Doom – The Politics of Catastrophe

Title: Doom – The Politics of Catastrophe
Author: Niall Ferguson
Publisher: Allen Lane, 2021 (First)
ISBN: 9780241501764
Pages: 472

In their evolutionary history, mankind has had many brushes with disaster in which a portion of the society perished; the surviving others recovered from the shock and the damages to technology and culture were repaired. Earthquakes, pandemics, volcanic eruptions, storms and wars are the disasters that confront human societies every now and then. Covid 19 was the latest in the list of disasters that afflicted us. This book is a general history of catastrophe from the geological (earthquakes) to the geopolitical (wars), from the biological (pandemics) to the technological (nuclear accidents). This book was written in late-2020 when Covid was raging across the world. Niall Ferguson is a prominent British-American historian who needs no introduction. Several of his books were reviewed earlier here. The seeds of this work were probably sown during the lockdowns enforced to contain the spread of the Covid virus which restrained most people to a virtual house-arrest that was unaccustomed and uncomfortable. Many people used this time of compulsory leisure to good advantage and this book is a testament to it.

The first part of the book provides a primer on the mechanics of a disaster and how human groups cope with it. All societies live under uncertainty and disasters have profound economic, cultural and political consequences. What we have to fear about is not the end of the world, but big disasters that most of us survive. The resilience of societies to pull back from a catastrophe and regain its earlier technological level is not actually tested yet in an interconnected world, but this is a graver threat than outright annihilation of the species. Even then, people does not seem to be too much concerned with living near places where disaster has struck previously and where there is a greater chance to repeat it. A map of the world with the locations of the biggest earthquakes since 1500 CE plotted reveals that the biggest cities were built on or close to fault lines. This illustrates the fatal interplay between the infrequency of disasters and the shortness of human memory. Humans nearly always return to the scene of a disaster, no matter how vast it may be. In spite of occasional eruptions of Vesuvius, Naples grew to be one of Italy’s largest cities.

Most often, what affects men more is not how a disaster occurred but rather how its effects were percolated across networks – both human and natural. The most important feature of a disaster is whether there is some way of propagating the initial shock through the biological networks of life or the social networks of humanity. This book includes a useful primer on network science. A disaster consists of multiple smaller versions of itself which is a microcosm of the larger unit. This is called the fractal geometry of disaster. Unfortunately, the author does not elaborate on or give examples for this claim. Most disasters occur when a complex system goes critical, usually as a result of some small perturbation. The extent to which the exogenous shock causes a disaster is generally a function of the social network structure that comes under stress. The point of failure is more likely to be in the middle layer of the hierarchy of people than at the top of the organisation chart. Ferguson introduces ‘groupthink’ also to be a reason for causing errors that lead to disaster. It’s a mode of thinking that people engage in when they are deeply involved in a cohesive in-group, when the members’ striving for unanimity override their motivation to realistically apprise alternative courses of action. The author also points to the gradual improvement of public health even before the scientific principles behind them became apparent. Scientists took much credit for the general improvement of public health which had produced an unprecedented increase in life expectancy in the space of a century into the early-twentieth. Beginning in the Renaissance period, men worked out the efficacy of quarantines, social distancing and other measures now referred to as non-pharmaceutical interventions, long before they properly understood the true nature of the diseases they sought to conquer. It was enough to disrupt the social networks of the time to slow down the spread of the still unknown and unguessed-at microbes.

Ferguson being a British and I being an Indian, some narratives in the book that describe events in the colonial era rattle my nerves. The author presents a sense of inevitability for some colonial mishandlings that led to the death of a considerable number of Indians. Nationalists accuse the British of insensitivity to native suffering which has some substance in it, but this book argues that there was nothing more they could have done at that time. The 1918 influenza killed 18 million Indians which was 240 times the fatality figure of the British. It shattered the myth that Britain led the world in public health. In fact, a ministry of health was constituted in India only a year later. This book is professed to have been written with the aim of enabling the reader to compare the different forms doom take, rather than treating all disasters as the same. It then plays down Indian deaths and argues that ‘what was a catastrophic famine for some parts of Bengal in 1943 is altogether smaller if the death toll is expressed as a percentage of the entire population’ (p.41) which is another way of saying that ‘you should be grateful that the death toll was not higher’! He further concludes that ‘those who call the nineteenth century famines in India ‘Victorian holocausts’ are debasing historical terminology’ (p.37). Ferguson also notes the improvement in Indian health but ascribes the wrong reasons to it. The Indian mortality rate declined steeply between the 1920s and 1940s, as did the death toll attributable to famines (p.186). This is only partially true. Indian life expectancy began to surge after 1947 and there were no famines post-independence even though the monsoon had failed in many years. The author’s attempt to deny British culpability is in vain.

Ferguson analyses several pandemics and disasters occurred since World War II and suggests lessons to be learned from them. He also hints at the disproportionately harsh response measures towards Covid 19 in some countries such as the US which actually performed much worse than some other countries that responded to the disease with much milder plans. The 1957-58 Asian flu pandemic was similar in threat to Covid, but the US played it down, by not imposing lockdowns, social distancing or forcing people to wear masks. Soon herd immunity developed, along with vaccines. The reason for this subdued response may also have been due to the cold war which was at its peak. It posed such an unprecedented threat of disaster that the traditional threats posed by microbes somewhat receded in popular consciousness. Between 1957 and 2020, the world faced only one historically significant pandemic: AIDS. The policy response to it was dismal at first because the disease was mostly sexually transmitted. If polio-stricken children in leg-braces had gripped the American imagination in the 1950s, gay men with a sexually transmitted disease had the opposite effect in the 1980s. It took fifteen years to find a therapy that could prevent HIV-infected people from developing AIDS, which had killed 32 million people worldwide. The other recent disasters that are handled in the book are the Challenger space shuttle explosion and Chernobyl nuclear reactor disaster that occurred within a span of three months in 1986. In both the events, the middle management is arraigned as the culprit. However, the US society accused its president of incompetence while the Soviets blamed the Chernobyl workers.

The lockdown and social distancing measures enforced by an unimaginative bureaucracy and overzealous policemen caused more harm than good during Covid. The author notes that instead of economic lockdowns, a more rational strategy would have been to keep that share of the working population employed that could not work from home while mandating social distancing, enforcing mask-wearing and isolating older and vulnerable people. Ferguson rightly prophesies that the economic consequences of lockdowns were historically unprecedented and may have exceeded the public health benefits. The monetary and fiscal measures would decouple asset prices from economic reality and would lead to financial instability and inflation. This was written in Sep 2020 and came true soon. We have not yet become free from the effects of that Covid-induced inflation. Had the Chinese authorities acted with speed and candour, the disaster might have been averted and millions of human lives could have been saved. The book also exposes the hypocrisy of American liberal media which accused President Donald Trump of not doing enough to curtail the spread of Covid. However, even the limited measures he initiated in Jan 2020 to close down American airspace to incoming traffic from China were condemned by much of the media as racist. At the same time, the author points out with concern the countries such as Taiwan and South Korea which excelled in containing the disease. This feat was achieved using surveillance of smart phones used by the public which infringed on civil rights and privacy. These nations could pull this off under the Asian dictum that an individual’s rights are subservient to the welfare of the society. This runs counter to western ideals which put the individual before anything else. The leeway such technologies afford to autocratic regimes is another serious issue.

Ferguson’s writing is profound and well-researched. This book is not a page-turner, but it will reward you for the time spent in assimilating the several nuances to every proposition presented diligently by the author. There is indeed a palpable link between the text to cultural icons such as paintings, literature and music, indicating the author’s intimate familiarity to these areas. This book includes a scathing criticism of China in the epilogue accusing it of being autocratic and illiberal. This is a welcome change from the behaviour of international organisations such as WHO which faithfully toed the Chinese narrative on Covid. The WHO’s spineless incompetence was exposed even in innocuous issues like naming the variants of virus mutations which was done according to the Greek alphabet. After variant ‘mu’ was named, the next in line were the letters ‘nu’ and ‘xi’. WHO was worried that the name ‘xi’ would upset the Chinese dictator Xi Jinping. So they dropped it as well as the earlier letter ‘nu’ and selected ‘omicron’, which succeeds ‘xi’. Considering this in mind, Ferguson’s tirade against China is well directed. There is a long chapter on the economic consequences of Covid. Having been written in Aug-Sep 2020 when the progress of the disease was still uncertain, this chapter lacks depth and meaningful analysis. This appears too much US-centric. The arguments look premature and do not raise above discussing American politics and how its bureaucracy bungled the response measures. The whole chapter looks pointless when viewed in light of the book’s grand title.

The book is recommended.

Rating: 3 Star