Five men paying a king’s ransom to go on a dangerous adventure in the deep ocean. They go in an experimental submarine whose owners describe as if it were a new app for your phone, a product that they can’t be bothered to have thoroughly tested by industry standards because innovation! disruption! capitalism! And rather unsurprisingly, the experimental vehicle on a dangerous mission appears to have put its passengers in mortal peril.
It’s the big story: we get animated graphics of the Titan, the detailed biographies of the passengers, a previous voyager tells us all about it. The wreck of the Titanic has been filmed in detail now, but there’s still bragging rights to be had by saying you looked out a teeny-tiny window and saw it yourself. What else are you going to do if you’re a wealthy, bored explorer? Climb Everest? It’s passe, darling, have you seen the lines? If you live, you have a story to tell; if you die, your story will be told. Maybe even become a TV movie. You win at the finish line: you mattered, you were daring.
If you’re daring enough to try and escape poverty, war, and cruelty and end sinking with more than 700 people on a fishing boat off the coast of Pylos, Greece, sorry, you failed your audition. It’s not daring if it’s desperate. You’ll all be a huddled mass. Nobody’s going to do a 3d animation of the boat. Nobody wants your names or your personal stories. It’s like the chorus of The Sinking of the Reuben James: what were their names? Tell me, what were their names?
This doesn’t just reduce to money and power, not neatly, though they’re certainly a big part of it. I don’t know how much the efforts to locate the Titan are costing, but I’m fairly sure that the final budget, even without any attempt to rescue the passengers, will sum to something close—maybe even more—than the Greek government has allocated annually f or search and rescue out of the very large allocation of funds they’ve received from the EU to deal with border issues and illegal migration. Few seem to question money and effort to rescue millionaires from dangers that they quite voluntarily got themselves into, even if the millionaires themselves are sometimes less than charitable towards their rescuers, as Gelje Sherpa found after saving an Everest climber not too long ago. Many question money spent trying to save migrants who get on unseaworthy vehicles hoping to make it to Europe.
If it’s not just money and power, what else is it? In a deep sense, I’m going to say the difference is about subjects who are understood in terms of social science versus subjects who are understood in humanistic terms. Who is a policy problem and who is a human being? We perform that separation almost instantaneously, unconsciously. It’s deeply encoded in our informational infrastructures, in our habits of mind, in the training of our senses. What anonymous person do you look at and imagine a story for, where you use clues of appearance and affect, of observed behavior and overheard snatches of conversation, to compose an imaginary biography? And what person do you look at and think, “Somebody needs to do something about that situation” or think about that person as a job or a function or a situation—as a thing?
Intellectuals have been trying to think about this sorting, this thinking imaginatively, thinking intuitively, slow and fast, for decades. We’re aware of the moral and political consequences of this sorting but also of a kind of cognitive and emotional economy that almost demands it—that we cannot hold in mind all the stories of all the people in a world that is unimaginably vaster than our everyday experiences and in media that are vastly unimaginative in how they allocate resources on our behalf.
But I think in a moment like this one, when the division of attention is sharp, you can see a simple narrative injustice to it, a simple storytelling failure. I don’t begrudge attention to the drama of the people trapped on the Titan—it is horrifyingly easy to imagine what it must be like if they’re stuck on the ocean floor and running out of oxygen. The story is real. But if we can imagine the terrors of that situation and put them within the context of a daring adventure, I don’t know why we can’t thrill, if that’s the word, to the enormous courage of people who are trying to do something besides just accept their lot in life and stay in places that are hostile to any hopes or possibilities. To see them as adventurous doesn’t even mean that you approve as an overall matter of policy with what all of those individual stories sum up to, it doesn’t mean that you can’t believe that we need to do something. It works the same way in the other direction: I actually think we need to stop millionaires from diving to the Titanic. I even think we need to stop them from climbing Mount Everest. What I think about the social science or public policy in those cases doesn’t stop me from being curious about the story of Gelje Sherpa convincing his own clients to turn around and help save someone else’s client. To be curious about a story requires names, lives, biographies, not just crowds and masses.
Wealth and power guarantee that the consequence of risk falls as unevenly as everything else in the world on the favored and downtrodden. But if you admire daring, the taking of a chance, enduring risk, try to have the imagination to understand just how many people leap into the unknown—who risk drowning in the sea of chances—every day.
Image credit: Photo by Viktor Jakovlev on Unsplash