My essay on the tragedy of the Titan went up today at The Everyman:

But what makes the Titanic a legend is less the fact of her sinking than the boast that she was ‘unsinkable’. The blasphemous (possibly apocryphal) claim that ‘God Himself could not sink this ship,’ followed by her sinking on her maiden voyage with such catastrophic loss of life, makes the ship a kind of emblem of modern hubris, and ready-made allegory for the post-Napoleonic Old World that was soon to receive a mortal blow of its own.

“Our whole civilization is indeed very like the Titanic,” said Chesterton, writing less than a month after the event. “Alike in its power and its impotence, its security and its insecurity… For there is a real connection between such catastrophes and a certain frame of mind which refuses to expect them.” He goes on to describe how a ship that contains a garage for a man’s motorcar may induce him to forget that he is on a ship; a ship that, like any other, may sink.

And it is one of his defining features that the modern man never seems to learn this. However much he delights in such tales of hubris (especially if they seem to reflect badly on his hated forefathers), he never quite gets the idea that this might apply to him as well. He will go on thinking that the point of the Titanic was that we know better now, not that such things may still happen in spite of any precautions we may take.

The result is that these catastrophes always seem to take us at unawares; this is the sort of thing that ‘should not happen’, that ‘doesn’t happen in this day and age’. For such events do the unthinkable and seem to put us on a level with those who have come before us; to suggest that we may, in fact, be subject to the same dangers, the same disasters, and thus the same restrictions as they.

Which brings us, in a roundabout way, to the Titan. I’m not in a position to say whether this submersible was adequately built for journeys under three-and-a-half tons of pressure per-square-inch; that will be for the inquiries that will surely be made. What strikes me is the very fact that someone thought it a good idea to set up a touring company for the purpose. I don’t know what I think of the morals of a profit-making enterprise to take people to visit a graveyard two miles under the ocean’s surface, but if it is to be done, then it certainly should be done only with the upmost respect for the forces being challenged. A tourism company doesn’t seem quite the thing for such an undertaking (again, meaning no reflection on the victims), nor does a submersible comprised – as I understand – of ready-made parts.

Read the rest here.