Overview:
A recently shipwrecked migrant vessel at Pylos and a lost submersible near wreckage from the Titanic create an easy contrast for reflecting on injustice. Are there any dangers in pitting sea crises against one another?
On June 13, a fishing boat overladen with smuggled migrants was detected by the Greek Coast Guard near Pylos, in the Ionian region of the Mediterranean Sea. By June 14, the ship had capsized and sunk, with 104 migrants rescued, 78 found dead, and hundreds more missing and presumed dead.
The Coast Guard maintains that the ship was still in motion, having covered 30 nautical miles between detection and sinking, when it capsized. But on Sunday, a BBC report drawing from MarineTraffic data stated that the ship had been stationary for at least seven hours before its collapse. This accords with reports from Syrian migrants, who claim that the Coast Guard actively attempted to tow the vessel, causing its collapse.
Migration researchers note that this is a familiar charge for the Greek naval authority. The UNHCR has called for a special investigation.
Meanwhile, a search-and-rescue operation is underway for a commercial submersible with five occupants, who paid $250,000US apiece for an excursion to the wreckage of the RMS Titanic, and who went missing on Sunday. With around four days of emergency capacity at most, Canadian and US coast guards have little time left to locate the sub at nearly 13,000 feet deep, around 900 miles east of Cape Cod (or 435 miles from St. John’s, Newfoundland). Hamish Harding, a 58-year-old billionaire, is among those on the OceanGate-operated vessel, along with OceanGate’s CEO, Stockton Rush. So too are Shahzada and 19-year-old Suleman Dawood, British citizens from one of Pakistan’s wealthiest families, and Paul-Henry Nargeolet, a 77-year-old former French Navy diver.
According to David Pogue, a CBS correspondent who partook in an earlier tour, the passengers would have had to have signed a waiver acknowledging the risk of death three times on the first page, because “this experimental submersible vessel has not been approved or certified by any regulatory body, and could result in physical injury, disability, emotional trauma, or death.”
Unsurprisingly, these events have made for easy contrasts online. On the one hand, we have the death of many people whose names we might never know: human beings driven by war, persecution, and economic precarity from their homes; exploited by smugglers; and ultimately subject to the choices of Greek authorities, for better and for worse. On the other hand, we have humans whose lives of relative ease provided them opportunities to spend more money than most will ever see in a lifetime on a pleasure ride, and who are now at risk of dying from it.
But while humans are pattern-seeking by nature, when two events in close proximity offer some parallels, it can be easy to take the wrong lesson from the contrast.
What if anything do we gain from thinking about these sea crises together?
The value of comparing these events
The proximity in time of these two events is just a coincidence. But the frequency with which tragedy now strikes migrants desperate to reach European shores all but guarantees that there would have been some recent hardship on the Greek coast to contrast with this latest sensation of a race against time to save affluent people who were at sea by choice.
Yet as ever, reality also tends to outdo fiction by offering on-the-nose details no novelist could get away with: like the fact that this submersible was exploring the Titanic in the first place. What better place to stage a pat story of human hubris than the site where over 1,500 people, most from lower classes, died in 1912 because of the overconfidence of the rich sending a ship to sea without sufficient lifeboats?
When such easy narrative contrasts emerge in our news cycles, we have a brief window in which to push for greater political action—in this case against a global economy in which a few are able to pursue elaborate and costly passions while others die for want of the bare necessities.
Another such example arose earlier in the pandemic when Amazon’s profit soared and Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin launched its first commercial human flight while most were still living in lockdown and millions were dying of COVID-19.
But one needn’t be among the world’s wealthiest for outrage to emerge around stories about those who take risks to survive and those who take risks for pleasure. A few weeks ago, a mountaineer on Mount Everest allegedly snubbed the sherpa who carried him for hours to safety, sparking renewed criticism of the poor treatment by tourists of the famous climbing site, and of the Tibetan, Nepali, and Malaysian sherpas who make it possible for foreign adventurers to achieve their dreams upon it.
Limitations when comparing such events
But while contrasting news events is inevitable, we still need to watch the rhetoric that all-too-easy comparisons can yield. Glib social media comments about the perks of a billionaire dying (as one might, if the submersible isn’t recovered safely and soon) are predictable in our frustrated times. They’re also not particularly useful.
Neither is a comparison between such sea crises that doesn’t offer a coherent path for political action. Where exactly is the policy through-line that connects the culture of abundance behind OceanGate missions to an overburdened Greek state that lacks the resources and political capacity to mitigate local xenophobic response to the many desperate refugees arriving on European shores?
On a superficial level, these two events at sea speak to the vastly different worlds in which human beings live: some getting to pursue and even die for their dreams and passions; some driven by extreme life circumstances into cruel, anonymous deaths. But if our only reaction to this contrast is to dismiss one human life’s value in favor of another’s, or to condemn the recklessness of an affluent outing while desperate people are driven to unsafe crossings, the greater point has been lost.
The Mediterranean migrant crisis, which is fueled by dictatorial civil wars, ethnic persecution, dead-end economies, forced conscription under threat of death, and climate-change-informed resource conflicts, is not slowing any time soon. Death rates in the crossing also spiked this year to levels not seen since 2017, due in part to rigid border policies and delayed rescue operations.
Could individuals of outsized wealth be volunteering more of their time and resources to address urgent problems instead of joyriding? Yes, absolutely. But the fault ultimately lies with public financing systems so deeply compromised that it will take years to refocus state funding models to better address rising humanitarian needs.
Right now, people are dying in the water.
If we want a world of equal dignity, recognizing this fact as terrible, irrespective of the wealth bracket of the people dying, is where we start to push for change.