Was the loss of the Titan really a disaster, or a foreseeable incident brought about by exaggerated pride and self-confidence?
We just witnessed the destruction of the Titan submersible on a dive to view the wreck of the Titanic. It was quickly dubbed a disaster, and rapt media attention was paid to the hunt for the Titan, perhaps in expectation of another “edge-of-the-seat” rescue attempt. But the whole episode raises some thorny questions.
My colleague Dr. Charuka Maheswaran alerted me to Barack Obama’s comments on exactly this point. As it happened, the former U.S. president was in Greece last week, speaking at a conference. The Huffington Post reported that he drew attention to the loss of the Titan, but added, tellingly: “the fact that that’s got so much more attention than 700 people who sank, that’s an untenable situation.”
The second question is: Was this an unforeseeable and surprising disaster, or merely an accident waiting to happen? Well, it has since been revealed that Stockton Rush, the creator of the Titan, took a pretty cavalier attitude to safety. Standards and regulations, he implied, are for wimps. They get in the way of clever people such as himself who are innovative and entrepreneurial.
The Ancient Greeks called attitudes such as those of Rush “hubris” — exaggerated pride or self-confidence. As the Merriam-Webster Dictionary notes, the Greeks “considered hubris a dangerous character flaw capable of provoking the wrath of the gods. In classical Greek tragedy, hubris was often a fatal shortcoming that brought about the fall of the tragic hero.”
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