Modern Exploration: Thrill-Seeking or Ghoul Tourism for the Mega-Rich?

The men (and it would have almost invariably have been men) who undertook the Haj, the Islamic pilgrimage to Mecca, prior to the modern era, would have been both rich and brave.

Rich to be able to afford to leave their affairs and families unattended for the duration of the journey, and to pay for a journey, by caravan at least, and possibly, depending on the distance, sail as well. It would have been a journey that could have taken years.

Brave, because a caravan across the desert involved running the risk of bandits and inclement weather. There was every chance of dying along the way, or at the destination.

Today, in the age of the jet liner, it is affordable to everyone of that faith who can pay the cost of the return airfare, although there is a novel risk of being crushed in a crowd of hundreds of thousands, and the ancient danger from the stifling heat, even where there is air conditioning part of the way.

I read T.S. Eliot’s poem The Journey of the Magi this past week for the first time in several years, and it’s words do convey some of what such a caravan across the desert might have been like:

A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a long journey:
The ways deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter.’
And the camels galled, sorefooted, refractory,
Lying down in the melting snow.
There were times we regretted
The summer palaces on slopes, the terraces,
And the silken girls bringing sherbet.
Then the camel men cursing and grumbling
and running away, and wanting their liquor and women,
And the night-fires going out, and the lack of shelters,
And the cities hostile and the towns unfriendly
And the villages dirty and charging high prices:
A hard time we had of it.
At the end we preferred to travel all night,
Sleeping in snatches,
With the voices singing in our ears, saying
That this was all folly.

Travel, particularly Exploration, has always been the preserve of the rich. Staying on the T.S. Eliot theme, I recall the end of Evelyn Waugh’s novel A Handful Of Dust (a title based on a quote from Eliot’s magnus opus, The Waste Land). The protagonist, landed gentleman Tony Last, copes with the loss of his heir and marriage by going exploring in the Amazon, to end up trapped and the prisoner of a hermit, who forces him to read Charles Dickens to him constantly – aptly symbolising the cultural decay both Eliot and Waugh felt best depicted the inter-war years.

Learning of the loss last month of tourist submarine Titan, it intrigued me that several of the paying passengers are mega rich dare devils, one being a prominent member of the Explorer’s Club. He holds several records for piloting high performance aircraft for long distances, and has been on other deep sea excursions, and into space on one of those commercial tourist space flights which the rich now indulge in. I am not sure whether he has been to the South Pole or climbed Everest, but I assume that he either has, or would have liked to eventually.

But even though rich he was, and brave for taking such risks (I look apprehensively at a roller coaster and get nervous getting on an airliner), he was no real pioneer. He might hold some contemporary flight records but he was no Charles Lindbergh or Walter Doolittle or Chuck Yeager or Yuri Gagarin, men who pioneered flight.

Which did give me great cause for reflection this past couple of weeks since the Titan was crushed, with its occupants dying mercifully instantly but needlessly.

All those modern ‘explorers’ are not pushing the limits` of human exploration or adding to the body of human knowledge. They are extreme tourists, thrill seekers who find the ordinary avenues of travel to be mundane, and who take their lives into their own hands because they are rich enough and brave enough – or fool hardy enough – to do so.

In an age where Big Game Hunting is no longer acceptable, paying $US 250,000 for a ticket to visit the wreck of the Titanic, or to join an expedition to the South Pole, or to get on a spaceship owned by Elon Musk or Sir Richard Branson or Jeff Bezos, or to get sherpas to more or less carry you to the summit of Everest is the new form of exploration for the mega rich.

The American sociologist Thorstein Veblen commented cynically a century or so ago about ‘conspicuous consumption’. There is little more conspicuous than the sort of thrill seeking that mega rich dare devils are consuming today when they spend money which would take most of us several decades to save on a potentially one way ticket to the stars or the depths.

Are they bored with their lives? What would the philosopher Nietzsche think of extreme risk takers who do not need to take such risks, but do so recklessly for mere thrills, unlike the hapless tightrope walker at the opening of his work Thus Spake Zarathustra?

Thrill seeking is one thing, but it is another to disturb the peace of the dead. The Titanic is a mass grave for some 1500 people who met a horrible and untimely death. There is nothing romantic about that, nor about risking one’s life to go visiting such a dangerous and solemn place. To be honest, I feel that it is ghoulish. This is nothing like making a pilgrimage to Paris Cemetery to pay your respects to Jim Morrison or Oscar Wilde or the many other worthy souls buried there. It is more like the rubber necking motorist who cannot tear their eyes away from a car crash they happen to pass by.