The response to the Titan submersible event has, in my view, been both remarkable and bizarre. Some people have found it an occasion for gallows humor; others have tried to suggest that the crew/passengers felt no suffering as they died. Still others tell us that we should celebrate the heroism of people who take risks to explore the unknown, and point out that civilization itself depends on its bold risk takers. I find all three of these reactions delusional, and diagnostic of the delusions of our society.
The destruction of the Titan was a predictable (and predicted) consequence of the overwhelming, idiotic hubris of its owner, as well as of the credulity of the people he took with him, and all those who cooperated with him. There was nothing heroic about it. There’s nothing heroic about reckless, lethal stupidity, particularly when it exploits the credulity of the credulous, including that of a properly skeptical teenager–the most reluctant of the passengers–blinded by love of his culpably credulous father, who was eager to take the plunge.
But is it funny? No. The supposed humor arises from the typically unexpressed thought that the victims deserved their fate, and that the laughter directed at them is an ennobling form of righteous indignation. From this perspective, their deaths are the ultimate in hilarious pratfalls, or morbid poetic justice—the “Jackass” series on steroids. The poetic justice supposedly intensifies when we introduce money into the equation. Suffering is funny when rich people do it. The richer they are, the more they deserve it.
We might ask whether it’s possible, even conceptually, to “deserve” what happened to the people on the Titan. Is the mutilation or annihilation of the body something someone can deserve? Is it clear, for instance, that terrorists deserve to be tortured? Murderers? Rapists? Arsonists? How about rich ones? Should we celebrate and make jokes about the torture chambers our country has erected over the last few decades, on the premise that at least some of the people tortured in them deserved it, and some at least were rich?
Torture seems less funny than death through submersible implosion, but perhaps it shouldn’t. Recklessness is bad, but the intentional violation of others is worse. If recklessness elicits laughter because it’s deserved, the tortures of the damned should be the funniest fucking thing in the world. In that case, Dante’s Inferno would have been a divine comedy marketable to Comedy Central. So would an average night on Rikers Island. I wonder who would laugh. I’m sure some would.
Unlike a lot of people, I’ve almost drowned to death in a situation vaguely similar to the Titan. I drove my car into a flash flood during Hurricane Ida, and survived only by jumping out the passenger side window. I made jokes about it at the time—but that’s because I survived. Sixteen people died in Hunterdon County alone that night, many in circumstances just like mine. It would have been obscene to laugh at them for dying as they did, even if they were billionaires, even if they died through avoidable, culpable stupidity. If culpable stupidity were always funny, life would be an endless dose of nitrous oxide. But it isn’t.
The people laughing at the Titan are richer than half the people on this planet. Should the wretched of the Earth laugh at your last breaths? Poor people often die in grotesque, idiotic ways, too. Are they saved from mockery only by the accident of poverty?
There’s no point pretending that the crew of the Titan didn’t suffer as they died. They did. If you want to approximate what it’s like, I suggest driving your car into a river or lake, and watching the vehicle fill with water after the electrical system goes, as your own weight tips the car forward, deeper into the water, and every move you make seems both an act of futility and a means of sealing your fate. Now hold your breath through the whole thing—as you hyperventilate. Or just volunteer to be waterboarded. It’s safe enough, or so the CIA assures us. There are many ways to describe the feelings associated with drowning and asphyxiation, but neither humor nor well intentioned compassion will supply the missing vocabulary.
I don’t like the people who perished on the Titan. I don’t like the venture, either, and feel no warmth or affection for the grand, risky, death-dealing endeavors of the past. But I like our society’s reaction even less. Either there’s obscene humor, or there’s maudlin sentimentality, or there’s the pedantry of the entrepreneurial spirit, piously there to remind us of the price that must be paid for exploration, voyeurism, and aimless frivolity.
I haven’t heard anyone express my reaction to this event. The implosion of the Titan was misery without grandeur: culpable, yet undeserved; grotesque, yet unfunny. This is what human beings should never do and never become. To do what these people did bespeaks a failure of reason. To laugh at them bespeaks a failure of humanity. The event manages to be tragic while lacking the dignity of tragedy. If the victims deserve anything, it’s pity without catharsis. A catharsis implies a cleansing or purgation in the face of tragedy. There’s no finding that here.
Thanks to Gayle Rembold Furbert and Kurt Keefner for encouraging comments on an earlier version of this essay.
Policy of Truth 
I appreciate and share both your outrage at people laughing at the victims of this disaster and your refusal to try to valorize or sentimentalize them. I hadn’t known anyone was actually laughing over this, but I guess it’s not really surprising.
However, you say you “don’t like” the people who perished on the Titan or their venture, on which you heap abuse. I myself don’t see anything wrong with either the people or their activity. I have a somewhat different take.
I thought the common take on this episode (and I haven’t read up or investigated, this is just my impression from glancing at the news) was to classify it as an instance of “extreme tourism.” Hadn’t a couple of these rich dudes done other, similar things like being launched into space? One of them seemed to be positively collecting a series of such “achievements.”
It’s easy to smirk at extreme tourism as a silly waste of time and money, a vanity for rich people who can think of nothing better to do. It puts me in mind of people who travel as an avocation. I know a guy who has spent his retirement visiting countries and has visited every country on the planet at least once and has many other travel “accomplishments.” And it turns out there is—naturally!—not one but many “World Traveler’s Associations” and “Circumnavigator’s Clubs” composed of such people. And I confess to looking at this and having the thought, “how pathetic.”
But that’s grossly unfair. After all, what is there for people with means to do? Is traveling or adventuring on the bottom of the ocean uniquely foolish, whereas stamp collecting or learning a foreign language or building ships in bottles or reading world literature is somehow intrinsically satisfying or particularly noble? We can’t all be Bill Gates, and it would be a grim world if all of us tried. I take a jaundiced view of do-goodery, thinking that most of the real good in the world does not come from deliberate schemes to create it. But I’ll grant that Bill Gates does seem to have made himself genuinely useful in certain ways. Fine. But that’s not most people, who have neither the brains nor the interest to succeed in such undertakings.
Human beings in general do not seem well cut out to make their own meaning or purpose. I think of Maslow’s famous hierarchy of needs: people are driven first to satisfy their basic bodily needs, then their need for safety, then their need for love and belonging, then their need for personal dignity and social respect, and finally their need for self-actualization and growth. The earlier levels of the hierarchy are supposed to take priority: people who have nothing to eat don’t worry too much about their personal dignity, etc. But once one level is more-or-less satisfied, the next assumes great importance. This implies that people who have reached the penultimate level will be filled with a drive for growth and self-actualization. But what do we actually find? Video gaming and Twitter and polyamory and opioids and cat videos.
According to Nicholas Eberstadt, in America as of late 2020, “nearly 7 million civilian non-institutionalized men between the ages of 25 and 54 are neither working nor looking for work — over four times as many as are formally unemployed.” (I say “as of late 2020,” but this is a secular [i.e., long-term] trend having nothing to do with Covid.) These guys are not gone fishin’ or in their garages rebuilding car engines. Their modal lifestyle is spending 40+ hours per week watching and playing on screens, usually while on some pain medication or other substance. They have found the means to leisure, but what they do with themselves is not self-actualization.
In fairness, these guys probably have not exactly mastered the third or fourth of Maslow’s levels either. Still, I think it’s indicative of a general truth, which is that human beings not living in hardship or crisis have a hard time figuring out what to do with themselves. People struggling to carve a life out of the bush or the wilderness do not have to reflect much on the purpose of their lives. The selective pressures of evolutionary history shaped us to survive and reproduce in the face of threats to our existence, not to achieve self-actualization or figure out our own life purpose. No doubt Maslow himself had a strong sense of his own need for self-actualization—as do I, for that matter—but this just illustrates the foible of psychologists in certain traditions generalizing their own mental traits into supposed human universals. (People do need purpose in their lives, of course. But that doesn’t mean they are equipped to figure out their own life purpose.)
In this light, what’s so irrational or silly about voyaging to the bottom of the sea? Or world travel? These are no worse than most things people could do with their time, and better than many.
You say the CEO of OceanGate was an idiot filled with hubris. I have not investigated the matter, but I’m not so sure this is true. He had made dozens of these voyages or ones like it, hadn’t he? And one of the passengers had been down to the Titanic over two dozen times. Life entails risk. Just because an action fails, even disastrously, doesn’t mean it was irrational. It is a mistake to judge the quality of a decision post hoc by the outcome. It’s a matter of probabilities, there being no certainties in life. I’m not saying he wasn’t too cavalier—maybe he was. But the typical moralizing I read after this disaster doesn’t convince me of it. His safety record doesn’t seem worse than NASA’s.
One other, pedantic point I can’t refrain from: you write as though the passengers drowned. Surely not. The implosion scattered debris hither and yon. Evidently it was violent. The water pressure at the Titanic is 5500 pounds per square inch!! They were instantly crushed to death. RIP
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Amusement at the Titan tragedy has been widespread and widely reported:
https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/story/2023-06-22/titan-submersible-social-media-reaction-cruel
I’ve seen (literally) dozens of instances. This Subway ad made headlines.
https://nypost.com/2023/07/04/georgia-subway-under-fire-for-titan-disaster-themed-sign-our-subs-dont-implode/
There have also been some impassioned “defenses” of the legitimacy of making fun of the passengers.
The New Zealand Herald article I linked to in the post (first link) quotes an expert who suggests, plausibly, that the passengers experienced enormous suffering before they died.
“He said those onboard suffered through between 48 and 71 seconds of the fall before the craft failed.”
I suspect that it’s more than that. I suspect that those on board had to have known that things were going wrong, and had to have experienced a sense of terror at their predicament. But regardless, 71 seconds is a long time to feel terror and agony as you hurtle “headlong like an arrow towards the bottom of the sea, without any possibility of manoeuvering with the damaged control and safety elements.”
The wild, insistent, dogmatic recklessness of Stockton Rush, the owner, has also been widely reported. A sample:
https://www.zmescience.com/science/news-science/titan-submersible-implosion/
https://www.newyorker.com/news/a-reporter-at-large/the-titan-submersible-was-an-accident-waiting-to-happen
https://www.insider.com/stockton-rush-oceangate-recklessness-was-open-secret-nobody-could-quell-2023-7
https://www.prindleinstitute.org/2023/07/what-titan-teaches-about-technological-recklessness/
Of the five passengers, Suleman Dawood, the nineteen year old, was the only one who expressed misgivings about the venture, but went because his father persuaded him to go. Setting Suleman aside, the three adults followed Rush with a kind of credulous stupidity, ignoring every critic of the venture, and every criticism. Rush may have made many dives, but no one had ever attempted a dive at this depth with this sort of craft, brushing aside all criticisms, admitting brashly to breaking the rules in the name of adventure, and not bothering to have (much less test) any emergency backup systems. (One of the passengers, Paul-Henry Nargoleot, had made many dives to the Titanic, but none on an untested vessel like the Titan.)
I do operational logistics for hospital billing systems, and no sane person would deploy even a computerized billing system as recklessly as Rush did with his submersible. All that’s at stake with a billing system is money–and yet we are more careful than he was. Even if we monetize the lives involved here (and abstract from moral considerations), we’re talking, on the standard risk analysis, of a monetizable value of roughly $50 million. To take an untested craft without adequate backup systems into such an extreme situation with a cargo of $50 million is culpable insanity. Unfortunately, the attitude is very common in the tech world, where people seem to have the same kind of faith in the wonders of technology that religious people have in God. But fideism + danger = predictable misery and death. At the very least, they should have left the kid out of their adventure, especially after he expressed misgivings. But they didn’t.
Yes, life entails risk. But recklessness entails culpability. I don’t think anyone can literally deserve a fate like theirs, but they weren’t morally innocent. My view here parallels that of Matthew Silk (Prindle Institute), whose article I link to above. The attitude Stockton Rush expressed in this case generalizes well beyond this particular case, or this particular context. In general, I agree with the attitude taken by Kip Viscusi in his book Pricing Lives: our society systematically overvalues risk and undervalues life. The crew of the Titan is just an extreme case.
https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691179216/pricing-lives
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LOL, it’s amazing how different our social perceptions usually are. I don’t see us as being intellectually all that different.
On the suffering of the victims, I looked at the article you linked and noted that the expert was talking about pre-implosion “terror.” That’s why I specifically spoke of drowning. However, I also had questions about his account. On the one hand, he says they had an electrical failure, lost propulsion, and were in “complete darkness.” On the other hand, they were looking out the window—at what? How do they know what’s going on in complete darkness? But he says they knew everything that was going on. His quip that “The pilot could not activate the emergency lever that abruptly released the lead ballasts and that the company pompously announced in one of its advertising videos,” is telling. “Pompously”? This sounds like moralism, not factual analysis.
I read the first of your links on Stockton Rush’s supposed dogmatic recklessness, and it was just like the ones I read in June when this was new. I wasn’t persuaded then, and I’m not now. They all say the same things. Did you know the vehicle was piloted by a game controller?! Items like this are picked to construct a case by journalists who don’t know jack shit. Without hearing what Rush would say in reply, this isn’t a basis for judgment. (Again, I’m hardly endorsing Rush’s attitudes, methods, company, etc. I just think it is prudent to be skeptical of the claim, predictable following an incident like this, that he was reckless, hubristic, etc.)
The Titan had made several previous trips to the Titanic. It’s not the case that the vehicle was untried or had never visited the Titanic.
Nargeolet seemed to serve as “tour guide” on all OceanGate’s tours to the Titanic. I think he was on the Titan’s previous voyages to the Titanic.
“our society systematically overvalues risk and undervalues life.”
I think the truth is the exact opposite! Of course, we’ve been through this before, such as with Covid. Our culture of safetyism fueled a response to Covid that did demonstrable harm for questionable benefit. The case of Sweden, which kept its cool and wound up with nearly the best all-cause excess mortality rate in Europe for 2020–2022 is indicative of this. The situation is complex, obviously, but it is unclear that Sweden pursued the wrong policy. They certainly placed a greater value on their citizens’ quality of life than we did. Is that not “valuing life”?
Some evidence for our culture of safetyism and the harm it does is provided in Lukianoff and Haidt, The Coddling of the American Mind.
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On the suffering of the passengers: It’s not just that they experienced terror, though they did. What Martin claims is that they experienced that terror during a precipitous descent to the bottom before the implosion. My claim about not being able to breathe was not about water, but about being jammed at one end of the craft as it plummeted to the point of implosion, with people piled on top of each other as they met their desperate end. They knew what was happening not because they saw anything, but because they felt the descent and knew it could mean only one thing.
I think “pompous” is absolutely fitting, and perfectly factual. It depends on whether you think moral predicates take truth-values or not. I would say “pompous” does–a pompous person is “affected and self-important”–and that Stockton Rush was, in a perfectly straightforward sense, a paradigm or exemplar of pomposity.
More on that in a moment, but for now, I would just contest the supposed dichotomy between offering a factual account and one that uses moral predicates. The LA Times article describes the “callous” behavior of the people who made jokes about the victims of the implosion. Is the use of “callous” factual or is it “moralistic”? I would say that it’s an accurate, factual use of a moral predicate in an account that requires their use. Try to describe the behavior of the schadenfreude crowd without making reference to their callousness, and something–something factual–goes missing. Likewise with Rush’s pomposity. A person who acts with as much recklessness as he did, then brags about breaking the rules–and quotes General MacArthur in the process–is about as pompous as any human being can get. If that’s not pomposity, the word has no meaning. The reference to MacArthur is in one sense perfectly appropriate: MacArthur was a man precisely in Stockton Rush’s mold (or, I suppose, the reverse): he was the guy who decided to “break the rules” in Korea while courting nuclear war with the Communists, then came home to brag about it.
I would insist that the Titan was untested despite the fact that it had made two previous trips to the Titanic (one of which nearly came to grief itself). There is a basic distinction between testing and ordinary operations. A test asks what could go wrong, and rigorously checks to see whether it will. Operations by definition can’t and don’t do that. It was a known fact that every dive would degrade the carbon fibers that the Titan was made of. Given that, the probability of failure increased with every dive. Since it did, no ordinary operational dive could be regarded as a “test.”
To test the Titan, what needed to be tested was precisely what Rush did not test: whether the hull would survive given the preceding wear and tear on it. He not only didn’t test it, he went out of his way to insist that it didn’t need to be tested. He didn’t just do that, either. He spent years attacking the people who insisted that he do a better job of testing that specific problem (among many others). And he didn’t just “attack” them verbally. He tried his best to destroy the career and reputation of the one person best qualified to make the criticism (described at length in The New Yorker article). He derided their concerns, and dismissed blatantly obvious objections of experts far more qualified than him as though they were of no concern. In the end, in an implicit concession to all of his critics (despite everything he’d done to shut them up), he basically gave up on safety altogether, declared the craft “experimental,” and put enormous, obsessive effort into ensuring that no one not personally loyal to him would scrutinize any aspect of the operations of the voyage. He bragged about breaking the rules–and the very rules he broke are what explain why he got everyone killed…on a trip to the wreck of a ship whose owners had done the same thing!
That’s why I regard him as culpable. This is not a person who took ordinary risks and just “happened” to get unlucky on one occasion. Nor is it a person who decided to run high risks but take extraordinary precautions. This is a person who spent enormous time and energy attacking his critics and evading criticism but explicitly, self-consciously gave up on safety while also paying lip service to it. That deserves condemnation.
You say that Rush isn’t alive to defend himself, but the fact is, he didn’t defend himself while he was alive. He didn’t respond to criticisms; he dismissed them and did his best to destroy his most important critic. In any case, OceanGate doesn’t = Stockton Rush, or the four people who died with him. If his venture is defensible, the company should be able to defend him. Yet they “have no comment” apart from predictable expressions of woe and sorrow.
A person who wants to defend Rush should be able to defend the voyage itself–not the idea of voyaging, but this particular voyage, made in this particular craft, under these particular conditions. Was it a good idea to have gone on a third voyage in a carbon fiber craft without testing it on this third occasion? What was the plan for reaching the surface if Rush was incapacitated? Rush said, very cavalierly, that if anything went wrong, he’d simply abort and head for the surface. How good was the mechanism for doing so? Was there any redundancy for failure? What if everyone on board suffered the bends on the way up? Apart from text messaging, how was the craft supposed to be detected by rescuers in the worst case scenario? If OceanGate has answers to these questions, they’re not prevented by Rush’s death in giving them. But it’s doubtful they have answers to give, because it’s doubtful there are answers to give.
On the journalistic accounts, I would say that The New Yorker article is more than adequate. I can’t repeat every claim in it, but I think it gives ample evidence of Rush’s recklessness, pomposity, vindictiveness, dishonesty, and irrationality. I don’t think the article reveals a journalist who doesn’t know what he’s talking about. The article mostly quotes experts, including experts who had previously been close to Rush. Expert opinion seems to have been unanimously or semi-unanimously against Rush. Rush had no actual responses to his critics, just brazen, self-serving pretenses at being some kind of anti-safety, anti-regulatory rebel or renegade. On the substantive issues, he had nothing but evasions. And the claims he’s made have been proven wrong in the most dramatic way imaginable.
On safety generally: I haven’t read Lukianoff and Haidt, but unlike either of them, Viscusi is an expert on risk. This is the argument of his book:
Viscusi’s point is that both government and private employers have systematically undervalued life by setting its monetary value substantially lower than is warranted (in a sense of “warranted” he explains and defends). That “de-monetization” of life has incentivized careless/risky behavior with others’ lives by skewing cost-benefit estimates to the low end. Because governments and corporations know that they get lives at a discount, they throw them away for a bargain.
Viscusi has spent decades confirming and re-confirming this account. If he is right, it isn’t possible to claim that our society is overly sensitive to safety. I’d be interested to see what, if anything, Lukianoff and Haidt have in the way of a response to Viscusi’s argument, and what they have of comparable empirical sophistication. Viscusi isn’t talking about the coddling of anyone’s mind, but about the literal destruction of their bodies. If he’s right, far more people have died premature deaths than can be justified. How that claim stacks up against Lukianoff and Haidt’s argument, I don’t know.
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I fear that this result will eventually be replicated with one of Elon Musk’s specialty voyages into orbit for multimillonaires. I give Musk credit for being enterprising though. I just hope he is more careful.
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@John
I think you’re being far too charitable to Musk, and to the entire mind-set involved here. Here we are, a mere month after the Titan tragedy. So far, OceanGate has offered zero in the way of a defense of that endeavor, just mumbling and evasions. Have they been chastened by the experience? Not in the least. Here’s their next adventure: they want to colonize the atmosphere of Venus!
https://www.popularmechanics.com/space/a44735833/oceangate-founder-wants-to-send-1000-people-to-colonize-venus/
What is the rationale here? Let’s stipulate that they’re only spending private money. Still, we can ask questions about the proper use of private money. People do it all the time when poor people are accused of improvidence. If so, I’d think that rich people can with equal legitimacy be accused of vanity, frivolity, and irrationality.
Why? Why would any rational being want to undertake such a quixotic, dangerous mission at literally astronomical expense?
If you go to their website, this is their idea of an answer:
That strikes me as an obvious, egregious evasion, a textbook case of the fallacy of appeal to ignorance. By OceanGate’s reasoning, there is a good reason for going to Venus because skeptics have not addressed the question why we should not go. How does that work? Doesn’t OceanGate have a prior burden of proof to meet?
Suppose that they go, that the venture results in an unplanned-for emergency, that they call NASA–the outer space equivalent of the Coast Guard–for assistance, and lose all hands. If this is the level of their response to skeptics, and if they adopt the same attitude toward safety as that adopted by Stockton Rush, wouldn’t they deserve exactly the abuse I dished out to Rush?
The same considerations apply to Elon Musk’s venture to colonize Mars (which I’ve previously criticized at PoT). I don’t think it’s merely a matter of being careful. The idea is just all-out crazy. The basic question that needs to be asked and answered is: what is the rationale for undertaking a venture as prima facie absurd as that? He doesn’t seem to have a non-crazy answer.
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