Once More Exploring the Niall: A Review of Niall Ferguson's Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe

 

Niall Ferguson, as I noted a few years ago in my review of The Great Derangement, seems to consist of two or more authorial personas. Having now read Doom, his most recent book, I can confirm and expand this observation. Ferguson indeed has multiple authorial personalities, and I believe that he gives voice to most of them in this book. (Although it's thoroughly footnoted and referenced, I find the archive-digging, monograph-writing historian is the missing persona in this book). But we do experience the scholar-data-digger; the purveyor of sweeping narrative; the innovative analyst; the philosopher of (and about) history; and the political commentator. Reading this book, I sensed that while quarantined by the pandemic, Ferguson performed a mind-dump into this book. But I say this not by way of criticism. The contents of Ferguson's mind never prove boring. Aggravating at times, yes; but never dull. When I went back in my blog over the last twelve years, I find many considerations of his work, some enthusiastic and some critical; but--at least to my mind at the time--certainly worth having read and commenting upon. This work doesn't disappoint, even if it is a bit unwieldy and unfocused. 

The overarching theme of the book concerns the human reactions to catastrophes and how responses can vary for good or ill. Catastrophes happen; some are natural disasters, some man-made. We can't control earthquakes or volcanic reactions in the least bit, nor can we hope to completely tame droughts and floods and hurricanes, although we've certainly--if unwittingly--learned how to exacerbate them. So while we have little or no control over the occurrence of some events, we do have a measure of control over how we humans anticipate and respond to natural and man-made disasters. ("Man-made"? Think "accidents" like Chernobyl, Three-Mile Island, Fukushima, Bhopal, mining disasters, plane crashes, and famines as examples.) Ferguson provides abundant examples and analyses of such occasions. Ferguson sometimes gets a bit long-winded with statistics and lists, but you come away with a comparative appreciation of the many events that have challenged humankind. 

As Ferguson turns to the recent pandemic (now likely to morph into endemic status), he compares it to the 1957 "Asian flu." The comparisons and contrasts are intriguing. The response to the arrival of the Asian flu in the U.S. was more or less business as usual in terms of risk avoidance and daily life. Of course, in writing about COVID-19, Ferguson must shift from history to the journalism of current events (he completed his manuscript in late summer 2020), so some of these observations and anticipations don't have the benefit of hindsight that history offers. Here he treads on less solid ground, and he allows his contrarian and (politically) conservative instincts freer rein. 

Toward the end, Ferguson explores The Three-Body Problem as manifest not only in Liu Cixin's sci-fi novel but also as a metaphor for the rise of China and its relation to the U.S. and the rest of the world. He also wonders (not unprofitably) off into Mary Shelley's The Last Man, Thomas Mann's Death in Venice, Margaret Atwood's MaddAdam Trilogy, and Emily St. John Mandel's Station Eleven, among others. Even the very learned historian must turn to the imagination of fiction, especially science fiction, to try to peer more deeply into the fog of the future. 

I also want to mention that Ferguson talks about some who've written about the patterns of history. Of course, there is the older school, represented by the likes of Spengler and Toynbee. But more recently we find the work of sociologist Jack Goldstone and biologist-turned-historical theorist, Peter Turchin, both of whom have promoted the "structural-demographic theory" of social and political patterns of historical events. Ferguson thinks highly of this line of thinking, but he notes (correctly, in my opinion) that such patterns are not inevitabilities but likelihoods, given the "black swan" nature of events outside the dynamics of the patters, such as natural catastrophes (earthquakes, volcanos, droughts, floods, etc.) or wars. Ferguson also touches on the recent work of investor Ray Dalio, who's posted his claim of identifying a pattern of political-economic change. The same reservations--about the effects of exogenous shocks to the system (pattern)could modify or even destroy the pattern Dalio identifies (assuming he's in some measure accurate). Ferguson, as a historian and someone who seems to appreciate history as a way of knowing, has developed some interesting ideas of his own about the contingency of history and the use of counterfactuals. (In a future blog, I intend to explore more deeply Ferguson's ideas about history, his relation to the work of R.G. Collingwood (whom he's often cited), and criticisms of Ferguson's work in relation to Collingwood's, especially as set forth by my fellow Collingwood enthusiast, David Pierce (here and here). 

Doom is a big, detailed work about what has and will no doubt continue to go seriously wrong in our world. It displays Ferguson's skills as an analyst, the breadth of his knowledge, his narrative skill, and his willingness to wade into controversy. It's classic Ferguson in one big book. And given that catastrophes of various sorts are unlikely to disappear by some magic of good fortune, we'd do well to consider what Ferguson has revealed, take heed, and govern ourselves accordingly. I don't recommend adopting a sense of doom, but we certainly could use a strong dose of prudence. 

Thoughts for the Day: Wednesday 9 June 2021

 

Time of the Magicians

Wolfram Eilenberger

Wittgenstein called upon one of philosophy’s most distinguished images of the inescapable problem of epistemology: the extent to which we, trapped as we are entirely within the internal space of our own experiential subjectivity, can have any reliable knowledge whatsoever of the outside world, or connect with the interiority of others.

Collingwood's the Idea of History

Peter Johnson

What Collingwood tends to think of as the animal side of human nature – feelings, appetites, desires and, even, more contestably, the emotions – is something which it is not possible to know historically. There can be no history of love, only a history of thought about love; no history of dreams, only a history of dreams as consciously recounted. A history of the feelings is, then, close to being an oxymoron, since, as Collingwood writes in a dramatic passage, ‘we shall never know how the flowers smelt in the garden of Epicurus, or how Nietzsche felt the wind in his hair as he walked on the mountains; we cannot relive the triumph of Archimedes or the bitterness of Marius’ (IH 296).

The Inevitability of Tragedy

Barry Gewen

“There exists in our society,” Arendt complained, “a widespread fear of judging.” The genuine statesman had no choice but to judge, and judgment, Kissinger said, demanded “character and courage . . . vision and determination . . . wisdom and foresight.” And where did correct judgment come from? Insofar as policy depended on nonquantifiable choices, there was no avoiding questions of morality. “All political action,” Strauss said, “implies thought of the good.” Kissinger wrote that “the great human achievements must be fused with enhanced powers of human, transcendent and moral judgment.” If artificial intelligence came to dominate or replace human thinking, “What is the role of ethics?”

Conservatism

Edmund Fawcett

The term “individualism” had no settled use. As an innocuous moral shorthand, it picked out four profound and well-attested convictions with long pedigrees in the common tradition. First of all, morally speaking, people mattered as people, not as men or women, Jews, Christians, or Muslims, blacks or whites, rich or poor. Nobody went naked in society. Everyone had to wear something. Their particular social clothes, however, were morally irrelevant. Second, everyone mattered equally. If social clothing was morally irrelevant, nobody could properly be excluded from society’s concern, denied its protections, or exempted from its demands. Third, everyone had a sphere of privacy that was no one else’s business and on which neither state nor society might intrude. And fourth, everyone had in them seeds of capability and personal growth, which could not be left untended without moral loss.

David and Goliath

Malcolm Gladwell

Arreguín-Toft then asked the question slightly differently. What happens in wars between the strong and the weak when the weak side does as    David    did and refuses to fight the way the bigger side wants to fight, using unconventional or guerrilla tactics? The answer: in those cases, the weaker party’s winning percentage climbs from 28.5 percent to 63.6 percent. To put that in perspective, the United States’ population is ten times the size of Canada’s. If the two countries went to war and Canada chose to fight unconventionally, history would suggest that you ought to put your money on Canada.

The Three Languages of Politics

Arnold Kling

The three axes allow each tribe to assert moral superiority. The progressive asserts moral superiority by denouncing oppression and accusing others of failing to do so. The conservative asserts moral superiority by denouncing barbarism and accusing others of failing to do so. The libertarian asserts moral superiority by denouncing coercion and accusing others of failing to do so.

Thoughts for the Day: Monday 7 June 2021

 

The Uninhabitable Earth

David Wallace-Wells

If the average American were confined by the carbon footprint of her European counterpart, U.S. carbon emissions would fall by more than half. If the world’s richest 10 percent were limited to that same footprint, global emissions would fall by a third. And why shouldn’t they be?

N.B. A great question. A moral issue. And it does suggest that "the rich" (as the top 10%) are pigs.

The Case for Keto

Gary Taubes

The alternative [theory of weight loss], the one that’s based on biology rather than (supposedly) physics, is: All diets that result in weight loss do so on one basis and one basis only: They reduce circulating levels of insulin; they create and prolong the negative stimulus of insulin deficiency.

Plato's Revenge

William Ophuls

Evolution occurs not by natural selection alone but mostly as an outcome of the dynamics of self-organization. “Matter’s incessant attempts to organize itself into ever more complex structures,” says Mitchell Waldrop, produces an emergent order that is then honed by natural selection to produce the rich panoply of life, so a “deep, inner creativity … is woven into the very fabric of nature.”

Dark Star Rising

Gary Lachman

Clearly one thing magicians and politicians are both interested in is power. The power of positive thinking, yes, but also the power over others.

Conservatism

Edmund Fawcett

Eric Voegelin, another Austrian émigré, dated the Utopianism of liberal modernity to a wrong turn by idealistic early Christians who thought fallen man redeemable by worldly means. A conservative historian of ideas in Chicago, Richard Weaver, dated humanity’s fated lapse into liberal modernism to scholastic theologians of the fourteenth-century who displaced what is naturally good for people from morality’s driving seat and put there instead whatever people choose to want.

Crises of the Republic

Hannah Arendt

The question remains why so many of the new preachers of violence [e.g., Sartre & "Maoists"] are unaware of their decisive disagreement with Karl Marx’s teachings, or, to put it another way, why they cling with such stubborn tenacity to concepts and doctrines that have not only been refuted by factual developments but are clearly inconsistent with their own politics.

Thoughts for the Day: Sunday 6 June 2021

 

The Wedge

Scott Carney, Amelia Boone, and Dave Asprey

Now we are masters at repairing physical injuries. Break a leg or show up in the emergency room with a gunshot wound, and you’re pretty likely to survive. Yet for all those achievements, Western medicine is pretty darn bad at managing chronic illness.

N.B. But we're damned good at creating chronic illness,!

Dark Star Rising

Gary Lachman

What is this strange need to lead, and the equally strange one to follow? What is this will to power? Why do we pursue it? Must it always corrupt? Charismatic leaders cast a spell over their followers in the same way that a magician casts one over those he wants to enchant. The power of the image, of glamour, of one’s self-confidence, is at work in both—as it is in the confidence trickster. The medium is the imagination, whether in its traditional forms or in its new electronic version.

The Force of Character

James Hillman

Some thinkers would discard “consciousness” altogether. They call it the ghost in the machine; they assert that the relation between consciousness and brain is an insoluble problem, or that the problem results from the wrong question. They are right—so long as consciousness is undefiled by qualities, a sheer abstraction. To conceive of consciousness as energy aware of itself makes matters worse. It defines the one abstraction by means of three others: energy, awareness, and self.

To deconstruct this characterless, senseless world without color, taste, or sound means letting it decompose into its multitudinous qualities. It means taking the world as it is, a cornucopia of phenomena, and saving the phenomena from abstractions. Nature does indeed abhor a vacuum. A world defined by its qualities and perceived as qualities requires the same richness of its observers. Like knows like. If the world is a messy many, then the definition of consciousness follows one proposed early in the twentieth century by the French philosopher Henri Bergson: “qualitative multiplicity.”

The knower becomes a bundle of traits and capacities, the ability to abstract merely one among many equally valuable potentials. The inmost nature of this knower, character, could no longer be contained within a single central core. It, too, would be imagined as an interplay of many characteristics. Consciousness would no longer be conceived as a clear light hovering over the face of the deep, observing each thing in its kind. Rather, the light would fracture, fluctuate, show variegations that reflect the characteristics of the world, our consciousness replying to its character. We would conceive of consciousness to be as multitudinous as the world, a microcosm of the macrocosm: as without, so within.

Commanding Hope

Thomas Homer-Dixon

"All of us…are preparing a renaissance beyond the limits of nihilism. But few of us know it." --Albert Camus

A Few Lessons From Sherlock Holmes

Peter Bevelin

“It is of the first importance...not to allow your judgment to be biased by personal qualities...The emotional qualities are antagonistic to clear reasoning. I assure you that the most winning woman I ever knew was hanged for poisoning three little children for their insurance-money, and the most repellant man of my acquaintance is a philanthropist who has spent nearly a quarter of a million upon the London poor.”--"Sherlock Holmes" in The Sign of the Four

Thoughts for the Day: Saturday 5 June 2021

The Price of Peace

Zachary D. Carter

FDR’s first inaugural address was a bold assertion of public authority over the banking sector and a nakedly populist attack on the titans of high finance. “Plenty is at our doorstep, but a generous use of it languishes in the very sight of the supply,” Roosevelt said. “Primarily this is because the rulers of the exchange of mankind’s goods have failed, through their own stubbornness and their own incompetence, have admitted their failure, and abdicated. Practices of the unscrupulous money changers stand indicted in the court of public opinion, rejected by the hearts and minds of men….They know only the rules of a generation of self-seekers. They have no vision, and when there is no vision the people perish.”

A Room of One's Own

Virginia Woolf

Money dignifies what is frivolous if unpaid for.

Rudolf Steiner

Gary Lachman

“Truth, for Goethe, is “a revelation emerging at the point where the inner world of man meets external reality.... It is a synthesis of world and mind, yielding the happiest assurance of the eternal harmony of existence.”

The New Leviathan

R. G. Collingwood

39. 2. I will now conclude this theoretical account of civilization with some remarks gathered up under two heads: the first ‘Law and Order’, the second ‘Peace and Plenty’. 39. 21. Both are familiar phrases. Each is a name for civilization in one of its main aspects. The first is a name for civilization as a task: it is a name for what you have to do to be civilized. The second is a name for civilization as a product: it is a name for what you get by being civilized, the fruits of the civilized life.

The Science of Conjecture

James Franklin

There is a considerable conceptual affinity, indeed, between reason of state and Pascal’s wager in that both involve action on opinions whose low probability is compensated for by a high payoff; deceit for reason of state is justified in terms of the allegedly overriding consideration of the safety of the realm, while acting as if one believed in God is recommended by the wager on account of the infinite gain to be expected, and loss to be avoided, if religion is true.

Thoughts for the Day: Monday 31 May 2021--Memorial Day

 

The Idea of History

R. G. Collingwood

History, so far from depending on testimony, has therefore no relation with testimony at all. Testimony is merely chronicle. So far as anyone speaks of authorities or of accepting statements or the like, he is talking of chronicle and not of history. History is based on a synthesis of two things which only exist in that synthesis: evidence and criticism.

N.B. As a lawyer with a fair amount of trial work under my belt, this reluctance to accept testimony as a form of evidence puzzles me. Of course, testimony can prove unreliable for reasons intentional (to wit, lying) and through inadvertence (faulty memory; see the work of psychologist Elizebeth Loftus). But this is why we cross-examine testimony. The historian can, in her own way, cross-examine past "testimony." Some testimony may also be hearsay, but that doesn't necessarily equate with unreliability.

Amusing Ourselves to Death

Neil Postman

My argument is limited to saying that a major new medium changes the structure of discourse; it does so by encouraging certain uses of the intellect, by favoring certain definitions of intelligence and wisdom, and by demanding a certain kind of content—in a phrase, by creating new forms of truth-telling.

The Caretakers of the Cosmos

Gary Lachman

Immediacy perception gives us the bare facts, the discreet things that populate our awareness, the surface of Bergson’s analysis and the ‘granulated’ bits and pieces of Schwaller de Lubicz’s ‘cerebral’ consciousness.

Essays in Understanding, 1930-1954

Hannah Arendt

It was not until the post-war years [referring to WWI], which brought a willingness to tear down outmoded intellectual structures, that Germany would offer a soil in which Kierkegaardian thought could take root. Nietzsche and the so-called life philosophy (Lebensphilosophie), Bergson, Dilthey, and Simmel had prepared the way for Kierkegaard in Germany. In Nietzsche, systematic philosophy saw its fundamental tenets threatened for the first time, for Nietzsche’s destruction of old psychological assumptions revealed the extra-philosophical, psychic, and vital energies that actually motivated philosophers to philosophize.

The Case for Keto

Gary Taubes

The counterargument, which I’m defending, is Astwood’s belief that those who fatten easily are fundamentally, physiologically and metabolically different from those who don’t.

Thoughts for the Day: Sunday 30 May 2021

 

Apologies to the Grandchildren

William Ophuls

As recent storms and quakes demonstrate, “civilization exists by geological consent, subject to change without notice.” (Will Durant, 1946).

Apologies to the Grandchildren

William Ophuls

That industrial civilization is being strangled by a slowly tightening noose of ecological scarcity has been apparent to anyone who cares to examine the evidence without prejudice. Sadly, this patent reality continues to be mostly denied in societies made up largely of the passively uninformed and the passionately misinformed.

1984

George Orwell

The masses never revolt of their own accord, and they never revolt merely because they are oppressed. Indeed, so long as they are not permitted to have standards of comparison, they never even become aware that they are oppressed.

The Ingenuity Gap

Thomas Homer-Dixon

Our supply of ingenuity, I soon recognized, involves both the generation of good ideas and their implementation within society.

The Principles of Art

R. G. Collingwood

The aesthetic experience, as we look back at it from a point of view where we distinguish theoretical from practical activity, thus presents characteristics of both kinds. It is a knowing of oneself and of one’s world, these two knowns and knowings being not yet distinguished, so that the self is expressed in the world, the world consisting of language whose meaning is that emotional experience which constitutes the self, and the self consisting of emotions which are known only as expressed in the language which is the world.

Prometheus Rising

Robert Anton Wilson

The “soul” or Circuit VII is constant, because it is, as the Chinese say, void or no-form. It plays all the roles you play — oral dependent, emotional tyrant, cool rationalist, romantic seducer, neurosomatic healer, neurogenetic Evolutionary Visionary — but it is none of them. It is plastic. It is no-form, because it is all forms. It is the “creative Void” of the Taoists.

The Quest for Hermes Trismegistus

Gary Lachman

The difference between the Gnostics and the Hermeticists is that Hermetic man doesn't want to escape from the world, but to realize his full potential within it, in order to embrace his obligations, so that, as Hermes tells Asclepius, he can 'raise his sight to heaven while he takes care of the earth'.

In the Dark Places of Wisdom by Peter Kingsley

 

1999 publication

In this relatively short, easy-to-read book, Peter Kingsley sets forth findings from archeology and classical tests that paint a very different portrait of one of the founders of Western metaphysical thinking, Parmenides. Kingsley's tale of discoveries and insights supports his contention that Parmenides and those around him were profoundly concerned with healing and a deeper form of knowledge than simply rational thought. "Dying before you die" is the title of one of the chapters, and it's a familiar refrain to me, having recently read Brian Muraresku's The Immortality Code, in which "dying before you die" was the dominant motif throughout his account of his search through ancient sources. (In fact, I'd taken a stab at Kingsley's book many years ago, but it didn't stick, but Muraresku's praise for Kingsley's work brought me back to it.) 

I'm not a classicist and I'm not in any way qualified to shift through the evidence that might counter Kingsley's contention that Parmenides was first and foremost a healer. I get the impression that such a contention is outside the mainstream of thinking in the classics, at least when Kingsley first promoted this thesis. But having read a bit in this area, including Pierre Hadot's Philosophy as a Way of Life and The Present Alone is Our Happiness, Thomas McEvilley's The Shape of Ancient Thought, and Muraresku's recent book, I'm not surprised that the roots of classical philosophy are found in mysticism, that is religious, spiritual, and healing practices that arise from deep within the cultural tradition. In short, I suspect that Kingsley is on the right track. 

I noted in perusing some other reviews, I find that some reviewers noted the very simple style in which this book is written. This is true, it is an easy read, especially given the subject matter. But while Kingsley writes simply, he thinks deeply. I found myself racing through the book while noting many gems of insight and argument as I went, so don't let the simplicity of the prose deceive you. Also, he doesn't use footnotes, but he has a section of references at the end of the book for each chapter for those who want to take a deeper look. It's especially useful if you read French, German, and Italian in addition to English and have access to an academic library! 

Kingsley has made a fascinating argument here, and I'm looking forward to reading his Reality, which appears to be a sequel of sorts (originally published in 2004 with a revised and updated version published in 2020). I also look forward to reading the "prequel," Ancient Philosophy, Mystery and Magic: Empedocles and Pythagorean Tradition  (1995), which may not prove such an easy read given that it's published by OUP.  

Kingsley is onto something here, and I look forward to continuing the journey with him.