Presumption is the kinder, gentler cousin of arrogance. It’s also, for that reason, harder to spot in advance, and on this weekend’s centennial of the sinking of the fabled White Star Line’s Titanic, we should remember the difference.
Although the Titanic was dubbed “unsinkable” by the Irish shipyard that built her, it wasn’t arrogance but a remarkable record of competence that stood behind the claim.
Titanic was the steady culmination of 40 years of passenger-ship experience on the North Atlantic, beginning with White Star’s first passenger liner, Oceanic, in 1871. Oceanic was 420 feet long and weighed, at full load, 3,700 tons. Twenty-five years later, White Star liners reached 749 feet and 24,000 tons.
The Titanic, which began construction in 1909, was only the next step in the growth of these fabulous vessels: 882 1/2 feet long, 46,328 tons, 29 boilers, a small hospital suite, two barber shops, a French café and four graceful 70-foot-tall funnels, which gave the Titanic her trademark profile. Titanic was big and opulent, but not edgy.
If anything, it was built beyond the safety requirements of the day. The ship floated on a 5-foot-tall double bottom, providing insurance against uncharted rocks and reefs. More than 2,000 mild-steel plates, some as long as 36 feet and all an inch thick, were riveted to 300 steel ribs; inside the hull, multi-deck steel bulkheads formed 16 large watertight compartments.
Were the Titanic rammed by another ship, the inflow of water would’ve been contained by two or three compartments; were a freak storm to threaten, the Titanic’s sheer size would’ve waited it out. There was space to carry up to 64 lifeboats, but why would the Titanic ever need them? Twenty would do nicely. At best, they’d ferry the passengers of some smaller ship in distress to the safety of the Titanic.
It wasn’t anything so bold as arrogance that sent the Titanic into a fatal brush with an iceberg four days out on her maiden voyage. It was presumption, fed by the complacence of the professionals who built her and managed her, and who couldn’t imagine how anything as efficient and practical as competence could be so wrong.
Twenty minutes before midnight on April 14, 1912, the lookouts in the Titanic’s crow’s-nest glimpsed a medium-sized iceberg in the ship’s path and rang down a frantic warning to the bridge. Titanic’s First Officer, William Murdoch, wrenched the ship out of the path of the iceberg, only to shave it along the length of her starboard bow.
The bumping and grinding along the Titanic’s side was so gentle that it barely awakened the ship’s sleeping passengers. Gentle, but freakish. The shaving opened seams and popped rivets along 300 feet of Titanic’s hull, allowing torrents of seawater into six of her watertight compartments. Six — not two or three. With six of the compartments flooding rapidly, the ship was doomed, along with 1,503 of the people on board for whom the 20 lifeboats had no room.
The Titanic sank in 2 1/2 hours, after barely launching the last of her lifeboats. (One lifeboat floated off as the ship went down.) Ironically, it wouldn’t have mattered if Titanic had been carrying the 64 lifeboats she was designed for. There wouldn’t have been time to launch them, anyway.
The builders, the owners, the captain and the officers of the Titanic never shook their fists and dared the gods to sink them. That would’ve been arrogance of the sort that stalks through every Greek tragedy. But they did presume that competence and procedural mastery would guarantee unsinkability.
The bureaucracies that now govern large swaths of our lives, and that aspire to govern still more, are likewise the domain, not of the arrogant, but of the presumptuous. They have no inkling that the problems they’re committed to solving — the economy, health care, the environment — are so complex as to be beyond bureaucratic solutions, and that the bureaucracies will make breakdowns more, and not less, likely, by steering toward problems whose depth they haven’t yet fathomed.
Remember the Titanic.
Allen C. Guelzo is director of the Civil War Era Studies Program at Gettysburg College.