Cruising to the dark heart of Western society

The documentary maker Adam Curtis has a blog, and in it he gives his own thoughts on the history of the cruise ship industry. Suffice to say it's a roller-coaster ride of misplaced idealism, snobbery, greed, and idiocy. Depending on the kind of day you've had you may find it hilarious or profoundly depressing. But I learned a lot, not least the fact that, originally, the modern luxury cruise liner was designed to being First and Third Worlds closer together:

Kloster and Arison are today seen as the founders of the modern cruise industry. Their first boat, the Sunward, started taking middle-class Americans on week-long cruises to Jamaica from Miami - and it was an immediate success. They also became close friends. 

Kloster believed that the aim of capitalism was not just to make money but to use its power to improve society. He saw the world as divided between the rich, industrial west - and the "third world" which was struggling to escape from the debilitating legacy of colonialism, and the still vastly unequal distribution of global power. 

So his cruise ships were going to remedy that. 

Kloster hated the idea that his liners were just going to take white middle class Americans on cheap holidays in other peoples' hell and misery. He supported the left-wing politicians in Jamaica who said "Tourism is Whorism".

Wow. The fact that a man called Knut Kloster (I kid you not) was behind the modern cruise ship is fascinating in itself. But how was he going to actually help the Jamaican people?

Kloster held brainstorming sessions in the company to come up with new ideas that would provoke the American tourists to engage with the lives of those they were pointing their cameras at. One brilliant suggestion was that women workers in a Jamaican coffee factory should be given instamatic cameras so they could take picture of the passengers as they toured past them. The aim was to make the tourists feel what it was like to be watched and snapped as if they were animals in a zoo. 

In a wonderful and perceptive history of the cruise industry called Devils on the Deep Blue Sea, Kristoffer Garin has described another scheme that Kloster dreamt up. It was called "New Experiences", and involved having a "Jamaican Family in Residence" on each cruise.
The New York Times described what was supposed to happen: 

"The passengers will be invited to meet the Jamaicans informally, to dine together, drink, dance and play together, to ask questions and pump them for all kinds of information in friendly conversations with no holds barred, including political and racial problems."

Double wow. If you want to know what happened next, you'll have to mosey on over to Adam Curtis's blog. (Spoiler - what happened next was not good.)