Feminism? Entry to the lifeboats was “women and children first”. Even at the time, it sounded like an anachronism, the last cry of a long-dead age of chivalry. In Denver, the anarchist Emma Goldman wrote “Suffrage Dealt a Blow by Women of the Titanic”. If women wanted to be treated as equals they must, she argued, take their chances like men. Yet even a doctrinaire revolutionary like Goldman wondered at the nobility that inspired men to step aside and give their lives for others.

Nationalism? Captain Smith was heard shouting: “Be British, boys, be British!” What he meant, it’s assumed, is “form orderly queues”. There was little jostling on deck. A higher percentage of British men drowned than Americans.

Anti-capitalism? The Titanic was built as a blue chip in J P Morgan’s rapacious bid to monopolise transatlantic travel. Its owner, J Bruce Ismay, had merged his White Star line with Morgan’s International Mercantile Marine Company. Ismay has gone down in calumny for climbing into a lifeboat; his corporate strategy serves as a classic counter-argument for market regulation.

Politics aside, what keeps the Titanic alive is pure emotion. The Bulgarian writer Elias Canetti, the least sentimental of Nobel literary laureates, remembered it as the event of greatest impact in his infancy, the housemaids weeping and the child transfixed by tales of the musicians who played on as the ship sank. A violin, allegedly the bandmaster’s, is presently touring England before being offered for sale at auction. The violinist’s name was Wallace Hartley. You knew that already. More people have heard of Hartley than of Jascha Heifetz.

So many stories from the Titanic are part of our common myth. There was the honeymoon couple who clung to one another in the lifeboat, only to divorce on reaching shore. The wife of a US tycoon who refused to leave her husband’s side, saying: “We’ve been together all these years, I’ll not leave him now.” The lookout boy who hanged himself. The wireless operators who trousered $1,000 from the New York Times for a swift exclusive. The British captain who ignored a distress call. The rescue ship Carpathia, later torpedoed by the Germans.

All human life, all of our history, is somehow concentrated in that one dark ocean night – and much of it will be revived a year from now at the actual centenary, when Belfast will open a Titanic tourist district, and a cruise liner, the Balmoral, filled with well-fed passengers snapping away on their pocket phones, will hover above the great ship’s hulk.

The world has since seen many bigger disasters, with far greater loss of life – two world wars and a Holocaust, earthquakes and tsunamis, terrorist attacks and African famines. Yet no event in the past century exerts the sustained and concentrated fascination of the Titanic, the immediacy of its drama, the moral choices on deck.

One cause for this fixation – proposed in 1912 by George Bernard Shaw, opposed by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle – is that the liner represented the rottenness of class division and capitalist aspiration. That, however, is mere salon politics. The roots of our engagement lie, in my perception, much deeper in human antecedents. As the King James translators put it: “And they said to one another, Go to, let us… build a city and a tower whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make a name lest we be scattered upon the face of the whole earth.”

The Titanic was a Tower of Babel moment. It was inspired by the fear every civilisation shares that it might be eternally erased. The urge to build the biggest ship, the first with a swimming pool and gymnasium, was an irresistible late twitch of the British age of engineering and invention. It was a vanity of vanities, a homily-in-waiting on man’s folly and futility in the greater scheme of things.

Whether we accept that or not, we all agree that folly is part of our nature. The need to build bigger and better, to reach for the heavens, is what makes us human. So we shall build another Titanic, or Jerusalem, or Twin Towers. We will gasp at its luxury and be shocked forever by its fate. That’s how we are wired. The Titanic takes us very close to the source of life.