Epic cherry-picking

Book review of Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe

This is a typical Niall Ferguson book. A grand tome of the history, politics, philosophy, economics, mathematics, science and sociology of catastrophes. Every time Dr Ferguson sets out to write a book on a specific topic, the first few pages make it abundantly clear that he intends his work to be the definitive epic, as he has done with 13 other books. This book is no different.

For a historian, the author comes across as a great polymath. The book encompasses a stupendous range of subjects to articulate the history of a wide swathe of catastrophes from the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 AD to Covid in 2020.

There are some running themes in the book and the author goes to great lengths to cherry-pick history to affirm them. The first theme is that the classification of disasters as “man-made” versus “natural” disaster is naïve. The second is that it is simplistic to blame individual leaders for causing or the handling of  the cause or management of a humanitarian disaster. The third is that there is no decipherable pattern of catastrophes, so it is futile to plan for one. The fourth is the Stalinist notion of “one death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic”; meaning, when the humanitarian toll of a catastrophe is enormous, contrary to belief, life reverts to normal afterwards seamlessly and quickly.

The book starts by citing “Cliodynamic” theories that attempt to glean patterns in socio-political change using history, data and anthropology. It then dives into the ideas of Poisson, Gaussian and power law statistical distributions to make the point that disasters do not fit into a pattern or statistical model. The book extends this argument to make the broader point that most life events and not just catastrophes, are random and unpredictable. The book asks — what explains the fact that of all the countless godmen and preachers, only three have attracted a large following (Buddha, Jesus & Muhammad)?

Perhaps the most important argument that Dr Ferguson seems to want to make is that the distinction between man-made and natural disasters is a false binary. The cornerstone of his argument is that it is humankind’s behaviour that distinguishes an event as being innocuous or a disaster. An earthquake is a disaster only because humans have chosen to live in earthquake-prone zones. An earthquake in the mid- Pacific Ocean is not a disaster, just an event. So, in the author’s view, classifying an earthquake as a natural disaster and the bombing of Hiroshima as a man-made one is fallacious. Under this reasoning, the raging debate over the origins of Covid-19 as a “lab malfunction” versus a “natural transmission” seems moot.

The book is titled “the politics of catastrophe” so it delves at length into the myth of “political incompetence” as an explanation for disasters.

Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe

Author: Niall Ferguson

Publisher: Penguin 

Pages: 472; Price: Rs 999

 

Dr Ferguson relies on the old Tolstoy versus Carlyle debate over history — is the history of the world the history of events or the history of leaders? In the Tolstoy school, leaders are individuals who happen to be at the centre when historical events unfold while in the Carlyle school, leaders make historical events. 

Dr Ferguson chooses Tolstoy to exonerate leaders from Winston Churchill for the Bengal famine to Donald Trump for Covid-19. He also challenges Amartya Sen’s famous thesis that famines are essentially political outcomes and democracies prevent famines. The book cherry-picks historical events of the causes of the Irish potato famine to the Bengal famine to point out that it’s the small mistakes of small people or unexpected natural mishaps that led to these famines, not the policies of individual leaders or governments. The book says, “in seeking to lay the blame for the famine on Churchill, historians have failed to heed the Tolstoy principle”. The author seems to have forgotten the aphorism: "If one is not to be blamed for the drought, then one ought not be praised for the rains”. His exoneration of the British Empire for the Bengal famine is sure to irk many Indian readers.

Dr Ferguson fell into the trap of writing about Covid-19 even as the pandemic continues to unfold. Expectedly, his argument, made when the book was being written last year, that Covid-19’s closest parallel is the Asian flu pandemic of 1957-58 and not the Spanish flu of 1918 turns out to be premature and hollow. Nevertheless, the chapter that looks back at pandemics and disasters through historical anecdotes and political contexts is the most interesting in the book.

In keeping with the desire to establish its “epic” nature, the book speculates on the geo-political impact of Covid, the possibility of a new world order (there’s no new order, says the author), the displacement of the United States by China as the world’s superpower (ain’t happening, he says). The book ends on a philosophically optimistic note by claiming that “a catastrophe separates the fragile from the resilient” and quotes Nietzsche —“what doesn’t kill me makes me stronger” to make the cheery point that nations and societies can emerge stronger from this pandemic.

The book is not an easy read. The vast canvas sprinkled with vibrant anecdotes, counter-factual history, provocative arguments, erudite scholarship and profound observations can hold the reader. But the smug tone and the tinge of imperialist supremacy could put off others. In my view, the book will be an inevitable addition in the bookshelf of Covid-19 books to come.

The reviewer is a political economist, and a senior politician of the Congress party