Why does Titanic
hold our fascination so many generations later? There are two main reasons, I think. The first is that it underscores the hubris
of technology. The ship was heavily publicized
at the time as being “practically unsinkable.”
Then as now, people trusted expert judgment (and advertising claims). Then as now, people were horrified when the
occasional technical failure resulted in a large body count. Today, we are as willing as ever to roll the
dice on any number of potentially risky technologies in our daily lives,
whether it’s driving, air travel, or using our cell phones, just to name a few
examples. We accept and live with the
everyday possibility of what Charles Perrow called “normal accidents” because
of the considerable net benefits to our overall quality of life. Undoubtedly,
Titanic’s passengers made the same
cost-benefit assessment each of us makes when we, say, buy a plane ticket. Sure, there’s always the possibility of a
crash, but what are the odds? We trust, as they trusted, that we will be
conveyed safely to our destination. For
them, their dice roll came up snake eyes and we can only think, “There but for
the grace of God…”
The other, probably more significant reason
is the sheer human drama of the disaster.
It makes us ask ourselves how we would have behaved under the
circumstances. Titanic’s passenger list represented a cross-section of
society. Rich and poor lived parallel
existences in a relatively small space. Even
in extremis the ship’s classes endured separately (and unequally). First and second class passengers,
particularly women and children, survived at higher rates than their fellow
travelers in steerage. Clearly since the
ship’s lifeboats didn’t have the capacity to hold the full complement of
passengers and crew, not everyone had an equal chance for survival. Had Captain Smith’s “women and children
first” order been carried out faithfully, however, the steerage survival rate should
have been higher than it was. Theories
as to why it wasn’t range from the ship’s officers’ arbitrary decisions as to
who got into the boats and who didn’t to the physical barriers that confined
steerage passengers to certain areas of the ship.
In any case, we tend to remember the deaths
of the first class passengers and the legends that have grown around them. One distinction then that we would surely not
see now is the manner in which the wealthy, society’s imputed leaders,
conducted themselves in the face of death: Isador Strauss and his wife…John
Jacob Astor…Benjamin Guggenheim and his manservant returning to their stateroom
to change into evening dress so they could die attired as gentlemen. Each of them behaved in a unselfish manner
worthy of comment and emulation. There
were exceptions to be sure; White Star Line president J. Bruce Ismay departed
early and spent the rest of his life in disgrace.
The point here is that despite the social
Darwinism of the age, your betters were expected to sacrifice in the
clutch. If the Titanic disaster happened in 2012, more likely than not the Koch
brothers, Jack Welch, Larry Ellison, Eli Broad, and Rupert Murdoch would be the first to
climb into the lifeboats, women and children be damned, and Fox News, Forbes, the Wall Street Journal, and
Bloomberg would tell us it was fair and right. Even
plutocrats with more benign reputations—Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, and George
Soros come to mind—would be quick to escape, and without a
second thought at that. (As for the
immigrants below decks, they’d probably be considered even more expendable now
than they would have been a hundred years ago.)
One similarity between 1912 and 2012 is the
preoccupation with celebrity. We
traditionally ignore the less prominent victims of mass tragedies. When we do attempt to put a face on the
faceless, as we did in response to the national pathos in the wake of 9/11, we do so in a tone deaf manner. We
project our desires and aspirations on the famous. That might be at least one reason why some aspects
of the Titanic disaster-as-morality-tale
fail to resonate nowadays. One example
comes to mind; Lady Duff-Gordon’s lament to her secretary about a “beautiful
nightdress gone” echoes in the cluelessness of today’s 1%. (Duff-Gordon was one of the foremost couturiers
of her time, so perhaps she can be forgiven the insensitive remark.)
Another, related facet of the tragedy is that
it may well be one of the first manifestations of the “global village.” Titanic
was at no point seen as an isolated event, but as a story that drew the masses
together in mass mourning. The Titanic narrative was a postmodern
phenomenon from the start, the reification of an object à la Baudrillard. Its symbolic value transcended the literal
from the moment the first distress calls went out; Titanic as synonym for all shipwrecks accords its sign value. To borrow and twist a cliché associated with Moby Dick, a ship isn’t always just a
ship. Powerful myths sometimes subsume
their base objects. The Titanic myth will evolve and
transmogrify over time, the story framed such as to suit the sensibilities of
the moment. It will
endure as a timeless narrative of the powerful and humble alike, a morality tale
on the high seas that nevertheless serves as an all-purpose metaphor for the
vicissitudes of modern life.
© 2012 The Unassuming Scholar
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