Who Will Read Niall Fergusons Doom ?
Many of those lessons are reasonable, if not particularly original. There is no such thing as an entirely natural disaster, Ferguson rightly notes. They are all, on some level, man-made political disasters, drawing their significance and impact from the ways in which they interact with social systems and political cultures: from the state capacity to enforce quarantines or roll out testing kits to the housing patterns that put us at perennial risk of mudslides and earthquakes. What makes disasters significant is whether or not there is contagion, that is, some form of ripple effect or networked cascade. Every disaster is a moment of truth, of revelation, he writes, in a phrase the likes of which you have read countless times since last spring, an experience that lays bare the societies and states that it strikes.  Fergusons eight chapters on the comparative study of disasters lack the polemical force of his briefer reflections on Covid-19. One comes away having learned new random facts (the diameter of South Africas Vredefort Crater, it turns out, is 190 miles) but absent any serious understanding of which matter most or why. Long block quotations go unpacked and unreflected upon. Few of the books major conceptual claims are novel. Its typology of serious risk-events, for instance, stitches together three categories developed by others: gray rhinos (Michele Wucker), black swans (Nassim Taleb), and dragon kings (Didier Sornette). And there are paragraphs and pages, on topics like cognitive bias and network science, that are lifted nearly word-for-word from Fergusons earlier books and articles. We will certainly face more major disasters in our lifetimes, whether industrial accidents or pandemics or existential threats like climate change and perhaps artificial intelligence. Many will ask us to reckon meaningfully with loss. Some will demand that we reimagine how we live together. Ferguson might easily have sifted through his vast Wunderkammer of catastrophe for cases in which societies emerged stronger from times that tested them, to help us see how to build social and political structures that are at least resilient and at best antifragile to face future disasters. But to write that book, Ferguson would have had to engage more generously with the environmentalists and Green politicians who have become the most urgent voices calling for sociopolitical resilience. He rather concludes that these radical prophets, people who seek to inflict economic penance to avert the end of the world, have little to teach his elite readers and boardroom acolytes. It is the relationship of formal power and informal influence that makes the Fergusonian world go round. Unusually for a professional historian, much of his work has been made possible not by archival serendipity but by the high and mighty. His masterful account of the Rothschild banking family was born when Sir Evelyn de Rothschild told Ferguson it might be a good way to mark the bicentenary of the familys arrival in England. He is now halfway into a two-volume biography of Henry Kissinger, who proposed the project himself after seeing Ferguson at a fancy party hosted by Conrad Black. In his own telling, Ferguson has never been interested in wielding power, rather in studying it: what it looks like, how it works, what it is for, how it may be lost.