We are all in the same boat, as the saying goes. But what scares me is that maybe that boat is ultimately as doomed as the Pequod in Moby-Dick.
On the Pequod and Spaceship Earth
I went to Disney World a couple of weeks ago. Although I didn’t go into the Spaceship Earth ride in the Epcot part of the park, I got a good look at it from a helium balloon in the Disney shopping district. A little while later, a Facebook friend posted the famous Earthrise photo.
The point is I’ve been thinking about the Earth as an astonishing and gorgeous spaceship that is, as far as we know, utterly unique in the cosmos. Is this spaceship a metaphor or fact? Well, the planet is moving around the sun at nearly 30 kilometers per second, which amounts to 67,000 miles per hour. But that’s not the only movement. Our whole solar system, gravitationally tied to the sun, is zipping around our galaxy at about 490,000 miles per hour.
So, yes, we are literally on a kind of spaceship.
At the same time, of course, I’m been writing about leadership lessons in the great novel Moby-Dick. I’ve been pondering whether or not there was any avoiding the tragedy of Ahab (spoiler alert) destroying the Pequod and killing every member of the crew (aside from our narrator Ishmael, of course).
On the Dark Obsessions of Ahab and Putin
Ahab spends a lot of time by himself obsessing. In fact, when we first hear of him, Captain Peleg tells Ishmael, “I don’t know exactly what’s the matter with him; but he keeps close inside the house; a sort of sick, and yet he don’t look so. In fact, he ain’t sick; but no, he isn’t well either. Any how, young man, he won’t always see me, so I don’t suppose he will thee.”
As of Chapter 21, we still haven’t gotten a look at Ahab, the only word being that “Captain Ahab remained invisibly enshrined within his cabin.” In Chapter 23, we are told, “Captain Ahab stayed below.”
This reminds us of current events. The stories about Russia’s dictator, Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, are eerily similar these days. We hear that “Putin himself was isolated, from other foreign leaders and from his own advisers and allies” in recent times.
Some of this isolation has been inspired by the pandemic, but it seems to have gone beyond that: “Questions have been raised over whether Covid-19 has fueled Vladimir Putin’s paranoia after claims emerged the isolated president spent time ‘stewing in his own fears’ after ‘withdrawing into himself’ during the pandemic.”
Some speculate that Putin’s psyche, already demented by his years in the KGB, has been further warped by his isolation in a bunker, where he has had a great deal of time to obsess about “the West,” perhaps in the same way Ahab obsesses about the great whale that has harmed him so.
On the Failure to Stop a Megalomaniac
In Moby-Dick, there are multiple failures to stop the tragedy. As we’ve noted, Peleg allowed Ahab to take the Pequod to sea even though he should have known better. Later on, Starbuck comes to understand how dangerous Ahab is, but he can’t bring himself to mutiny against his captain, and it’s not clear that he’d have the crew’s support if he did.
That leaves the crew itself. The crew members could have put an end to Ahab’s mad quest but they didn’t feel as if they had the power. That’s what a dictator does. He (and it is usually a he, with a few exceptions) makes others believe that he rather than they have the power, even if it’s based on an illusion. Dictators know how to divide and conquer and cast an aura of invincibility even though their deepest fear is that they will be exposed as the frail, vulnerable and all-too-fallible individuals that they are.
As I write this, there is no knowing how the current invasion of Ukraine will end. What we do know is that Putin himself has raised the specter of nuclear war. Of course, aside from not being a fictional character, Putin is no Ahab. He is being resisted on many fronts. Yet, sitting on the world’s largest arsenal of nuclear weapons, Putin has the potential to do untold damage to all the inhabitants of the ship called Earth. It’s as if we are all now crew members aboard the Pequod.
I don’t know if Putin is as obsessed and insane as Ahab. Maybe he’s a cold-blooded strategist rather than an emotional cripple, or maybe he’s somewhere in between.
Nor do I know if there’s any stopping him. Is there a Starbuck who could act against him in Russia? Could the Russian nation itself rise against him?
From what I’ve read, these are both long shots. There’s no telling how this will end.
What I do know is that it’s scary, at least from my perspective, that the fate of the planet rests largely on the shoulders of, again from my perspective, one very bad and possibly mad leader.
If we have the chance, we crew of the Spaceship Earth should do our level best to rid ourselves of the kinds of weaponry that makes it possible for one Ahab-like leader to so easily scuttle the vessel on which we ride though the star-studded seas. I’m afraid, though, that most of us can no longer even imagine the possibility of disarming our tripwire weapons of mass destruction. If so, then perhaps we have no more autonomy than the ill-fated crew of Melville’s tragic tale.