Post by Rabbi Neil on Jun 23, 2023 21:46:01 GMT
There’s an old internet meme that every one of the corpses on Everest was once a highly motivated person. In other words, you’ll likely live a longer and happier life if you don’t engage in high-risk activities. So far this year, around 600 people have climbed Everest – around 350 Sherpas supporting 250 clients. Of those 600 people, 17 died … nearly 3% of the people who set out to climb Everest. In total, around 300 people have died on Everest ever since Norgay and Hillary first reached its summit in 1953. None of them had to die. None of them needed to climb Everest, they just wanted to. Each client paid $50,000 for the opportunity to risk not only their lives but the lives of the Sherpas who guard their sacred mountain. And when people die on Everest, most are never recovered. Their corpses, of which there are around 200 still on the mountain, become landmarks for climbers.
So, why do people take such life-threatening risks? Glenn Sparks of Purdue University explains that thrill seekers take part in such dangerous journeys because of the gratification they feel from mastering something that is so frightening. Overcoming the risk creates more of a sense of achievement. Frank Farley, a professor at Temple University in Philadelphia and former president of the American Psychological Association. says that thrill seekers “believe they control their fate.” Keith Johnsgard, a clinical psychologist and author, says that such thrill-seeking has genetic roots and appears to be caused by dopamine dysregulation. He seems to imply that it gets to the point that for such people, an activity needs to be life-threatening to be gratifying. Joe Arvai, a professor, thrill seeker and director of the Erb Institute for Global Sustainable Enterprise at the University of Michigan, says that the thrill-seeking urge is what is known as a motivational bias and that “many people [who voluntarily engage in dangerous activities] are motivated to think of themselves as ‘special’ – talented, skilled, and so on.” He says “that this is a motivational bias because we are motivated to think this way because “special” people tend to be highly valued in society.” And then I believe that he adds something crucial when he says that “the reality is, sadly, most of us aren’t really that special.”
So, why do so many people every year go on life-threatening journeys? There are those who do so in order to push the boundaries of humanity – explorers who are the first to go somewhere who redefine the parameters of human existence. Then there are more who do so to get some kind of thrill or validation. Mostly, though, there are those who do so in order to survive. There is a clear difference between those who engage in exploration and thrill-seeking, and those who risk their lives to survive, and that difference is privilege. In the last two weeks, we have witnessed two different life-threatening journeys by water. The first is most likely the worst disaster in the Mediterranean, with over 300 lives lost, people fleeing mostly from Pakistan, which is in the middle of a terrible economic crisis. The second was the multi-million dollar rescue attempt of a tiny group of billionaires hoping to see the wreck of the Titanic in an unnecessarily and deliberately dangerous submersible.
Rescue attempt stories make for exciting news. Remember the twelve young Thai children and their coach who were trapped for 17 days by rising waters in the Tham Luang cave in 2018. Remember the thirty-three Chilean and Bolivian miners trapped for 69 days after their mine collapsed in 2010. Remember the 118 Russian sailors trapped in the Kursk submarine in 2000. In all of these, regardless of the final outcome, every time global attention starts to wane, a new element of hopeful drama is always added… maybe there was a knocking sound, a new piece of equipment is on the way… stay tuned, folks. We focus on the drama, and not on what caused it… until this week in particular, when the social media response to the Oceangate submersible was brutal. This was not a careless miscalculation of inexperience as in the Thai cave. This was not a workplace accident as in Chile. This was not a military accident as in the Kursk submarine. This was something else.
Despite James Cameron’s movie, the story of the Titanic is not a romantic one. When the ship went down in 1912, every single staff member died. Nearly 40% of the first-class passengers died, nearly 60% of the second-class passengers died, and 76% of the third-class passengers died. When the Titanic sank, it was the rich who had far, far better chances of survival. In his memoir of the Titanic sinking, published in 1934, Second Officer Charles Herbert Lightoller's recounts: “Arriving alongside the emergency boat, someone spoke out of the darkness, and said, “There are men in that boat.” I jumped in, and regret to say that there actually were - but they weren’t British, nor of the English-speaking race. I won’t even attribute any nationality to them, beyond saying that they come under the broad category known to sailors as “Dagoes.” They hopped out mighty quickly, and I encouraged them verbally, also by vigorously flourishing my revolver. They certainly thought they were between the devil and the deep sea in more senses than one, and I had the satisfaction of seeing them tumbling head over heels on to the deck, preferring the uncertain safety of the deck, to the cold lead, which I suppose they fully imagined would follow their disobedience—so much for imagination—the revolver was not even loaded!” The officer seemingly delights in the irony of removing the dark-skinned men from the lifeboat with an empty revolver only to leave them to an icy death not long afterwards. That’s the reality of the Titanic. It's a physical reminder of the reality of class war and those who go to gawp at it at the bottom of the ocean merely spend insane amounts of money visiting a grave of mostly poor people instead of using their money to help poor people who are alive and drowning today. Visiting the Titanic does literally nothing to advance humanity, just like being the six thousandth person to climb Everest. All it does is serve ego but whereas Everest is at least a natural wonder, visiting the Titanic is thrill-seeking ghoulish classist tourism. If you want to visit a place where countless people died, visit the World Trade Center site, or Pearl Harbor, or Auschwitz-Birkenau, do it safely, and let the experience change you, humble you, and yearn to fight for a better world. Is it possible that this is what these people were doing? It’s possible, but psychological research suggests that it’s unlikely, and that instead they were either looking for a thrill or were looking to feel special and different from the rest of us.
When you walk around the Palace of Versailles, with its insane opulence while the masses suffered, it’s easy to see why the French peasantry rose up in revolution. As the people starved from lack of bread, one princess famously said, "Qu'ils mangent de la brioche," often translated as “let them eat cake.” In other words, it’s not our job to help the poor, let them just be more resourceful to navigate their poverty better. If they don’t have bread, let them eat cake. If it’s not good in their country, let them move elsewhere. If they’re drowning at sea, let them travel differently. Let us put our society’s resources on trying to rescue the rich from voyages of fancy instead of protecting the world’s poor who are constantly drowning. Nadine Kheshen, a Lebanese human rights lawyer and researcher, this week said that the scale of attention and resources devoted to the submersible search in comparison to what was expended for the Greek boat tragedy “sends a message… that our lives are cheap comparatively.” The difference in how they died is fascinating, too. Those in the Oceangate submersible died in around 1 millisecond, faster than anyone can register a thought and a hundred times faster than the blink of an eye. They literally had no awareness of what happened, so enormous were the forces that acted upon them. By contrast, the migrants in the Mediterranean died in a terrifying way, slowly and well aware of what was happening to them. It seems that the rich can not only afford to live well, but they can even afford to die well, even when their hubris causes their own deaths.
Online, the loss of the Titan submersible this week brought out some concern, but also, more than every before, brought out an outpouring of comedy memes. People all across the internet mocked the people in the submersible for their stupidity, for their arrogance, for breaking safety regulations to save money, for their waste of money. In response, someone this week wrote online that we should be more empathic about it because “those people are also like us – science lovers, explorers and dreamers.” But this wasn’t a scientific expedition – there were no measuring instruments on board. It wasn’t exploring – which is the act of investigating unknown places – after all, many people have visited the Titanic wreck since it was found in 1985. They weren’t scientists or explorers, they were death tourists. So, when this person wrote that those people were like us, I originally disagreed. I said that they were nothing of the sort like us. If we had that much money, we would never waste it so stupidly. We would use it for better causes. A few days later, I’m not sure I actually believe that, though.
I now suspect that the reason that there was so much vitriol and humor online towards the people in the Titan submersible was not jealousy as some people suggested, but because they are the extreme version of us. They are our hidden values spoken out loud. We say that if we had money, we would use it wiser, that we would protect those who keep drowning by sea. The truth is, though, that back in 2015, eight years ago, I gave a sermon about Alan Kurdi, the two-year old boy whose dead body on the beach haunted all of us who saw it. Since that sermon, at least 17,000 migrants have drowned in the Mediterranean, but we have done literally nothing to help any of them. The way that we look at the megarich is the way the rest of the world looks at us. It turns that we’re much more like Second Officer Lightoller than we want to admit - so long as it’s the “Dagoes” who are drowning and not us, we don’t change our society. Why would we? We’re the first-class passengers on the Titanic, we’re the decadent ones with homes and readily available food and cars and healthcare and education and luxuries the likes of which the rest of the world could not even hope for. We mock the plight of the megarich to distance ourselves from them because if we didn’t, we would have to admit a terrible truth – that we’re comfortable enough to not have to care about migrant drownings. So, we convince ourselves that we don’t help because they’re too far away for our help to be effective, when the reality is that we don’t go and help because we don’t want to. We say that we don’t have the money to affect change, but then we spend our wealth on things that fill our homes instead of saving lives or on vacations to insanely expensive amusement parks and tourist destinations. We may not be thrill-seekers, we may not even be reckless, but we are contemptuous of the global poor and their plight. We shut ourselves off from their pain until they wash up on our beaches and we’re forced to look at their corpses. We thrive on dramatic accounts of rich people being rescued rather than on depressing accounts of poor people drowning not just because they’re exciting but because we hope that if God forbid the time ever came, we would be rescued just like the rich. They would bring out the boats for us.
The exclusivity of Everest is starting to wane. The megarich need a new distraction, a new way of being exclusive, a new way of feeling special and different from the rest of the world. They’re not going to visit the wrecks of the migrants in the Mediterranean because that would remind them of how much they ignore the world’s poor and only help when they can get a tax write-off or some publicity from doing so. I think that Talmud helps here. In Tractate Eruvin (65a), Rabbi Ilai says that a person’s character is discerned in three ways – b’koso, b’kiso uv’ka’aso – by his cup, his wallet, and his anger. In other words, you learn most about a person by how they behave when they’re drunk, by how they spend their money, and by how they behave when they’re angry. It’s the second of those who is most important here. We judge the megarich, and we ourselves are judged by the rest of the world, by how we spend our money individually and as a society.
So, the deaths of those in the Mediterranean looking for a better life, and the deaths of the megarich tourists leave us with a choice. We who are among the richest people on earth, without being the very richest, we can decide how we spend our money, on what kind of society we are going to create. Will it be a society that lets the poor literally drown or will it be a society that protects them? Will it be a society where the buzz from being special means not spending on follies but on giving more money to good causes than others can possibly afford? Will it be a society in which we pretend that we are nothing like the superrich, or will it be a society in which we admit how much we waste and how much suffering is brought upon others to protect our way of life? Will ours be a society in which we are sad for a few days when the global poor drown, or will it be a society in which we fight to protect countless others from drowning in the future? Will it be a society of decadence or of care? I suspect the next boatload of dead migrants will give the answer for us.
When the seas have lifted up their voice, their pounding waves (Ps. 93:3), let their voice be one not of condemnation of our way of life, but one that thunders that we care. Only God can still the surging sea when its waves mount up (Ps. 89:9), but we can choose – choose to hide quietly under the depths from the world’s troubles or choose to rescue and protect those threatened by the waves. We can say to those desperately crossing treacherous waters the same words as God says to us in the Book of Isaiah (43:2) – “When you cross over the deep waters, I will be with you.” Instead of casting the world’s most desperate people to drown in the depths, let us instead cast only our sins into the depths of the sea (Micah 7:19). Instead of crying out to God in despair, let everyone on the seas be able to sing God’s praises (Ps. 69:34). And so, let us, those who have the power and the awareness to change, let us be the ones who learn from this week and who actively work to bring about that society for all those who cross the dangerous sea in search of a life like ours. And let us say, Amen.
So, why do people take such life-threatening risks? Glenn Sparks of Purdue University explains that thrill seekers take part in such dangerous journeys because of the gratification they feel from mastering something that is so frightening. Overcoming the risk creates more of a sense of achievement. Frank Farley, a professor at Temple University in Philadelphia and former president of the American Psychological Association. says that thrill seekers “believe they control their fate.” Keith Johnsgard, a clinical psychologist and author, says that such thrill-seeking has genetic roots and appears to be caused by dopamine dysregulation. He seems to imply that it gets to the point that for such people, an activity needs to be life-threatening to be gratifying. Joe Arvai, a professor, thrill seeker and director of the Erb Institute for Global Sustainable Enterprise at the University of Michigan, says that the thrill-seeking urge is what is known as a motivational bias and that “many people [who voluntarily engage in dangerous activities] are motivated to think of themselves as ‘special’ – talented, skilled, and so on.” He says “that this is a motivational bias because we are motivated to think this way because “special” people tend to be highly valued in society.” And then I believe that he adds something crucial when he says that “the reality is, sadly, most of us aren’t really that special.”
So, why do so many people every year go on life-threatening journeys? There are those who do so in order to push the boundaries of humanity – explorers who are the first to go somewhere who redefine the parameters of human existence. Then there are more who do so to get some kind of thrill or validation. Mostly, though, there are those who do so in order to survive. There is a clear difference between those who engage in exploration and thrill-seeking, and those who risk their lives to survive, and that difference is privilege. In the last two weeks, we have witnessed two different life-threatening journeys by water. The first is most likely the worst disaster in the Mediterranean, with over 300 lives lost, people fleeing mostly from Pakistan, which is in the middle of a terrible economic crisis. The second was the multi-million dollar rescue attempt of a tiny group of billionaires hoping to see the wreck of the Titanic in an unnecessarily and deliberately dangerous submersible.
Rescue attempt stories make for exciting news. Remember the twelve young Thai children and their coach who were trapped for 17 days by rising waters in the Tham Luang cave in 2018. Remember the thirty-three Chilean and Bolivian miners trapped for 69 days after their mine collapsed in 2010. Remember the 118 Russian sailors trapped in the Kursk submarine in 2000. In all of these, regardless of the final outcome, every time global attention starts to wane, a new element of hopeful drama is always added… maybe there was a knocking sound, a new piece of equipment is on the way… stay tuned, folks. We focus on the drama, and not on what caused it… until this week in particular, when the social media response to the Oceangate submersible was brutal. This was not a careless miscalculation of inexperience as in the Thai cave. This was not a workplace accident as in Chile. This was not a military accident as in the Kursk submarine. This was something else.
Despite James Cameron’s movie, the story of the Titanic is not a romantic one. When the ship went down in 1912, every single staff member died. Nearly 40% of the first-class passengers died, nearly 60% of the second-class passengers died, and 76% of the third-class passengers died. When the Titanic sank, it was the rich who had far, far better chances of survival. In his memoir of the Titanic sinking, published in 1934, Second Officer Charles Herbert Lightoller's recounts: “Arriving alongside the emergency boat, someone spoke out of the darkness, and said, “There are men in that boat.” I jumped in, and regret to say that there actually were - but they weren’t British, nor of the English-speaking race. I won’t even attribute any nationality to them, beyond saying that they come under the broad category known to sailors as “Dagoes.” They hopped out mighty quickly, and I encouraged them verbally, also by vigorously flourishing my revolver. They certainly thought they were between the devil and the deep sea in more senses than one, and I had the satisfaction of seeing them tumbling head over heels on to the deck, preferring the uncertain safety of the deck, to the cold lead, which I suppose they fully imagined would follow their disobedience—so much for imagination—the revolver was not even loaded!” The officer seemingly delights in the irony of removing the dark-skinned men from the lifeboat with an empty revolver only to leave them to an icy death not long afterwards. That’s the reality of the Titanic. It's a physical reminder of the reality of class war and those who go to gawp at it at the bottom of the ocean merely spend insane amounts of money visiting a grave of mostly poor people instead of using their money to help poor people who are alive and drowning today. Visiting the Titanic does literally nothing to advance humanity, just like being the six thousandth person to climb Everest. All it does is serve ego but whereas Everest is at least a natural wonder, visiting the Titanic is thrill-seeking ghoulish classist tourism. If you want to visit a place where countless people died, visit the World Trade Center site, or Pearl Harbor, or Auschwitz-Birkenau, do it safely, and let the experience change you, humble you, and yearn to fight for a better world. Is it possible that this is what these people were doing? It’s possible, but psychological research suggests that it’s unlikely, and that instead they were either looking for a thrill or were looking to feel special and different from the rest of us.
When you walk around the Palace of Versailles, with its insane opulence while the masses suffered, it’s easy to see why the French peasantry rose up in revolution. As the people starved from lack of bread, one princess famously said, "Qu'ils mangent de la brioche," often translated as “let them eat cake.” In other words, it’s not our job to help the poor, let them just be more resourceful to navigate their poverty better. If they don’t have bread, let them eat cake. If it’s not good in their country, let them move elsewhere. If they’re drowning at sea, let them travel differently. Let us put our society’s resources on trying to rescue the rich from voyages of fancy instead of protecting the world’s poor who are constantly drowning. Nadine Kheshen, a Lebanese human rights lawyer and researcher, this week said that the scale of attention and resources devoted to the submersible search in comparison to what was expended for the Greek boat tragedy “sends a message… that our lives are cheap comparatively.” The difference in how they died is fascinating, too. Those in the Oceangate submersible died in around 1 millisecond, faster than anyone can register a thought and a hundred times faster than the blink of an eye. They literally had no awareness of what happened, so enormous were the forces that acted upon them. By contrast, the migrants in the Mediterranean died in a terrifying way, slowly and well aware of what was happening to them. It seems that the rich can not only afford to live well, but they can even afford to die well, even when their hubris causes their own deaths.
Online, the loss of the Titan submersible this week brought out some concern, but also, more than every before, brought out an outpouring of comedy memes. People all across the internet mocked the people in the submersible for their stupidity, for their arrogance, for breaking safety regulations to save money, for their waste of money. In response, someone this week wrote online that we should be more empathic about it because “those people are also like us – science lovers, explorers and dreamers.” But this wasn’t a scientific expedition – there were no measuring instruments on board. It wasn’t exploring – which is the act of investigating unknown places – after all, many people have visited the Titanic wreck since it was found in 1985. They weren’t scientists or explorers, they were death tourists. So, when this person wrote that those people were like us, I originally disagreed. I said that they were nothing of the sort like us. If we had that much money, we would never waste it so stupidly. We would use it for better causes. A few days later, I’m not sure I actually believe that, though.
I now suspect that the reason that there was so much vitriol and humor online towards the people in the Titan submersible was not jealousy as some people suggested, but because they are the extreme version of us. They are our hidden values spoken out loud. We say that if we had money, we would use it wiser, that we would protect those who keep drowning by sea. The truth is, though, that back in 2015, eight years ago, I gave a sermon about Alan Kurdi, the two-year old boy whose dead body on the beach haunted all of us who saw it. Since that sermon, at least 17,000 migrants have drowned in the Mediterranean, but we have done literally nothing to help any of them. The way that we look at the megarich is the way the rest of the world looks at us. It turns that we’re much more like Second Officer Lightoller than we want to admit - so long as it’s the “Dagoes” who are drowning and not us, we don’t change our society. Why would we? We’re the first-class passengers on the Titanic, we’re the decadent ones with homes and readily available food and cars and healthcare and education and luxuries the likes of which the rest of the world could not even hope for. We mock the plight of the megarich to distance ourselves from them because if we didn’t, we would have to admit a terrible truth – that we’re comfortable enough to not have to care about migrant drownings. So, we convince ourselves that we don’t help because they’re too far away for our help to be effective, when the reality is that we don’t go and help because we don’t want to. We say that we don’t have the money to affect change, but then we spend our wealth on things that fill our homes instead of saving lives or on vacations to insanely expensive amusement parks and tourist destinations. We may not be thrill-seekers, we may not even be reckless, but we are contemptuous of the global poor and their plight. We shut ourselves off from their pain until they wash up on our beaches and we’re forced to look at their corpses. We thrive on dramatic accounts of rich people being rescued rather than on depressing accounts of poor people drowning not just because they’re exciting but because we hope that if God forbid the time ever came, we would be rescued just like the rich. They would bring out the boats for us.
The exclusivity of Everest is starting to wane. The megarich need a new distraction, a new way of being exclusive, a new way of feeling special and different from the rest of the world. They’re not going to visit the wrecks of the migrants in the Mediterranean because that would remind them of how much they ignore the world’s poor and only help when they can get a tax write-off or some publicity from doing so. I think that Talmud helps here. In Tractate Eruvin (65a), Rabbi Ilai says that a person’s character is discerned in three ways – b’koso, b’kiso uv’ka’aso – by his cup, his wallet, and his anger. In other words, you learn most about a person by how they behave when they’re drunk, by how they spend their money, and by how they behave when they’re angry. It’s the second of those who is most important here. We judge the megarich, and we ourselves are judged by the rest of the world, by how we spend our money individually and as a society.
So, the deaths of those in the Mediterranean looking for a better life, and the deaths of the megarich tourists leave us with a choice. We who are among the richest people on earth, without being the very richest, we can decide how we spend our money, on what kind of society we are going to create. Will it be a society that lets the poor literally drown or will it be a society that protects them? Will it be a society where the buzz from being special means not spending on follies but on giving more money to good causes than others can possibly afford? Will it be a society in which we pretend that we are nothing like the superrich, or will it be a society in which we admit how much we waste and how much suffering is brought upon others to protect our way of life? Will ours be a society in which we are sad for a few days when the global poor drown, or will it be a society in which we fight to protect countless others from drowning in the future? Will it be a society of decadence or of care? I suspect the next boatload of dead migrants will give the answer for us.
When the seas have lifted up their voice, their pounding waves (Ps. 93:3), let their voice be one not of condemnation of our way of life, but one that thunders that we care. Only God can still the surging sea when its waves mount up (Ps. 89:9), but we can choose – choose to hide quietly under the depths from the world’s troubles or choose to rescue and protect those threatened by the waves. We can say to those desperately crossing treacherous waters the same words as God says to us in the Book of Isaiah (43:2) – “When you cross over the deep waters, I will be with you.” Instead of casting the world’s most desperate people to drown in the depths, let us instead cast only our sins into the depths of the sea (Micah 7:19). Instead of crying out to God in despair, let everyone on the seas be able to sing God’s praises (Ps. 69:34). And so, let us, those who have the power and the awareness to change, let us be the ones who learn from this week and who actively work to bring about that society for all those who cross the dangerous sea in search of a life like ours. And let us say, Amen.