Note from Bob Kuttner: While away in Europe, I’ve invited François Furstenberg to write today’s On TAP post.
When the Titan submersible disappeared in the North Atlantic last Sunday, with passengers who paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for the risky voyage, the world took notice—and mobilized.
A multinational force immediately launched into action to search the site, some 900 miles off Cape Cod. The U.S. Coast Guard, U.S. Navy, and the Canadian Coast Guard established a unified command the morning after the distress was reported, and French and British ships with deep-sea capabilities soon joined. By Wednesday, they were combing a search zone about twice the size of Connecticut, as deep as 2.5 miles under the surface. Medical personnel equipped with a hyperbaric recompression chamber stood ready to help.
Private actors joined the effort as well. Within 20 hours of being notified, a Cape Cod–based company specializing in sub-sea research expeditions assembled a team; three U.S. Air Force C-17 aircraft transported them to Newfoundland on Tuesday. Within hours, they were sailing on board a Canadian ship.
Later that day, some 60 hours after the Titan was first reported in distress, rescuers discovered a debris field confirming the implosion of the submersible and the death of all five occupants. The tragedy, as The New York Times put it, had "mesmerized people worldwide for days."
The same can’t be said about a tragedy that unfolded just a few days earlier in the Mediterranean. There, up to 750 Pakistani, Syrian, Egyptian, and Palestinian migrants had jammed aboard a rusty fishing trawler to undertake a perilous journey from Libya to Italy. Five days into the voyage, the ship was in severe distress. Food and water had run out. "People were dying. People were fainting," recalled one refugee.
As the boat floated helplessly off the coast of Greece, with at least six dead refugees on board and hundreds more locked in the hold below, passengers sent out calls of distress. Few, however, bothered to respond. On June 13, two merchant vessels approached the ship to offer supplies before sailing off. The Greek Coast Guard arrived that day, but did not intervene. (Indeed, just a few weeks earlier, Greek authorities had been filmed kidnapping recently arrived migrants on the island of Lesbos and towing them back out to a life raft. European officials in Brussels had expressed that they were "concerned" by the images.)
Early on the morning of June 14, as the Greek Coast Guard ship looked on, the rickety fishing trawler lurched and began to sink. With only one ship deployed, the Greek Coast Guard was ill-prepared to help. Only thanks to the arrival of a $175 million superyacht were around 100 survivors saved from drowning. An estimated 650 desperate migrants, many of them women and children, went down to the sea depths.
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The divergent responses should trouble anyone who ponders the contrast, even for a moment. They tell us a great deal about the entrenched and interrelated inequalities of the world over the last few decades.
With a U.S., French, or British passport, countries will spare no resource to save you. Hold a Pakistani, Egyptian, or Syrian passport, and those same countries will make every effort—building walls across vast terrestrial borders, flying you to Rwanda, or towing you out to the middle of the sea—to keep you out.
The wealthy victims of the Titan tragedy have well-reported identities. Readers and viewers were invited to empathize. The identity of the migrants, by contrast, remains mostly unknown—even those who survived. As for the ones who perished, we are unlikely to ever know who or even how many disappeared.
Both voyages involved extreme risk. The passengers on the fishing boat undertook their journey out of necessity; for the passengers on the submersible, it was a choice. Space on the rickety trawler cost far less in monetary terms than space on the advanced submersible. But as a share of the passengers’ total wealth, the refugees paid far more.
It’s worth asking about the extent to which the wealth of billionaires who adventure deep underwater—or into space, for that matter—results from the poverty of global billions. Did those Pakistanis on the trawler flee the climate catastrophe in their country, made so much worse by the developed nations that burned up the fossil fuels to enrich a few billionaires? How much has the soaring concentration of wealth in the United States and in other developed countries resulted from the ability to exploit workers in the developing world?
It’s worth asking, too, to what extent the extreme inequalities of wealth within developed nations fuel anti-migrant sentiment and right-wing backlash, which generates perilous obstacles for refugees, forcing them into ever-greater risks in their quest for a better life for themselves and their children.
The spectacle of impoverished migrants sinking with the ship while every resource is mobilized to save the wealthy few certainly recalls a past maritime tragedy—the very one whose wreckage the submersible went to explore. Why did the original Titanic hold such a grip on the popular imagination? Why is it that, more than a century later, people will pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to visit the wreckage? Wasn’t it at least in part because it stood as a parable of the hubris of modernity in our last Gilded Age?
Martin Luther King famously said that the arc of the moral universe bends toward justice. Perhaps he was right, but it can also bend the other way. Maybe the moral of the Titanic tragedy was that, rich or poor, we all sail on the same ship, and we will all sink or survive together. Well, now we have our own parable, updated for the 21st century. It’s up to us to decide what meaning we want to make from it.
François Furstenberg teaches history at Johns Hopkins University.
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