There are two approaches to answer a query of history. Why did a unique war take location? One way of answering the query is possibly since one party wanted some thing and the other party did not want to give it. The other way could be that wars are inevitable as human societies develop from the primitive to contemporary and communitarian life yields to individualism. As geographical boundaries are drawn and nation-states come into becoming. As the acquisitive nature of state and humans unfolds. The answers can go on: Wars by no means cease to take location, only their nature modifications, from military to trade, from hot to cold to possibly hot once again.
One can say that the initial method focuses on instant elements, although not simplistically, although in the second, the causes are attributed to lengthy-term evolution of historical forces, although not entirely ignoring the instant elements. There are merits and demerits in each the methodologies, but coherence in the narrative is the essential, with no which each drop relevance.
Niall Ferguson is a grand historian, so he delves deep into the subjects he picks up and by no means restricts himself to his location of expertise—financial history—but examines the whole gamut of disciplines—science, medicine, technologies, history, economics, politics, nuclear technologies, epidemiology.
Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe is no various from his other books in terms of writing style, with the evaluation of causes and effects of disasters becoming lengthy-winding and more than generally meandering. The conclusions are nonetheless hazy. The overload of info about just about every discipline beneath the sun is so immense that the reader may possibly be left puzzled by what she’s reading and, just after finishing, may possibly obtain tricky to fully grasp what, according to the author, are the standard causes and effects of any disaster, and how can they be avoided or can they be avoided at all?
To be clear, the book has been written in the backdrop of the outbreak of Covid-19, but because the virus continues to devastate, it focuses on the basic history of catastrophe—all sorts of disasters, from geological to geopolitical, from biological to technological.
The essential learnings are: there’s no big distinction in between all-natural and man-made disasters. Disasters cannot be predicted. The scale of the contagion can not be understood by studying only the virus, but also the social network it attacks. Heads of governments cannot be singularly blamed for badly handling disasters. It’s simpler to spot and blame the instant causes of disasters, but basically the blame should really rest largely on the lengthy-term structural causes, which are tricky to spot at initial go. And last but not the least, the Covid-19 virus is top to one more cold war in between the US and China.
This is how Ferguson explains: “We cannot study the history of catastrophes, natural or man-made—though the dichotomy is somewhat false—apart from the history of economics, society, culture, and politics. Disasters are rarely entirely exogenous events, with the exception of a massive meteor strike, which hasn’t happened in sixty-six million years, or an alien invasion, which hasn’t happened at all. Even a catastrophic earthquake is only as catastrophic as the extent of urbanisation along the fault line—or the shoreline, if it triggers a tsunami. A pandemic is made up of a new pathogen and the social networks that it attacks. We cannot understand the scale of the contagion by studying only the virus itself, because the virus will infect only as many people as social networks allow it to. At the same time, a catastrophe lays bare the societies and states that it strikes… exposing some as fragile, others as resilient, and others as antifragile”.
To illustrate his theory of disasters, Ferguson requires the reader on a tour across the globe because ancient occasions, examining wars, famines, finish of empires, pandemics, HIV, rise of science, development and expansion of social networks, and political incompetence of significant states in dealing with disasters.
For apportioning blame for terrible handling of disasters, Ferguson has laid down two forms of theory of errors: Active and latent. Active errors are committed by individuals in direct make contact with with the human-technique interface and are generally referred to as human errors. Latent errors are the delayed consequences of technical and organisational actions and choices, such as reallocating sources, altering the scope of a position, or adjusting staffing.
To illustrate this, he provides the instance of the sinking of the Titanic, exactly where although the blame for the sinking can be attributed to the employees manning the ship (active error), the flaw in the style of the ship itself (latent error) can not be overlooked. He examines the Chernobyl disaster also making use of this framework, and ultimately comes to the case of Covid-19 to examine how fair it is to lay the blame solely at the doors of Donald Trump and Boris Johnson.
Though he does not absolve the two leaders, in the very same breath, he highlights the failure of the bureaucracy and health-related experts. “Who was to blame for the fact that the two biggest English speaking countries handled the first wave of Covid-19 so much worse than their Asian and European peers? For most journalists, the answer was blindingly obvious: the two most populist leaders, Boris Johnson and Donald Trump. Neither can be said to have handled the crisis ably, to put it mildly. But to turn the story of Covid-19 into a morality play—The Populists’ Nemesis—is to miss the more profound systemic and societal failure that occurred, in a way that future historians will surely see as facile,” Ferguson writes.
Here, he also brings out the fallacy of interpretations based on the wonderful males theory of history. Quoting Tolstoy, he says that a king, just after all, is history’s slave. “Inevitable laws of history are generally scoffed at; the public remains wedded to the great man school of history, even if academic historians eschew it,” he writes. The reasoning is that formally a leader sits atop a hierarchical organisational chart, issuing edicts that are transmitted down to the lowest functionary. In reality, leaders are hubs in significant and complicated networks.
“Arguing that Trump could have averted the public health disaster is rather like saying that Bill Clinton could have prevented the dismemberment of Bosnia or the Rwandan genocide. It is like claiming that Bush could have saved New Orleans from Hurricane Katrina or avoided the 2008 financial crisis, or that Obama had the power to avert or end quickly the Syrian civil war—or the capacity to save hundreds of thousands of Americans from opioid overdoses,” Ferguson writes.
Ferguson is extremely crucial of lockdowns as a way to fight the virus and as an alternative favours social distancing, testing, mask wearing, and contract tracing as the way to deal with it on a lengthy-term basis. Here, he provides the instance of nations like Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore, New Zealand, and Israel, which handled the pandemic competently with no resorting to lockdowns. Lockdowns, according to Ferguson, took a heavy toll on the financial activities and, in turn, brought misery to the working population. The expense advantage evaluation, according to him, did not justify lockdowns, as it was aimed at saving lives of the elderly whose residuary life in any case was shorter than these of the younger working population who bore the brunt of the stalled economy. And lockdowns, more than checking, only postpone the disaster. “Most people, however, will be unable to resist the temptations of post-lockdown gregariousness. There will be unsafe socialising just as there still is unsafe sex, even after more than three decades and thirty million deaths from HIV,” Ferguson concludes.
From examining pandemics, lockdowns and financial expenses, the book’s concluding chapters abruptly leap to examine the emerging cold war in between the US and China, which, although exciting, appears out of location.
Interesting as nicely as confusing, Doom is definitely a magisterial work by Ferguson, if one goes by the facts packed, backed by impeccable investigation and the variety of disciplines tackled. But then, it tends to make the story digress so a lot that the central theme gets lost in the course of action. By no implies an uncomplicated book, maybe a concluding chapter summarising the author’s findings would have helped make it more readable and even well known.
Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe
Niall Ferguson
Penguin Random House
Pp 496, Rs 999