Has anyone noticed how popular the story of the Titanic has become, recently? Last month, CBS aired a brand-new, highly-touted movie about the "unsinkable" luxury ship which struck an iceberg on her maiden voyage 85 years ago and shocked the world by sinking and taking with her over 1500 lives. A few weeks ago, AMC and A&E ran other movies and documentaries about the disaster, there have been several novels about the ship on the New York Times Best-seller list recently, and I’m told a Broadway play based on the catastrophe is opening soon. On the campus where I work, the Seminole Community College Library has on display a model of the ill-fated ship. A few months ago, the news was filled with articles about an unsuccessful attempt to raise the Titanic and tow her with chains into New York harbor, 85 years overdue. And just today, in the mail, I received an unsolicited nostalgia newspaper (which runs articles on historical events such as Napoleon’s love affairs and Sitting Bull’s predictions) and the lead story was an account of the sinking of the Titanic.
What’s going on? Why is this 85-year-old bit of history suddenly so interesting to contemporary society? In fact, I must confess that I myself have always been compelled by this story of ideological and personal tragedy ever since I first read Walter Lord’s A Night to Remember when I was ten years old. Why so fascinated? What does the Titanic tell us about the content of our character?
Well, for one thing, it’s a story filled with remarkable tales of heroism and tragedy. Some of the famous moments are heart-wrenching: some individuals giving up their seats in the lifeboats that others might live, the husbands watching their wives being lowered in the boat, knowing full-well they may never see them again, the crewmen who stayed until the last moments such as the stokers in the boiler-room, the wireless operators, the band playing faithfully. It’s a story of humans being put to the test in their last moments. What would you do if you found yourself on a sinking ship and only a third would live? Would you fight for it or be a martyr? "Millionaire playboy" Benjamin Guggenheim and his valet changed into their formal tuxedos to "meet death like gentlemen," while another man dressed up as a woman so he could get into a lifeboat when it was "women and children first." At the time, there were "proper" ways to behave, even in desperate hours; so one was a hero and one a coward. But how do we judge these people today, by our standards, if we have standards? In a post-feminist society, would anyone dare make a rule such as "women and children first"? And who among us today knows that they would not have presented a false image of themselves to save their lives? And is that really such a crime?
Other crimes were committed. There are so many "if onlys" that might have averted the catastrophe. If only there were enough boats, if only they had heeded the numerous ice warnings, if only the lookouts had binoculars, if only they had hit the iceberg head on rather than sideways, if only the Californian had gotten the message--the list goes on for pages.
The Titanic is also a story of class. Segregating passengers into three distinct social classes seems such a crime by today’s standards. There was such a fantastic contrast of opulence and poverty on that ship; that seems unjust. And the fact that so few of the third-class passengers survived speaks to the immorality of treating some people as sub-human. But yet even today we still have class distinctions. It’s not just reserved for countries like India or South Africa. Racial segregation remained legal in this country until the 1960s, and even now there is still de-facto segregation. And still in travel--on planes and trains--there’s first class and non-first-class. What do all these social conditions tell us about our society then and now?
But perhaps the most important significance the Titanic’s story is that it began in a different age than the one in which it ended. It started in an age of wonder. An age of faith. An age, at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th Century, which believed in the goodness of progress, the growth of industry, the constant improvement of the world. Everyone aboard the Titanic, from the richest members of society who profited from the sweat of laborers, to the humblest of immigrants in third-class, seeking a new and improved life in America, all firmly believed that the world was only getting better. Inventions from the dynamo to the "flyer" to electric lights and even the first automobiles seemed to reinforce this faith in technology. And by the end of the first decade of the infant century, humankind had produced a ship that was "unsinkable." There was the dangerously accepted belief that we could best God and triumph over nature herself.
Mark Twian had christened this era the "Gilded Age;" perhaps that’s a damned good description, for the word "gilded" means covered by gold, implying that underneath the gold is something entirely different. And the Titanic, which was designed to travel only on the surface, seemed the perfect metaphor. It’s plunge into the depths shocked the world out of its complacency and proved the aphorism that all that glitters is not gold. The truth about ourselves came out: that we were arrogant, defiant, and too self-confidant for our own good.
In many ways, it can be said that the Titanic was the bridge between the 19th and 20th Centuries, for it ushered in an era marked by revolution, Holocaust, Hiroshima. Only two years after the Titanic sank, a world war which would span two continents would be fought and no one would know why. The 20th Century would be described by artists whose works were fragmented, disjointed, and confusing. Our current world is one in which values are turned upside down, where "Ethnic Cleansing" is something we yawn at--and who can blame us in a world where the atom can be split, where we have so much information constantly being thrown at us, over television and the internet. The culture of the 20th Century has progressed from "Modernists" like Escher and Picasso to MTV videos where the typical image lasts for less than half a second. In our consumer society, some of us long for the permanence the Titanic was supposed to represent; yet having only four days for the public to appreciate all her majesty, the Titanic ironically became the largest consumable item.
The sinking of the Titanic changed everything. When those 1500 people drowned in the North Atlantic due to our own oversights, we realized our misplaced faith. The faith in ourselves, in technology, in our world, went down with that gigantic ship. As Second Officer Lightroller says (at the end of the movie version of "A Night to Remember"), "This time we were so sure. Now I’ll never be sure of anything ever again."
That’s what the Titanic did to our thinking in this century. When the news hit, it shocked and stunned the world and shattered the faith of an age. How infrequently are we "shocked and stunned" by news today? We’ve accepted tragedies as normal; they may disappoint and sadden us, even anger us, but they rarely surprise us. As for me, only once do I recall being so shocked by a news story in my lifetime that it changed my perspective of the world. That was the Challenger explosion in 1986. I was at the impressionable age of 18, and during my naïve childhood I had believed in the infallibility of technology which would take our world shining into the next decade, and the continual success of the space program reinforced that. But that cold January day when I watched a fireball in the sky consume my faith--a teacher and six of the "best and the brightest" astronauts killed by oversight, overconfidence, over-greed--I must have felt the way those 705 people in Titanic’s lifeboats did as they witnessed "man’s monument to civilization, technology, and progress disappear beneath the waves," as one survivor described.
Now we no longer have faith in our abilities, or anything for that matter. There is nothing stable, nothing certain, nothing impossible. Keats’ constant urn is a relic from another age. "God Himself could not sink this ship," they said, and then it sank. In the late 20th Century, we don’t even believe in the present, let alone the future. The only kind of faith that exists now is reactionary. Because we cannot put faith in ourselves, some are drawn to extremes as fundamentalists embrace a blind faith in God and refuse to question it (perhaps because they know if they do question it, they’d have to let go of the only thing that keeps them going). Yet that kind of faith is irrelevant as I and others of my generation struggle desperately to find supporting jobs in a depressed economy, to make our mark in a society suffering from a barrage of information pollution.
I think that may be why the story of the Titanic, 85 years old though it may be, is one that is told over and over again. Not just merely as a warning not to put too much faith in technology, to caution us about our own fallibility, but it tells us who we are today: mature enough to recognize our own immaturity.
Or are we? As new technologies change weekly, and we again start putting too much faith in computers and the internet, in air-bags and O-ring joints, perhaps we need to be reminded of Titanic’s lesson. Will we heed it, or will we plunge head-first into the 21st century, psychologically unprepared for the challenges which await us?