Finally, in case of Doom

Niall Ferguson on The Politics of Catastrophe

In his book, DOOM: The Politics of Catastrophe, published in 2021 and out right now with a new afterword, Niall Ferguson sets out with what appear to be twin objectives.  He undertakes – and succeeds in writing – what will undoubtedly be viewed as the first, dominant historical record of the coronavirus pandemic of 2019.  Bravely wrapping up his drafts in the Fall of 2020 and publishing in the Spring of 2021, as the COVID calamity was still very rapidly unfolding, Ferguson fearlessly stakes out his views on President Trump’s largely wise decisions of policy and entirely disastrous ones of communication; on the many mediocrities and hypocrisies of an American media so enthralled by their orgiastic hatred of Trump that they failed to assign the correct apportionment of blame to the health bureaucracy; on the different effects of severe and loose government restrictions on the course of the disease and economy in various countries around the world; and, perhaps most boldly, on the likely sum total impact of the coronavirus pandemic on the planet.  Most journalists, commentators, and academics would shrink from making such huge prognostications, certainly in book form.  Ferguson doesn’t.  And so far, it would seem, a couple of years after he hit “print” on his final draft, his predictions have been just about bang on. 

The book’s second chief objective – perhaps more properly, the book’s central point, by its own attestation – is that all catastrophes, whether arising from disease, earthquake, war, or spectacular machine failure, as in the case of space and air calamities, are in some way man-made political disasters.  I am not quite sure the book achieves what the author may wish it to achieve here.  More on this later.

In DOOM, Ferguson is very much on display.  He strides confidently through the historiography of disasters – cycle theories and super-calamity event hypotheses – and fairly flattens the field in preparation for his own view that none of the prior schemas of catastrophe quite holds up to scrutiny.  He marches through what must be one of the field’s most comprehensive compendia of the world’s pandemics, hysterias, and their fast friend, anti-Semitism.  He draws many alluring historical parallels, such as one between the 1920 US presidential election on the heels of the Spanish influenza and the 2020 election on the heels of the coronavirus pandemic.  It will be no surprise to readers of his work that he deftly handles every nuance of financial history he addresses.  The book continues his quite public and superb campaign against Woke Inc. and cancel culture; we must credit him with being, bravely again, early to this party, though one wishes that he weren’t perhaps quite as focused on the academy as either Ground Zero of the disease or as the chief engine and enemy of our future.  Time and again, Ferguson marshals, in DOOM, just about all the detailed evidence one could hope to see for his major claims.  And despite these obvious academic strengths, he gives us something readable and indeed fluid (that is, if you can handle a bunch of series of serial statistical data points, which I bet you can).  Few writers alive could pull it off.  Not only that, but the book gives us ample opportunity to revisit areas about which Ferguson has ably written before.  In some material sense, DOOM must be considered a follow-up and companion book to his 2018 The Square and the Tower: Networks and Power, from the Freemasons to Facebook.  Ferguson again makes much of his expertise in networks to explain the spread of pathogenic, financial, and religious contagion, among other problems, and I can imagine that at some point or another he may have been tempted to pin DOOM with the alternative subtitle of See, I Told You So.  And, of course, he writes amply about the horrid doom of the First World War, which is, for him, well-trod ground.  One might be allowed to wonder if he had some great extra material lying in the desk drawer for the last decade or two that he was finally able to use.

I had the particular pleasure of consuming a lot of the book on Audible.  This was my first audiobook experience since high school, when I listened to thrillers on cassette tape.  The experience has gotten better, and in this case much more so than I had expected, as the reader was Ferguson himself.  His burr and brogue were, well, en pleine forme.  In general, listening to him read must be similar to what it was like to hear David Hume review his latest pages.  Nonetheless, the application of Ferguson’s Scottish accent was not entirely consistent.  I could not, for example, perfectly make out his rules of thumb for pronouncing various local place- and personal names.  For some reason that defies reason, he likes a long second “e” in Bethesda (“Betheesda”).  By contrast, he seems to pronounce very carefully the names of, among others, Italian or Chinese scholars in their native intonations.  And then, once in a while, he quite unintelligibly utters a word such as “food,” which I am now convinced he does not know how to spell.

Now back to DOOM’s stated goal of establishing that all catastrophes are also man-made political disasters.  Probably some academic reviewer or another could assemble a batch of counter-examples.  But never mind such cavil.  My own reservation here is different.  In my opinion, Ferguson doubtless proves his point well, though I think one might be left wondering “so what?”  In some sense, the conclusion is perhaps just too obvious (though perhaps not as obvious as saying that all disasters are in some way calamities of, say, gravity, or the wide dispersion of oxygen).  If the lesson to be learned from DOOM is that “machines of government matter and should be properly designed and run,” then I suppose that simply must be true.  If the point is that one of the author’s bêtes noires – the implacable, incompetent, and impersonal Middle Management, who are, by his account, at the bottom of nearly every major modern tragedy – should be eviscerated or upgraded, then that might indicate the way to some vigorous and difficult policy decisions.  If the point is that Western-style democracy offers poor alignment of incentives for planning against long-tail shocks, then that, too, might suggest some way forward.  But this reader, at least, couldn’t quite discern the Main Idea that was meant to follow this Main Observation.

But perhaps, if I seek to channel my inner Niall, there is a better version of DOOM’s central point, evident in the fact of the book as well as in its content.  Maybe we can put forward what we might call the Ferguson Maximum Maxim: Those who are illiterate in history are not just doomed to repeat it but are, finally, idiots who have no business being near, let alone at, the tiller.