لخّصلي

When the ocean liner Titanic sank in April of 1912, one of
the few men to survive the tragedy was J. Bruce Ismay, the chairman and managing director of the company that owned the ship. After the disaster, however, Ismay was savaged by the media and the general public for climbing into a lifeboat and saving himself when there were other women and children still on board. Ismay said he’d already helped many women and children into lifeboats and had only climbed in one himself when there were no other women or children in the area and the boat was ready to release. But it didn’t matter.
His reputation was ruined. He was labeled an uncivilized coward and, a year after the disaster, he resigned his position at White Star.
The “women and children first” protocol of the Titanic may not be as strong a social stricture1 as it was a century ago. But we still tend to laud those who risk or sacrifice themselves to save others in moments of danger or crisis and look less kindly on those who focus on saving themselves, instead
But is survival really selfish and uncivilized? Or is it smart? And is going in to rescue others always heroic? Or is it sometimes just stupid? It’s a complex question, because there are so many factors involved, and every survival situation is different.
Self-preservation is supposedly an instinct. So one would think that in life-and-death situations, we’d all be very focused on whatever was necessary to survive. But that’s not always true. In July 2007, I was having a drink with a friend in Grand Central Station2 when an underground steam pipe exploded just outside. From where we sat, we heard a dull “boom!” and then suddenly, people were running, streaming out of the tunnels and out the doors.
My friend and I walked quickly and calmly outside, but to get any further, we had to push our way through a crowd of people who were staring, transfixed, at the column of smoke rising from the front of the station. Some people were crying, others were screaming, others were on their cell phones . . . but the crowd, for the most part, was
not doing the one thing that would increase everyone’s chances of survival, if in fact a terrorist bomb with god knows what inside it had just gone off—namely, moving away from the area.
We may have an instinct for survival, but it clearly doesn’t always kick in the way it should. A guy who provides survival training for pilots told me once that the number one determining factor for survival is simply whether people hold it together in a crisis or fall apart. And, he said, it’s impossible to predict ahead of time who’s going to hold it together, and who’s going to fall apart.
So what is the responsibility of those who hold it together?
I remember reading the account of one woman who was in an airliner that crashed on landing. People were frozen or screaming, but nobody was moving toward the emergency exits, even as smoke began to fill the cabin. After realizing that the people around her were too paralyzed to react, she took direct action, crawling over several rows of people to get to the exit. She got out of the plane and survived. Very few others in the plane, which was soon consumed by smoke and fire, did. And afterward, I remember she said she battled a lot of guilt for saving herself instead of trying to save the others.
Could she really have saved the others? Probably not, and certainly not from the back of the plane. If she’d tried, she probably would have perished with them. So why do survivors berate themselves for not adding to the loss by attempting the impossible? Perhaps it’s because we get very mixed messages about survival ethics.
On the one hand, we’re told to put our own oxygen masks on first, and not to jump in the water with a drowning victim. But then the people who ignore those edicts and survive to tell the tale are lauded as heroes. And people who do the “smart” thing are sometimes criticized quite heavily after the fact.
In a famous mountain-climbing accident chronicled in the
book and documentary Touching the Void, climber Simon Yates was attempting to rope his already-injured friend Joe Simpson down a mountain in bad weather when the belay3 went awry. Simpson ended up hanging off a cliff, unable to climb up, and Yates, unable to lift him up and losing his own grip on the mountain, ended up cutting the rope to Simpson to save himself. Miraculously, Simpson survived the 100 foot fall and eventually made his way down the mountain. But Yates was criticized by some for his survival decision, even though the alternative would have almost certainly led to both of their deaths.
In Yates’ case, he had time to think hard about the odds, and
the possibilities he was facing, and to realize that he couldn’t save anyone but himself. But what about people who have to make
more instantaneous decisions? If, in fact, survivors are driven by instinct not civilization, how do you explain all those who choose otherwise? Who would dive into icy waters or onto subway tracks
or disobey orders to make repeat trips onto a minefield to bring wounded to safety? Are they more civilized than the rest of us? More brave? More noble?
It sounds nice, but oddly enough, most of the people who perform such impulsive rescues say that they didn’t really think before acting. Which means they weren’t “choosing” civilization over instinct. If survival is an instinct, it seems to me that there must be something equally instinctive that drives us, sometimes, to run into danger instead of away from it.
Perhaps it comes down to the ancient “fight or flight” impulse. Animals confronted with danger will choose to attack it, or run from it, and it’s hard to say which one they’ll choose, or when. Or maybe humans are such social herd animals, dependent on the herd for survival, that we feel a pull toward others even as we feel a contrary pull toward our own preservation, and the two impulses battle it out within us . . . leading to the mixed messages we send each other on which impulse to follow.
Some people hold it together in a crisis and some people fall apart. Some people might run away from danger one day, and toward it the next. We pick up a thousand cues in an instant of crisis and respond in ways that even surprise ourselves, sometimes.
But while we laud those who sacrifice themselves in an attempt to save another, there is a fine line between brave and foolish. There can also be a fine line between smart and selfish. And as a friend who’s served in the military for 27 years says, the truth is, sometimes there’s no line at all between the two.