Throughout our history we have rarely been aware of the underlying Reality of our experience or why we behave the way we do.
Let’s begin by exploring the purpose of taking a “cruise.” “The travelers enjoyed the relaxing sense of detachment [emphasis added], within their own closed world, from the old problems they had left behind and the new ones they were approaching. The war news hardly intruded [denial], and the crew was studiously determined to carry on imperturbably as if nothing mattered but the self-contained life of the ship.”[i]
We have been boarding cruise ships for over a century, but did the passengers of the Lusitania ever consider the dangers of taking a cruise during wartime? “An ocean voyage, once undertaken only out of necessity or daring, now became part of the commonplace glamour of a European tour. The gaily jostling dancers who so often waltzed the whole journey across never troubled to think that the subsidies had a purpose, and that that purpose was war.”[ii] This is a description by Harvard history professor Oscar Handlin writing in 1954 about the “cruise” aboard the British ocean liner Lusitania which was sunk by a German U-Boat in May of 1915. The cost of the Lusitania had been underwritten by the British Treasury and was also carrying 4,000 boxes of ammunition for British troops.
When did modern warfare on a global scale become a universal preoccupation? “A dreadful prospect opened up for mankind when Napoleon’s Grande Armee won the battle of Austerlitz and swept on to conquer all of Europe. The enthusiastic multitudes of revolutionary France had placed at Napoleon’s disposal the resources of an entire nation, and he had fashioned from them a mighty new weapon: the mass citizen army, the Grand Armee. War was no longer a game of kings and small hired armies; it had become a cataclysm into which entire nations were hurled.”[iii]
Because war and other forms of violence have always been omnipresent in the human community one might think we have become comfortable with it–along with arranging the deck chairs on our Titanic “cruise.” Merrily we cruise along … or not.
________________
Supplemental Reading: War, The ABC’s of Simple Reality, Vol 2
#37 Merrily We Cruise Along
[i] Ibid.
[ii] Handlin, Oscar. “A Liner, a U-Boat … and History.” American Heritage. June 1955, p. 42.
[iii] Mack, Charles. “From Austerlitz to Moscow.” American Heritage. December 1977, p. 48.
