On its journey to visit the wreck of the Titanic, the Titan submersible
lost contact
with the surface on Sunday. It had enough breathable air to last until
sometime on Thursday
. The hull may have cratered in on itself under ocean pressure, killing the five passengers instantly. Or they may have stayed alive for days, miles below the ocean surface in a 22-foot-long capsule, waiting for their oxygen to drain away.
It’s not unusual for the public’s attention to fix on a nail-biting disaster scenario for the span of a news cycle or two — as it did in 2010, when three men were trapped in a Chilean mine shaft for 69 days. What’s remarkable about this episode, though, is that the crowd of online spectators seems to contain a significant
cheering section
. The jeers arising from this peanut gallery range from the
lurid
to the positively
sadistic
: “Actually, it’s funny when rich people die in a homemade submarine.”
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Apparently, the crimes for which these thrill-seekers
deserve
indifference, mockery, or death include
being
white
and
very rich
,
not
being
refugees
, and
spending their money
on a
risky joyride
rather than a worthy charitable cause. Participation in the expedition cost a quarter of a million dollars — a lot of cash to throw around, although not so much that you couldn’t also donate to charity if you were uber-rich.
And the people who boarded that submarine were uber-rich — guilty as charged. Obviously, they also had a taste for daring and extreme ventures — guilty there, too. Hamish Harding, the billionaire who has drawn the most coverage, once led a team of aviators to set the world record for the fastest flight around the Earth as a tribute to the Apollo 11 moon landing on its 50th anniversary.
Not everyone on board was white; the 48-year-old Pakistani-British businessman Shahzada Dawood was there with his son Suleman, aged 19. But of course, their wealth and privilege make them “white-adjacent.” They are beneficiaries of some supremacy or other, no doubt, and some new tabulation of the ever-changing social scorecard can surely be devised to show that they, too, got theirs. Guilty, guilty, guilty.
Let it be conceded that any extreme tourist has an obligation to know what he is getting into. These passengers understood what they were taking on — not that anyone ever really expects the dreaded nightmare scenario to materialize. Not that it is any less horrifying for having been an acknowledged possibility. All the same, they did know it might happen.
But something in the spite and relish that greeted their disappearance seems uniquely cruel, emblematic of a certain ugly spirit in the air. It is the spirit of self-satisfied resentment, the hatred of anything that rises too far above the horizon. Not just the victims’ wealth but their use of it to test the edges of what can be done, their apparent hunger for exhilaration and endeavor, has called forth a ghastly delight in their predicament. The rich are not supposed to enjoy being rich; they are supposed to pour out their copious lucre in a lifelong sin-offering for the crime of making us feel inferior. They are supposed to apologize. They are supposed to cringe.
This is the same sentiment that
prompts scorn
for Elon Musk when one of his SpaceX rockets explodes, as if trying and failing to send men to space is more contemptible than never trying at all. That is how you make sure no one ever sends a man to space again.
Envy is among the most natural human impulses — and the most vile. Making it into the operating principle of your politics is an excellent way to trap yourself and anyone who listens to you in a small and seething life of arrogant mediocrity. It’s not an act of heroism to risk your life in a luxury adventure. But it’s not a sin, either, and it expresses a certain daring aspiration that civilizations must encourage in their best men if they want to excel. Cultures that honor greatness inspire more of it. Those that cackle eagerly at failure get more of that, too.
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Spencer Klavan is an associate editor of the Claremont Review of Books and host of the Young Heretics podcast. His book,
How to Save the West
, is available now.
