“History tells us to expect the great punctuation marks of disaster in no predictable order.”
- Niall Ferguson
Celebrated historian and intellectual Niall Ferguson is best known to the public for his many historical books that are as suitable for lay scholars as they are for professional academics. His past works have addressed historical threads spanning financial markets, empire, war and civilizational development. Ferguson’s latest book has a similarly ambitious scope - he describes Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe as a general history of catastrophe. This includes various geological, geopolitical, biological and other disasters that damage human beings on a grand scale. While he addresses the COVID-19 pandemic with the information available prior to the book’s publication in May 2021, the book’s purpose isn’t to provide a comprehensive summary of the current pandemic, but rather to place the COVID-19 civilizational challenge into historical context.
Ferguson approaches this mission by diving into statistics about the impact and frequency of disasters, exploring why some societies respond better than others and explaining the role of politics in causing or exacerbating catastrophes. The reader receives well-presented and relevant historical information that puts today’s pandemic into perspective. For example, critical context is given on the unglamorous and underrepresented impact of infectious disease in history. Some readers might be surprised to learn that the deadliest pandemics in history killed greater shares of world population at the time they occurred than the deadliest wars in history did. This comparison of the COVID-19 pandemic to other pandemics (even recent ones from the 20th century) as well as other natural or man-made disasters offers valuable perspective. Additionally, we believe that those who gain this perspective understand how common calamities can still occur in such a complex world, preparing these individuals to take potential issues seriously without devolving into overreactive hysteria. We saw the fruits of historical ignorance when so many public and private sector leaders laughed off COVID-19 in early 2020 until it was too late; many later desperately took drastic action as if facing something as unprecedented as an alien invasion.
Ferguson spends more time on frequency and predictability of disasters while simultaneously exploring their causes and effects. He devotes considerable space to analytical frameworks that others have used to explain historical catastrophes, including religious interpretations, deterministic political theories, and cliodynamics (a newer field that attempts to mathematically model historical processes). He gives each framework fair treatment before bringing the reader to his own complex and nuanced view.
Network theory lies at the core of Ferguson’s arguments about the key dynamics in catastrophes. The Square and the Tower, Ferguson’s last book (which we plan to cover on Citizen Scholar in the future) was effectively a brief history of the world viewed through the lens of networks and hierarchies. Ferguson asserted that non-hierarchical network structures of individuals have served at least as consequential a role in history and power politics as formal institutional hierarchies have. In Doom, Ferguson builds on this by detailing how exogenous shocks interact with and stress existing social network structures to cause disasters of varying scale that manifest with varying speed. Drawing on physicist Richard Feynman’s analysis of the 1986 Space Shuttle Challenger disaster, Ferguson also suggests that points of failure in the system are more likely to be in the middle layer of an org chart or other pockets where incentives may adversely affect the flow of critical information.
Regarding probabilities of these exogenous shocks occurring in the first place, Ferguson draws on the works of other thinkers to create categories of disasters based on foreseeability and impact. Some disasters are difficult or impossible to foresee, while others are known threats that were allowed to inflict similarly massive damage due to lack of preparation or competent response. As for predicting the timing of these disasters, Ferguson is unequivocal:
“From earthquakes to wars to financial crises, the major disruptions in history have been characterized by random or by power-law distributions. They belong in the domain of uncertainty, not risk.”
Whether the reader agrees with Ferguson’s particular views or the competing frameworks he explains, it’s helpful to have systematic methods to think through the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and future disasters. These structures allow one to rise above the daily headlines and separate the signal from the noise.
In the final portion of Doom, the author also couldn’t resist sketching an opinionated but detailed preliminary draft of the current pandemic’s history. He goes on to project potential implications for the near future of geopolitics and social structures. This section includes plenty of venom for incompetent government officials as well as prophecies of a frostier Sino-American Cold War and renewed post-COVID social fabric.
Doom is detailed and occasionally technical or depressing (hard to avoid that when describing the Black Death), but it’s also a rewarding and valuable read. We think Citizen Scholar subscribers who read the book will appreciate being armed with the facts and frameworks and may even enjoy Ferguson’s opinionated musings at the book’s conclusion, whether they agree with him or not.
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The Citizen Scholar Team
Discussion #3: Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe, by Niall Ferguson