There's a journal none of us intended to keep, and it betrayed me even before I put pen to paper on this essay.
Your Google searches. Mined by me on a Tuesday evening for no other reason than vague guilt, mine were an odd and telling little journal: oxygen content, location of a rescue ship, the university attended by a nineteen-year-old boy, the wealth of his father. Four nights of it. No searches for the names of any of the people who died on a fishing vessel off the same coast earlier that same week, maybe ten times as many people as were on board. I wasn't trying to forget about them. I just hadn't thought to look up their names in the first place.
What Google searches reveal about our morality is not what we believe. What Google searches reveal about our morality is what we cared enough to Google. This essay is not, finally, about a submersible or a shipwreck. It is about that ledger – the accounting we keep, but don’t see, about who is alive and important enough for us to research. These two ships I will discuss next are just my strongest examples of how this accounting occurs, and how little most of us think about it.
On June 18, 2023, the submersible Titan, owned by Ocean Gate Expeditions, descended toward the wreck of the Titanic carrying five individuals on board. Within less than two hours after its departure, communication between the submersible and its support ship was lost. An acoustic signature matching that of an explosion, almost at the same time, was confirmed by the U.S. Navy. Four days of international search operations followed until pieces of the hull were identified as being caused by an instant failure of the vessel.
One of the five was Suleman Dawood, who was eighteen years old. His aunt said he had confided to his relatives that "he wasn’t very up for it," and he was "terrified." Nevertheless, he came to celebrate Father’s Day, to be with his father who had always loved the Titanic from boyhood, and his mother who gave up her seat so the both could come. You need to imagine this seat for a minute: an empty seat chosen by a mother to be empty out of love on a ship which won't live through the next week.
Four days before, on June 14, a rusty trawler named Adriana, intended to carry a few dozens of men, but carrying something more like a small town, sank in the waters off Pylos in Greece. Out of approximately 750 passengers, only 104 survived; 82 bodies have been recovered,d and hundreds of others have never been found. The survivors would later recall the hold: darkness, no space to sleep, the heat from the engine radiating up from the floor through six days at sea from Libya, children handed from person to person towards whatever air there was on the deck above. One of the missing people was a Pakistani man called Matloob Hussain. His brother, Adil, kept the door to their home in Athens open for weeks, in case Matloob came walking through the door. A survivor by the name of Oday, whose brother never turned up, said it better than I could:
"They are not numbers. They are people."
A door that is left open is a form of prayer that does not require any belief at all.
It just takes a willing person to keep hoping beyond hope.
What the Mind Does With a Face
It turns out that there is a documented psychological bias in humans: while they feel extreme sympathy for a single identifiable individual, the sympathy for an abstract group is relatively weak even when the suffering of the latter is far more significant. Display a picture and a name, and something inside you opens up. Display a statistic, even a horrifying one, and something closes quietly. It is not a flaw exclusive to cold-blooded people. It is rather a default setting of everyone,ne including mine, which helped me to learn the name of Suleman Dawood in a matter of days, and that of Matloob Hussain to remain forever unknown to me if not for my forced research into the matter.
I want to stop for a second and consider this sentence because it is doing something a bit too convenient to itself, explaining the mechanism in a way that allows me to step outside of it and describe a phenomenon rather than confess to one. So, let me be more explicit here: I did not fail to mourn six hundred people because I did not meet them long enough to make it possible.
We don't run out of compassion. We run out of the willingness to go looking for something to spend it on.
The Uncomfortable Question
This is the part that I do not really want to write, for it does not seem to lead to any comforting conclusion.
Is attention in and of itself a kind of privilege? Suleman Dawood could be found almost immediately: a university education, a national identity that had become headline news, a rich father. Matloob Hussain's name had to be gleaned from his brother with the aid of a translator several weeks after the water had already washed away whatever answer his family needed. None of this was earned by either man or lost. It was determined long before either of them stepped onto anything, by geography, by class, by the sort of passport that transforms a disappearance into a story rather than a statistic.
I don't have an easy answer to this question. Nor am I sure whether the whole essay provides one. I believe it is honourable to leave it hanging rather than turning it into something that will allow us to feel done with it.
The Mirror We Didn’t Want
This is where all of it can be thrown at newsrooms, at editors who did full wall-to-wall coverage of subs against a lone wire paragraph out of Pylos. It's a valid critique; a former president of the United States made his views known on the matter publicly that week. But newsrooms cover what the audience rewards, and an audience is made up of individuals like me, with my thumb poised on my smartphone late at night and deciding, without even really deciding, whose ocean I will think about. The Mirror We Didn’t Want
It is a valid objection to raise from here and one which should have been made: The two catastrophes were not the same. Five individuals, a fixed location, an approaching time limit for oxygen supply- this is what produces the kind of hourly reporting that one sees when there is a mine collapse. An ongoing disaster that claims lives each year in numbers in the thousands cannot be chronicled as a singular incident. This is why the discrepancy occurred. I do not believe that it is enough reason for its occurrence.
The Weapon Hidden in the Statistic
But there is a more sinister direction I have been shying away from, and it feels like a minor form of dishonesty to do so, so I'll take it.
The beginning of any act of mass cruelty happens well before the first act of physical violence. It starts even further back and more quietly than that — in the process of reducing the targets to an entity or a category. A wave, a tide, or simply a number. This is not a rhetorical flourish I am using to add weight to the conclusion of my essay. It is a pattern that has played out independently in various times and places around the world. And it happens because those who have planned atrocity understand something we all learn accidentally: that a name is a danger to their plan, and a number is not.
But this does not mean that four days of imbalanced reporting can be mentioned in the same breath as those histories. This would be misleading and would make me do something cheap, and I do not wish to do that. Rather, what I do want to say is less and perhaps more useful: the gap in cognition which was intentionally created by those histories is precisely the same as the gap into which we all slip unintentionally and innocently every week without any ulterior motive except that of being too busy and having faith in another pair of eyes watching.
The machine of atrocity and the machine of the average Tuesday evening looking at one’s mobile phone are not the same in their magnitude. But the two are, in some disturbing way, made of the same stuff.
Civilisations are ultimately judged not only by who they saved, but also by who they did not think to look for
There is something you should do before closing this page. Without scrolling back, try recalling: What was the name of the child who did not want to go inside the submersible?
If you found that easy, try the hard one: Can you name a single individual who was onboard the Adriana?
If you could answer the former but not the latter, you have not failed a trivia test. You have completed, in roughly four seconds, the entire experiment conducted by this essay over the last four days of June 2023, except this time there was no news cycle left to blame. Just you, the ocean, and the two ways in which it is possible to disappear into it.
This is all that I will ask of you, and it will take approximately ninety seconds. Search for one name from a tragedy that the news cycle has moved on from. It does not matter how futile, how impossible your act may seem. All you need to prove is that the ledger is unfixed, that the numbers change every time someone looks.
History is not written only by the people who win. It is written, just as permanently, by the names someone bothered to keep asking after and left blank by the ones nobody did. The ocean doesn't decide who disappears. We do twice. Once when they drown. Once when we close the tab.