Planet Titanic

In the hit film Titanic, Leonardo DiCaprio played Jack Dawson, a class-crossed lover and steerage-class cad who pursues the beautiful, upper-class Rose Dewitt Bukater, played by Kate Winslet. Their short-lived romance didn’t stand a chance of surviving the iceberg, and neither did any real-life “Jack Dawson” of the1912 catastrophe. Of the more than 2200 passengers and crew aboard Titanic, only 706 survived—a mere 32 per cent of those aboard.

If you were among Rose DeWitt’s elite and travelling first class, your chances of surviving the disaster were much greater (60 per cent), because the lifeboats were stationed adjacent to your quarters; you had, in a sense, “paid” for the privilege of being saved. If you were in third class, like Jack, your chances of getting in a lifeboat were severely retarded (25 per cent).

This illustrates perfectly the unequal distribution of life chances, opportunities, wealth, privilege and consumption in every society and in every sector of society on our planet.

Look around: Do an elite now live in a gated security-guaranteed settlement near your neighbourhood? Increasingly, the wealthy opt for life in palatial homes behind walls, drawing on infrastructures provided by public money. They want to be insulated from poorer sectors of society who are more likely to be under surveillance, arrested, charged, convicted and jailed.

This microcosmic reality of elitism and exclusivity are writ large on a global scale in imbalances between industrialised nations of the so-called North and the developing and less-developed nations of the South.

Here are some statistics* lifted from the last decade of the 20th century:

average per capita income for the North was $US22,000; for the South it was $US300;
the world’s wealthiest 20 per cent control 65 per cent of its resources;
the three richest individuals on our planet (one of whom is Bill Gates, valued at $US40 billion) had assets worth more than the world’s poorest 48 nations and more than the lowest 40 per cent of the American people;
the income of the multinational corporation, Samsung, was equal to that of the Philippines; Hitachi earned more than Malaysia, Toyota more than Poland, Ford more than Turkey and GM more than Indonesia;
nations classified North consumed 85 per cent of the world’s paper, 80 per cent of its commercial energy and 79 per cent of its steel;
an average child born in the North ended up with a life-expenditure bill equal to all the children in an average African village;
Americans spent $US8 billion on cosmetics, Europeans $US2 billion on ice-cream ($US4 billion would have supplied basic education, clean water and sewerage for the planet’s poorest).
grain fed to American livestock equalled the total food consumption of the billions of people who make up India and China;
two-thirds of our world’s people had to make do with less than 20 per cent of the world’s wages;
Little surprise, then, that the life expectancy of the people of the North is around 80 years, 30 more than the South.

Warfare and tighter national borders keep millions down and out, and the mass media–driven ethos of “competitive individualism” keeps the privileged winners committed to consuming even more of their unfair share. Commenting on this appalling and growing gap in inequality and the concentration of privilege in the hands of so few, sociologist David Newman quietly concludes that “such enormous wealth has a way of preserving itself.”

Indeed, as Newman notes, of Forbes’s list of America’s wealthiest 400 individuals in the 1990s, a mere 61 made it onto the top-100 most generous Americans list.

Human self-interest, for the most part, has reigned supreme since the Garden of Eden. No doubt the rich give more to charity than I will ever earn, but the disparity between the haves and have-nots is a matter for everyone, not just the generous of spirit and pocket.

A day of reckoning, of calling the elite to account will never happen if left to human resources (because they control most of them.) But the message of hope for Planet Titanic is that all is not lost; spiritual, social and economic salvation for the world’s poor arrived 2000 years ago in the “favourable year of the Lord,” Jesus Christ (Luke 4:19). A growing number of the earth’s people are acknowledging that and helping to bring it to fruition—before we hit another iceberg.

* Source: David Newman, Sociology, Pine Forge Press, California, 2000.

Extract from Signs of the Times, May 2003.

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