. That sounds very cynical, but I suppose there's a good aspect to it as well - at least public pressure means that there's an incentive to carry on looking for and potentially rescuing someone.
4. Our own capacity for empathy and grief
The human brain is an amazing thing, but it's not infallible. Just as it's impossible to mentally calculate how much more a billion is than a million, it's also very difficult to find great emotion for a huge number of people at once. Imagine you hear about a house that's burned down, claiming the lives of the family inside. Even if you don't know them, you'll feel tremendous sorrow for that family. But if you hear about wildfires tearing through a country, having this impact on multiple families, you won't feel sorrow on quite the same level. You'll be upset, sure, and you'll know logically that this has a far worse impact than an isolated incident - but logic doesn't match up to your emotional reaction. This is because there's just too much suffering in the world for us to feel something for every single bit.
In a lot of ways, this is perfectly logical and reasonable. The plain truth is that if we felt a personal loss for every needless death or piece of suffering in the world, we'd drive ourselves insane with grief and be unable to live as our best selves. However, it does mean that in situations like this, it becomes extremely hard to keep track of what's really important. It's so much easier to feel sad for five people that you didn't know than for hundreds - even if the lives of those hundreds are far closer to your own than the lives of the five. It is normal and natural for us to have this reaction.
And yet...
In spite of what I've said about about our capacity for empathy, the public interest in the Titan submersible and in refugee ships has been manipulated artificially. It is deliberate that refugee ships are presented in a parasitical way, as they are. I do not believe that human behaviour is inherently and organically hostile and xenophobic. When news first broke of the war in Ukraine, so many people were quick to donate their time, money and resources to those affected, even going as far as to open their homes. I think a big part of why we've survived for so long as a species is our capacity to display empathy like that. However, the powerful have also perfected the art of using this against us; making us believe that our ability to care for one another is actually to our detriment, and they are, unfortunately, increasingly successful at that.
There's an infographic that is commonly shared around social media involving ants. It's said that if you put red and black ants in a jar together, they will live quite harmoniously with one another until someone shakes the jar, at which point they will each identify one another as a threat and begin attacking each other. I don't have enough knowledge of ant behaviour to know whether this is literally true, but it works as a great metaphor for human beings. The question is, who is shaking the jar?
Nevertheless, I think it's important to recognise that the Titan Five were human beings, with the capacity for love and fear and all human emotion. It's important to recognise that they had loved ones just like us. I despise billionaires; I think they're absolute parasites who take and take and take from the world and put almost nothing back. That combined the amount of unnecessary sea deaths that are being deliberately inflicted on vulnerable people, I understand entirely that there's something savagely refreshing about it happening to the super-rich for a change. But I can't participate in this.
The reason I can't participate is that to me, this goes against everything I stand for, every aspect of my being that caused me to realise I'm left-wing in the first place. In my view, this is the fundamental difference between the left and the right - that the right look for scapegoats to justify their cruelty, and the left have to care for one another extra hard to make up for it. The cruelty and savagery of the far-right's behaviour towards the vulnerable, be they refugees, transgender people, the disabled or anyone other group who is unfortunate enough to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, comes from a willingness to forget another person's personhood. This is the justification for any and all forms of institutional cruelty, and I will not accept it - no matter who is the victim, and no matter who is the perpetrator.
The position that no matter who we are, we all deserve dignity and we all deserve recognition is an absolute, unqualified, unshakeable principle. I do not feel that any of the money spent trying to find the Titan Five was a waste - all I would say is that that amount of money should be spent finding everyone who's lost at sea (or, even better, making sure they aren't in that situation in the first place). It's possible to do that, and if it's possible there is no justification for not doing so. In the meantime, I will allow myself to feel sad for five people who lost their lives in a terrible accident. They didn't deserve that.
