Flights from Scarcity: The Endless Journeys of Wealth

What Do We Think We’re Finding When We Travel To Far Flung Places?

Part of our subscriber-only series on scarcity and the moral life.

Money allows us to not be locked into any particular place. But there are more adventures to be had than those of the explorers.

Neither Height Nor Depth: The Cosmogony of Wealth

The world’s attention was gripped this week by the disappearance of the Oceangate submersible, with five souls lost. Dying underwater is its own kind of horror. And all of the memes and jokes about their deaths only reflect a world incapable of valuing human life.¹ Or at the minimum, the media jokes are fit a world which cannot see mass death events at sea as things which happen to humans.

Visiting the wreckage of the Titanic isn’t an regular occurence, but neither is it apparently that out of the ordinary. James Cameron, the director and erstwhile deep-sea explorer, has apparently been to the wreckage 33 times.² I don’t see the appeal. As I contemplate a cross-country road trip to Michigan to go camping, the possibility of traveling in a submersible to see the Titanic might as well be in the same category as going to the moon.

Which…..it is, I think: much has been made of the price tag for the trip to the bottom of the Atlantic to visit the Titanic wreck ($250,000), a mere pittance of what Jeff Bezos’ guests allegedly paid. Wealth has always brought with it the ability to travel to exotic locations, whether to remote global locations, to its heights or to its depths. Before there was outer space or the ocean floor, there was the unknown territories across the Atlantic, the undiscovered mountains of Nepal, the pristine hunting grounds of the Sahara.

This is, of course, what money does: it enables travel, not though it’s spending so much as its sheer existence. Money itself was developed as a portable version of goods, to allow for people to not have to travel with great number of goods, but merely with coins banked by banks: easier to travel across the world with a bag of coins than with a herd of cattle. Credit cards allow this luxury to be extended to the masses, allowing folks like you and me to defer our lack of resources and see sights which we don’t have the tangible goats and cattle to trade for.

Money allows for us all to escape the tight orbits of particular places, and enough money allows for an almost infinite escape.

But the path traveled by the wealthy is mimetic: it is one that all are enticed to travel. The depth and height of travel enabled by great wealth is not simply one which allows the traveler to observe the world, but to create what counts as height and depth itself. What began as the travel of one European to the top of Everest now has opened up a whole commercial industry; what began as a novel exploratory venture to recover one of the most famous wrecks in history now exists as a travel tour. That which began in wealth creates a new world in which the ceiling is higher and the floor lower.