The Joe Walker Podcast - A General Theory Of Catastrophe — Niall Ferguson

Episode Date: June 6, 2021

Niall Ferguson is one of the world's most renowned historians. He is the Milbank Family Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and a senior faculty fellow of the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard. He is the author of sixteen books, including most recently Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe.Full transcript available at: josephnoelwalker.com/niall-fergusonSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Ladies and gentlemen, this episode is brought to you by my weekend email. As many of you now know, every weekend I share some interesting links, articles and sources that I've been reading, watching or listening to. Last weekend, for example, I shared five links, including Clive James' favourite poems to read aloud and the greatest essay written by an Australian. The essay is titled Dermagum Anangiamere by W.E.H. Stanner. I'd love to share a bit about the essay here before we start the episode because I think it's such a great piece of writing. If you're one of those people who gets angry about long introductions, you can just skip

ahead by four minutes or so. So in 2014, as a 21-year-old uni student, I traveled up to Darwin to begin a five-month policy internship at the North Australian Aboriginal Justice Agency. Before heading up I tried to read as much as I could about Indigenous Australia and one of the names that was continually recommended to me was W.E.H. Stanner. Stanner was surely Australia's greatest anthropologist. He was the guy who coined the word every when to describe the dreaming and the phrase the great Australian silence to describe the way Australians had put Indigenous history in a memory hole. Stanner's essay, Dermagym and Nangyameri, is still the best thing I've read

on Indigenous Australia. It's a biographic account of Dermagym, a Nangyameri man who Stanner met in 1932 on the Daly River in the Northern Territory. The essay opens with a tribal battle between two groups of Aboriginal men, a battle at which Dermagham stands out as the most skillful and graceful fighter. The essay then follows Stanner's blossoming friendship with Dermagham and, poignantly, Dermagham's growing despair as Aboriginal high culture disintegrates around him, what Emile Durkheim would call anime. It was first published in 1960, and it's won admiration from across the political spectrum. Robert Mann wrote that it is the finest essay by an Australian that I've read.

And Keith Winchardt argued that Stanner was one of the most impressive essayists Australia has ever produced, and that Dermagum was his masterpiece. So let me read you the opening paragraph. Here goes. Quote, one wintry afternoon in 1932 on the Daly River in North Australia, I saw that some of the men in an Aboriginal camp near my own had painted themselves garishly with earth pigment. I knew this to be a sign of impending trouble, but no one would give me any clear idea of what was to come. At about three o'clock, the men began to go unobtrusively downriver, and some women and older children drifted off in the same direction. Each man carried a woomera, or spear thrower, and a handful of mixed spears, but this fact in itself meant little, for in those days every male Aborigine went armed on the shortest journey. Curiosity overcame any fear that I might be

unwelcome if I followed, so I made haste after them as soon as I could. By the time I made my camp and stores as secure as possible, the party was lost to sight in the timber. I had to cast about a good deal to find the right direction, but eventually the sound of a distant uproar led me out of the savannah and onto the edge of a clearing where I could see more than 100 men, my friends among them, locked in a noisy battle. End quote. I will leave you with that cliffhanger,

but if you're an infivore who enjoys reading widely, including things like Dermagum and Nangiameri, Australia's greatest ever essay, then you should join my mailing list and get access to my weekend emails. To do so, head to thejspod.com. That is thejspod.com. That's all. Back to the show. You're listening to the Jolly Swagman Podcast. Here's your host, Joe Walker. Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, swagmen and swagettes, welcome back to the show. It is great to have you back.

And before we get started, I want to take a moment to say a big thank you to everyone who's been writing in recently. I get to speak with many listeners by email or Twitter message. Sometimes I don't reply, which is just because I have a life outside of the podcast, but most of the time I do. And I really appreciate your thoughts and your messages. So please don't stop writing in and sharing your thoughts. I feel like I have one of the smartest and wisest audiences in Australia, and I'm very lucky that I get to do this podcast for you all. In many ways, I feel like we're doing it together, and I'm craving some sort of in-person event, which I think I'll do in Sydney later in the year. Obviously, given Fortress Australia, that means that attendance will be limited to

Aussies at most, but I'm hoping to be back in America next year or whenever borders reopen. So, American friends, let's pencil in some events in your cities in 2022. I will keep you posted. To today's episode, our guest is Neil Ferguson. I first read Neil back in 2013 when I picked up his book, Civilization. I've read much more of him since then, and I even remember going and seeing him live at the Sydney Opera House with a mate in 2016. Shout out to Mon. I've found Neil to be consistently one of the most eloquent and erudite historians, probably even writers in the world today. To give you an indication of his standing among the world's writers, Stephen

Pinker picked up something Neil had written as one of four examples of good 21st century writing featured in Pinker's book, The Sense of Style. Please note, just because I admire Neil in many ways does not mean I necessarily agree with all of his opinions. It's possible to respect someone and have a conversation with them without agreeing with everything they say, even in 2021. Having said that, I do think Neil is a little misunderstood and often misrepresented by writers on the left. In this conversation, I hope you get to see another side of Neil. I should preface it with the embarrassing admission that this was the second podcast we recorded. In the first one, Neil forgot to record his end and I had neglected

to record a backup. That was a failure on my part, not his, and Neil graciously gave me his time again, so we recorded an entirely new conversation. It's new because I wanted it to be enjoyable for Neil and I hate the idea of trying to remember and repeat a previous conversation. It feels unnatural, like acting. So I hope you enjoy this one. Without much further ado, here is the great Neil Ferguson. Neil Ferguson, welcome to the Jolly Swagman podcast. It's a pleasure to be with you, Jolly Swagman. Are we going to fess up about this? We should.

Because I think we need to. We should provide the anecdote of our own mini disaster well if you're going to write a book about disasters there will be almost inevitably disasters as you launch it and perhaps the whole book will be a disaster but at any event we had our own modest disaster in that on on friday we we had an extraordinarily rich and enlightening conversation that i think the rest of the world would have would have adored but unfortunately i forgot to record my end of the conversation so it was a monologue that that you ended up with and we decided that that on on the whole that wasn't quite enough i mean it would have been challenging for your listeners to infer my answers

to your questions but we're going to try again and i told you after we realized with ghastly sickening horror that we actually completely screwed it up that this this happened to Thomas Carlyle another Scottish historian back in the 19th century when he he lent the one and only manuscript of his history of the French Revolution to John Stuart Mill so that Mill could read it and Mill's cleaning lady thought it was rubbish and burnt the whole thing, whereupon Colal had to sit down and write it again. And compared with that challenge, doing the Jolly Swagman podcast again

seems relatively low-hanging fruit. Anyway. Did something similar happen with Wittgenstein's Tractatus, or am I making that up? Lost it in the trenches and rewrote it. I'm almost certain you're right, but I don't have the story at my fingertips and I'm not going to bluff as, you know,

as obviously I would have done at the age of 20. Well, I won't be quoted on that. But Neil, it's great to see you again. And as I mentioned to you before we started recording, I set myself the challenge of asking you an entirely fresh set of questions. So hopefully this is not only new to our audience, but new to you as well. As I said, being 57, I've forgotten all the questions that you asked the last time. So you could do this and it would be perfectly fresh to me.

Well, I might slip in one of the old ones that was good. Let's see if I notice. But you've written a new book called Doom, which is a sort of general theory of catastrophe. And if doom is death writ large, I'd like to begin by talking about death. And in the book, you quote from King Lear, I believe this is your favourite Shakespearean

quote, as flies to wanton boys away to the gods they kill us for their sport. How do you think about death and do you fear death? I don't fear death. I was brought up in a quite rigorously atheist household, my parents left the Church of Scotland really in disgust with the sectarianism that was rife in Glasgow in the 50s and 60s. And I was therefore brought up by a physicist and a physician to believe that life itself was a cosmic accident and quite possibly a joke.

And that therefore, there was nothing after this brief time that we have. And that was it. Get over it and feel lucky that you get this brief lease of life. I don't, I've never had trouble with that. I briefly found religion when I was a teenager, a very young teenager,

and my parents sent me to a summer camp unaware that it was run by the Scripture Union. I don't think my father had read the small print. And I came back and told them I'd found Jesus. And I remember my dad pulling the car over, hitting the brakes. And I was quite, you know, suggestible at that age. So he talked me out of it quite quickly.

Anyway, I'm not one of those militant atheists who comes to atheism. I was born into it. And I think never really could quite understand why anybody would want an afterlife or feel the need for one. That seemed odd to me from the minute I realised that that was one of the key offerings of Christianity. I think also that I was led into studying history by the awareness of mass death.

I think we all fear premature death, and I certainly fear the premature death of my children. Nothing would cause me more agony than if one of my children or more were to die before me. But when I was a teenager I remember it hit me that my grandfathers had fought in two immense wars, one in the first, the other in the second, and that in those wars a great many other young men of their generation had been killed, so they were amongst the lucky ones who survived. And that was probably the first historical thought I had. I remember at the same kind of time finding A.J.P. Taylor's history of the First World War lying around at home and thinking, which had a very startling cover in the paperback edition of a decomposed soldier, I think a British soldier. And essentially he was a skeleton in uniform. So this idea of premature death that is brought to you by history struck me as a powerful and haunting

thought. So I became a historian partly to work out why that had happened. And I suppose I assumed as a teenager, it was only the 1970s, that it might happen to me me it might be my lot to have to go and fight in a war and and yes I suppose I would have if I'd had to do that approached it in the same in the same spirit that my grandfathers did namely that you really just had to do your duty and hope you came through it wasn wasn't something, nobody glorified war in my family, quite the reverse. But nor did anybody, nor did anybody argue that you should be a conscientious objector

or a deserter. It was a sort of, it was a duty you did and you hoped you came through. So no, I think death was never and is not a big fear of mine other than the deaths of my children. Have attitudes to death changed in the West?

Profoundly. Far more than most of us realise. There's a wonderful book that I came across as an undergraduate, Philippe Ariès' book, The Hour of Our Death, which is a history of Western attitudes to death. And Ariès argues that in medieval times and into early modern times, death was as present and readily encountered as marriage or birth. And the rituals were in some ways similar, so that you would expect to go to funerals as often as to weddings, and you would expect to encounter deaths as well

as births. And then in the 19th century, that began to change. First, death was romanticized. Dickens specialized in beautiful deaths, but he wasn't the only one. In the 20th century, we decided that death should simply be airbrushed out so far as possible. And this was something Evelyn Waugh made fun of in one of his best books, The Loved One, which makes fun of the American way of death. But it is extraordinary that most of us never encounter death until quite late in life we're confronted by the death of a parent. I remember seeing a man die on the railway platform at, I think, Glasgow Central Station, or it may have been at A an elderly man just dropped dead almost at my feet and

that was my first encounter with death it was obvious he was dead there was no kind of frantic effort to revive him because he'd just so obviously gone but that that was unusual and I think for most of us in the developed world death is a very remote thing so much so that we can go for much of our lives simply disbelieving in our own Death or at least at least putting it off. There's a wonderful passage in in Proust's a large earth to Tom Park do in which Proust talks about his grandmother's dying and death.

And I was listening to it only the other day on a wonderful audio book version. It's very, very shrewd in its observation that even over the 100 years ago, or around 100 years ago when Proust was writing, we'd already arrived at that point at which we didn't quite believe in our own death, even on the morning of it.

It was going to take us by surprise. So this is very novel. And it explains, I think, why in the face of disaster, when suddenly your probability of death goes up, we are slightly stunned and struggle to process the reality of a higher probability of death. Proust is notoriously difficult to read. Is that your life hack, to listen to the audiobook version? I failed with Proust multiple times as a young man.

Tried it in French, tried it in the Scott Moncrief translation, and then almost abandoned it, rather as I had abandoned Mahler's symphonies. The pandemic gave me an opportunity to try again, so I tried again with Mahler, and this time I decided I would approach Proust with real help and go with the extraordinarily good audiobook recordings. And this has worked because I've overcome my impatience, my inability to get past the early part of Swan's Way. And yeah, it's a completely shaming thing, isn't it? I should be reading it in the original,

in my book line study while smoking a pipe. But I just have failed with that. And maybe now I can go back and come at it again, reading it in the original. But my French is okay, but it's not good enough that I'd get all the subtleties, I suspect. So I'm loving listening to Pr get all the subtleties I suspect so I'm I'm loving listening my way to

to priest all the way through and and and he is just such a shrewd observer of the modern condition almost at its not quite at its birth but at an early stage of it and I think as he as he talks about death uh he's as shrewd about death as he is about love. At any event, the key with things like Proust or Mahler or whatever it is you're finding tricky, it's whatever gets you through the book. John Lennon wrote a great song, Whatever Gets You Through the Night. Whatever gets you through the book, don't be proud.

Yeah. There's a different approach, which is sort of the Tylerler cowan approach which is as soon as you find something in the book that you think is flawed or you're finding the book uninteresting or difficult you just sort of toss it aside and begin a new one but i'm too loyal and too proud i tend to stick it out well i I think there are two kinds of reading. I mean, when one's reading for work, when one has to kind of grapple with some great pile of books

on the US-China relationship, which I'm currently doing, I agreed to review a bunch of those. They're not quite ten a penny at the moment. I'm certainly not going to read faithfully each of the pages of those books, but I am going to try and work out what each of those books is saying. But then reading for pleasure is a different matter, and I've hardly ever given up a book that I've embarked on as a read for pleasure. I gave up on Children of the New Forest by Captain Marriott when I was about 12. And I remember an enormous keen sense of sin as I abandoned it. It was the only book I didn't finish as a boy.

So I'm not one for tossing books aside lightly. And I'm quite a tenacious reader. I'm reading my way through the novels of Walter Scott belatedly at the moment. But that's pure, unmitigated pleasure. And even if there are occasional longueurs, which all 19th century novelists committed, I don't hold it against Scott. I read on knowing that I'll quickly enter

some new and exciting passage. Do you ever reread books? Or do you remember the last time you reread a book? There are some books that I've read multiple times. There are the books I've read to all my children. So there are plenty of those, including the Harry Potter books. The best of all the books I've ever read to a child is still Tolkien's The Hobbit,

an extraordinary book that benefits from being read aloud. So I've read The Hobbit five times, at least six if you include the time I read it for myself, and I probably read it a couple of times as a boy. I certainly read The Lord of the Rings several times when I was young. I was a devoted Tolkien reader. To my mother's great disappointment, she regarded all fantasy novels as preposterous, but I couldn't help myself. I was the black sheep of the family in that regard. The book that I've read multiple times in later life is Tolstoy's War and Peace, which is another of the reasons I became a historian. And that's a book that repays

multiple readings. As I said, I probably don't have a wonderfully good memory. That's why you could have done the same set of questions as you did on Friday without my really seeming bored. And I'm always slightly shocked by how little I've really retained and therefore how fresh the book seems I think this is a a disadvantage in one respect because in a way a historian needs to have a really good memory and have a lot of of raw data sort of floating around accessibly. On the other hand, I think if one remembered too much of each book, there might be a problem of cluttering. And I have always said to students, trust your brain to be selective without too much coercion. it'll remember the things that are memorable. And that probably will be enough.

Teaching people for many years at Oxford and Harvard, especially how to read was a part of what I did. And I would see them, there's a particular type of student, taking incredibly detailed notes, but proceeding at a snail's pace through the reading list, whereas it's much better to have read all the books on the list, even if you had to read them quite fast. And my advice to people who would get bogged down in reading was, don't worry about taking such detailed notes, read it,

and then write down the things that are memorable. And that way you can be much more efficient. And your brain will forget the boring parts. So rather than be like Tyler and throw the book aside, keep going, because there's probably a couple of nuggets between where you are and the end of the book. You'll spot them. People are sort of unfit about their reading.

They don't read in a way that they would accept in their own physical fitness. So I'm always trying to encourage younger people to think of their brains as these kind of slightly out-of-shape bodies that they can train up to be much faster and much quicker and and you've got to let the brain do what it's good at which is ultimately forgetting the boring stuff that's actually important i think that's a great heuristic and the other thing is reading compounds and the more you do it the easier it becomes because you start to recognize references you get quicker just by building that muscle and unfortunately today's

young people are distracted from reading by any number of devices and now i really do sound like i'm 57 but in fact it's a tremendous problem because they lose the ability to read War and Peace. I noticed at Harvard over the 12 years that each year when I asked who's read War and Peace, the number of people in the class would be smaller until finally nobody had. And I'm not sure that it's possible to have the power, the physical mental fitness to read War and Peace if you've spent too long gaming. And so the game world is gradually eating the book world. And that's sad because in the great works of literature,

that's where the wisdom is. It's all there. And if we lose the ability to get young people to read Tolstoy, then we are going to have... Our civilisation will start to basically be deleted. And that's a great preoccupation. That's why my children are nagged and harried and bullied into reading

and taken away from their screens, kicking and screaming. Because you've got to get that reading speed up early and then you just have to read and read and read and it is cumulative not only in the sense that you get better at reading but in a fascinating way the knowledge that you you imbibe from books is is is cumulative history is a very it's a very very much a data processing activity and you get better you should get better at being a historian over time whereas you get worse being a mathematician over time because a mathematician just has to have that that early very very rapid processing power that's really the key whereas the historian gets better until the

memory starts to go because there's just this accumulation of of references my old mentor norman stone brilliant and wayward man had read such a phenomenal amount of of european literature in multiple languages he was a far far more gifted linguist linguist than I that that it felt when you had a conversation with Norman as if a library had sort of found its way into somebody's head and was talking to you and the illusions that Norman could pull off in a conversation were always deeply inspiring to me made me feel like a terrible plodder because there was such a gap between what I'd read and what he'd read but that's that's the thing that really really begins to be be lost at this point I just don't know what percentage of what I'd read at the age of, let's say, 27.

My eldest has read, and I don't suppose it would be fair to guess, but it's probably pretty small. And I'd say that even the best students at Harvard and Stanford must be a long, long way behind. And I'm conscious that that means sometimes that you appear to be speaking the same language to people in a different generation. But in fact, a lot of what you're saying is not intelligible in the way that you think it is because the illusions are completely lost. That's something that made the classroom a less and less comfortable place for me

in the kind of later stages of my teaching career because I felt as if it was really hard to connect with students who just hadn't read that much European literature. For people interested in reading some of these literary landmarks, would you recommend them making their way through Harold Bloom's list in the Western canon? Or do you think there's a better more limited list? I think you should find a good library and just follow your nose.

I think all these lists are strangely deadening. And I hate lists. I think it's a sign of a kind of petty, petty mind to think you could boil it down to a hundred books. So no, don't, don't even look at that wretched list go to the library as i as i did as a boy and just follow your nose and and find the the authors and then when you find one that connects read it all and and i remember having that experience as

a teenager with the great russian writers of the 19th century. I couldn't believe it when I'd run out of Dostoevsky. It was a blow. I felt the same way when I ran out of Dickens. So I'm of the view that you should not think of great books, but of great authors. And once you find a great author, why would you just read one book?

Read them all. So I think that's the way to go and libraries are very important in that respect because as you browse the the stacks i used to love that about cambridge that you would open access to the stacks because of the way books are ordered in the library rather differently from the way they're ordered on Google, you will, as intended by the people who catalogue libraries, find kindred books. And you can then spend happy hours dipping in and finding your way around the author, seeing who grabs you and who does not. I think that's the way to do it and and then you don't have this sense of number 19 i'm nearly you know i'm nearly a quarter of the way through the list you should never feel that you're even one percent of the way through the

list we've strayed a long way from uh, but there is a connection between death and books. You're probably familiar with Nietzsche's famous pun, ought liberi, art liberi, either books or children, the two ways to survive death. Pass it on your information or your genetic code to successive generations and i'm fascinated neil if there was one kind of big idea of yours to emerge out of your body of work that you wanted to be your legacy or to be remembered by future generations what would that big idea be if there's one uh it's it's that history is the history of empires and you can pretend it's nation states but that's really just a short period of time

it's mostly empires and empires write down their their doings more by and large than other policies. And a lot of my work has been concerned with different empires and their dynamics. I mean, the first book was really about the crisis of German empire, the catastrophic breakdown of the relatively newly created Reich in the 1920s. That was where I started. I think as I was writing the history of the Rothschilds, it constantly struck me that I had been educated to think about European history as the history of nation states. You do German history and Italian history and you do French history and you didn't really bother with the other stuff. But actually that was just a very, very misleading way

to think about it. In truth, 19th century history, that was the century the Rothschilds hit the big time was a time of empire. And some of the empires were European, but they weren't all so that that idea has been an organizing idea it led me to write the empire book uh which one day they'll doubtless be burning on the woke campuses uh probably wouldn't have got it published if i'd come up with the idea 10 years later then did the american empire book Colossus, which was essentially

why can't America be like Britain, why it's all going to end in tears in Iraq and Afghanistan. And although I have done financial books along the way, ultimately the Ascent of Money is about power too, and includes a sort of alternative way of thinking about power to paul kennedy's idea that that power is about manufacturing industry so yeah i think it's really empires matter and and get over it you know because the idea that we could somehow uh cancel empire from history which seems to be the prevailing mode of decolonizing the curriculum is just stupid i mean it's it's it's it's you might as well just cancel history so that's probably the idea i certainly cling to the delusion that books give you some immortality and that 100 years from now at least somebody will be

reading at least some of these books but I don't know it may it may be a delusion by this point I've certainly loved the fact that I could commune with long dead historians going all the way back to Thucydides. That gives me enormous satisfaction that he succeeded in communicating his ideas over millennia. But it's hard to believe at this point that it will be possible for the work I've done to endure so long, even allowing for the fact that it's not as good as the Peloponnesian War book, even allowing for that, one senses that the half-life of a book is

terribly short these days. By the way, I can share an idea with you that was suggested to me on Friday night by my nine-year-old son Thomas after our fiasco of the unrecorded podcast and I was lamenting that although I've done a great many podcasts over the last three weeks and talked myself almost hoarse my book was not selling as well as I had hoped and I'd been lamenting this to my publisher and agent earlier that same day. And Thomas said, well, what makes you think that a podcast would help with the sales of the book? And I was slightly flummoxed by this question. He said, isn't it instead of reading the book that you listen to the podcast it's a substitute for the book and that idea crushed me because it's probably right

I suspect that what happens now is that people listen to podcasts and think done so I should really stop doing podcasts this is the last podcast I'm going to do. From now on, podcast people, go away. You're not welcome. You are cannibalizing my effing book sales. That's an intriguing scoop. Thank you, Neil. I think sometimes a podcast can be a surrogate for a book.

Sometimes you can turn the listener into a reader. It entirely depends on what happens during the conversation. So maybe I'm saying the wrong thing. That's another possibility. Yeah, Thomas said another thing. He said, well, maybe you just might be telling them too much. If you want to know more, buy the book. Yes, yes.

Well, I do recommend Doom. I recommend any of your books that I've read. And in that vein, I might continue to ask you some questions that aren't explicitly covered in Doom, but kind of dance around the edges of the topic. That might be an interesting way to go. So, in Doom, you reject cyclical views of history a priori and in the ascent of money you reference a couple of times the unorthodox economist hyman minsky but you're mainly referencing him approvingly by citing his quote about the most significant event to have happened since world war ii is something that hasn't happened that is we haven't had

another recession on the scale of the great depression but i'd love to get your take i'd love to hear what you think about Minsky's financial instability hypothesis, because you don't discuss that directly in The Ascent of Money. And I'm interested in this because I wonder whether Minsky's financial instability hypothesis is just a cyclical view of financial history. Because, as you know, Neil, he holds that stability contains the seeds of its own destruction. I think that a new version of this is to be found in Ray Dalio's book. He's been publishing in installments over the last year or so. And in Dalio's formulation, there's a kind of debt super cycle. And we can see history as a series of financial cycles.

That's not a novel idea. It's there in Minsky, and it's there in other places, too. Kondratiev was convinced that he'd found long cycles in economic history. And the business cycle is a term that people use almost routinely. The National Bureau of Economic Research in the United States is one of those institutions dating back to the mid-20th century, there is periodically revived, usually by people in search of a crisis. The Minsky moment, the moment when the cycle turns, is one of those phrases that crops up in financial journalism on a regular basis. When I was writing The Ascent of Money, I went back and read Minsky and I thought about how do I fit this in? And I came to the conclusion that I liked that idea best, that in a sense defied the cycle, that there wasn't what they all expected to happen after World War II, which was another really significant downturn.

And when you then take a look at the long run performance of any indicator you like unemployment or the stock market you choose prices when you really chart it over the long run it's not actually that much of a regular cycle that you see and that's the thing that i suppose I first realized writing about the German hyperinflation. There are huge disruptions, big events that blow things up, but they're randomly spaced out. So much of what the ascent of money is really telling you is that there isn't that much of a rhythmical pattern to financial history. There are some really big crises. And then there are sort of kind of mini recessions that nobody quite remembers.

They vary in duration. The recessions are very, very significantly distributed in terms of duration and we had a longish as well as deepish one after 2008 but again it wasn't the great depression there's only been one great depression really and uh and that that's why i like that minsky point because if there were really cycles there'd be regular there'd be great depressions aplenty, but there's just been one. And everything else is a sort of pale imitation. So I'm interested in the fact that history is not cyclical, and yet we want it to be. And we want it to be because psychologically it's just easier to handle if the historical process behaves a bit like our lives, or if states, you know, rise and reach

their zenith and decline and fall the way we do as individuals there are so many attempts to to kind of squeeze a cycle out of the data that it really you know if data had rights the rights of data would be regularly violated by these endeavors you have to torture the data to get a generational theory uh of the sort that people are always looking for uh going all the way back to Spengler or even further back so I'm I'm of the view that and there are things that one can see that have a certain rough resemblance to one another i don't think it's possible for there to be a cyclical theory overall because these rough patterns

are constantly being disrupted by the big disasters and that's really the motivation for writing doom that whatever rhythms are out there and there clearly are demographic rhythms just as there are macroeconomic and financial rhythms they're constantly being disrupted by the big disasters. And that makes the charts look much messier than you'd like if you really wanted to have a cyclical theory. The trouble is these exogenous and endogenous shocks, whether it's a pandemic or a war, they just come along at random or otherwise abnormally distributed intervals. And that's just too big a part of history to be explained away. Yeah, it's telling that many would-be financial doomsayers

like to invoke Minsky. And they sort of darkly quote that quotable quote that stability leads to instability. But, as you say say there are not only tell me what kind of instability are we talking about here i mean we're talking about some of those tiny little perturbations that you saw in the in the 50s and 60s are we talking about the big one in 29 to 32 or the quite big one in 2008 to to 11 i think the problem is it's a bit like kissinger's observation that you know any solution to a diplomatic problem is an admission ticket to the next problem it's true but it doesn't tell you about the size of the problem and that's really

what's important because when you look at the size of economic or political problems, there's such enormous variance between a little local difficulty and World War III that we need a lot more than, you know, the Minsky or Kissinger formulation.

What we need to know is, yeah, but what about the big one? When does the big one happen? And the problem, as I try to argue in Doom, is that we can't answer that question. We can't know when the big one comes, whether it's the earthquake that hits San Francisco or the next really bad pandemic or World War III

or a really 1929-like financial financial crisis history doesn't allow us to to predict these events or even to attach probabilities to them all we know is that they happen and the same applies to the stuff that we don't think enough about when we're studying history like the sunspot activity the solar activity that doesn't have any cyclical pattern to it, or the geological stuff, which I already alluded to, but I got fascinated by volcanoes writing this book. The volcanic activity they had between the late 1100s and the late 1200s, the really big volcanoes like Tambora in 1815, that's huge in history.

It's enormous in the way that it affects the average temperatures around the world. There's no cycle there. Good luck finding an earthquake cycle. So I think when I started to think about disasters, what struck me most was what terrible news the history of disasters was for the people trying to build cyclical theories of history. I mean, it's just, it's so tempting to imagine waveforms. We're drawn to that idea of looking for waves. But if this is really some kind of sea that we're sailing on, these are not surfing waves. We're pattern-seeking storytelling animals, to quote Ed Lehmer. I'd love to know how the human story ends,

but it's just not possible to know. Well, probably with a whimper rather than a bang. The great thing about science fiction is it's given us such a large number of ends to choose from. I originally was motivated to write this book by a return to science fiction reading and the fun of seeing all the different dystopias and ends of humanity that science fiction writers have come up with. And that's where the book ends. Here are all the different ways it can end.

And yeah, unfortunately, we don't have a clue which one it it will be i was having a conversation with andrew sullivan about this the other day and my point was well we're not that doomed because the the truth is lots of really big disasters happen and we just kind of survive uh there's obviously an end game when life on this planet will become unsustainable, but it's very, very remote. And even if you had World War III or the antibiotic-resistant bubonic plague, I struggle to imagine us all being wiped out. I mean, we survived the Black that was that was a pretty serious achievement so I'm kind of actually more of an optimist than you might think from the title doom

my my takeaway is in fact that we are fascinated by the end of time as a species with the end of our species the end of our planet we constantly think about it and it's there in all the great religions it's there in the environmentalist movement. The world is supposed to end in 10 years now, I think, because it was two years ago that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said it was 12. We find that idea deeply interesting. But in reality, although the prophets of doom are always with us, we have this remarkable knack of of bouncing back from uh from

disaster that's not to say that we won't ultimately have to bail to mars on elon's spaceships but my sense is that the full-blown species eradicating calamity is is that's a pretty unlikely event insofar as you can attach probabilities to it. And that's the story of the species. We're pretty hard to eradicate, kind of cockroach-like in that way. Yeah, I think you write in the book that what we really have to fear is big disasters that do not kill us all, but just a large number of us. Yeah, that's what we really have to think about,

because there are plenty of those in the foreseeable future. And we, oddly enough, are fixated on just one of the scenarios, which is the climate change one. And I don't dismiss that at all, but I just think there are lots of other ways that we can have a lot of excess mortality. And that's what COVID taught us. And we were sitting around in Davos in January 2020. Everybody was talking about climate change. The Global Risk Report had as its top five risks

entirely climate-related things. I mean, that's myopia after a certain point, because there are so many other ways in which this problem of excess mortality can occur. And part of the point of doom is to say, well, not only should you be a little wary of your climate models because there's just so much that you're not going to get right, but even if you do roughly get it right, even if the intergovernmental panel on climate change has actually got it roughly right with its worst case scenario, there are still ways that we could have excess mortality

before any of that plays out. I mean, I think Bjorn Lomberg's right that a lot of the things that the IPCC worries about are slow enough moving that they won't kill that many people because people will move. Then you've got another set of problems, but it's a lot slower than a coronavirus,

this climate change story, even if there are some non-linearities that could catch us out. But in the short run, there's a whole lot else that could cause significant excess mortality of which a war is probably the the first uh in line for for consideration war has been the great killer after infectious disease we haven't had a big war in a while is that because we're so wise so incredibly wise that we're not going to have another big war?

Please. Ultimately, as I try to argue at the end of the book, the US and China are doing all the things that you would do as two superpowers if you were going to have a really big war within the next 10 years. Quarreling about multiple issues, underestimating one another's capabilities. I see the probability of a significant conflict as quite high. And what history tells us is that stuff really does kill people.

If you read Jim Stavridis's new novel, and I respect Jim, retired admiral, certainly seen more classified war plans than I've seen, you know, his vision is that if the US and China really escalate conventional conflict, they will at some point have to go nuclear. And so in his novel, there are major cities that are destroyed on both sides by nuclear strikes. There is nothing in anything that I've read

about nuclear strategy that says it's never going to happen. Nothing. On the contrary, one thing I learned from writing Henry Kissinger's biography is that a limited nuclear war is really something that will happen at some point. And the surprising thing is that it hasn't happened. If you look back to the debates of the 1950s, Kissinger said something remarkable in Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy, which was that there will need to be a possibility of limited nuclear war for the United States to be sure of winning Cold War I, because it actually doesn't have a great prospect of winning

a conventional war with the Soviet Union. And at the time, and subsequently, many people have derided this argument, but it became central to NATO's planning. By the 1980s, that's how NATO was going to fight if the Red Army was streaming westwards with tactical nuclear weapons. And we developed all the intermediate range and tactical weapons for a limited nuclear war. Just as Kissinger had

envisaged we went quite quickly away from the Armageddon or peace option which was kind of the John Foster Dulles version of nuclear war and we ended up with a suite of nuclear options so I think nuclear war is much more of a clear and present danger than climate change. I also think that cyber warfare could end up killing a lot of people by simply causing massive disruption. If you had a major cyber attack on the US that took critical infrastructure out for a decent period of time,

a lot of people would die. It would be crazy. So all of that's much, much more near term, I think, than the climate change about which we are obsessed so i think that the key is to try to broaden our vision and realize that the ways in which excess mortality can happen are far more numerous than than greta thunberg would like us to to believe the prospect of a war between the us and China is certainly something that keeps me awake at night. I've been thinking more about it recently.

And like you, trying to do a deep dive into the literature, in my case, because your friend Graham Allison is coming on the podcast in June. So I've just sort of started taking that reading list a bit more seriously. What's on your reading list at the moment in relation to China-US relations? Well, I've got a pile of relatively recent books on this issue to get through. And I've been putting it off because I don't actually find the prospect of reading them terribly attractive that means I can't I can't plug any of them what I have read recently that has really helped me

think about this issue there's a couple of books Robert Zellick's general history of US foreign policy covering the whole history of the republic, America and the world. And Philip Zelikow's brilliant book, The Road Less Travelled, on Woodrow Wilson's failure to bring World War I to an early end in 1916. And these books have really kind of helped me frame the fundamental problem that the United States confronts again when it is faced by a large communist ruled superpower or maybe I could broaden it out and say when it's confronted by a totalitarian regime that is willing to sacrifice really large numbers of people in conflict so I think before one gets into the weeds of

the US-China relationship in the recent past, it helps to read those two books. Zoellick, of course, was one of the architects of Chimerica in his time in government. He was a strong believer and remains a strong believer in a good, harmonious, or at least cooperative US-China relationship. And so it's interesting that that book doesn't really have an ending. It doesn't really get to grips with all that's happened since his vision fell apart, and we ended up in Cold War II. The thing I loved about Philip Zeliker's book was the realization that it's really hard to stop a big war once it starts. Because for all kinds of reasons, World War I could have been stopped or should have been

stopped in 1916. And Woodrow Wilson seemed to hold all the cards to do that. As a peace broker, after all, Teddy Roosevelt had ended the Russian-Japanese war, brokered a peace. And Zelikov's book shows you that it was really impossible to do. Because once these big wars get started, it's very, very hard to stop them. So I think for those reasons, I'm approaching the recent the current bunch of books about US China at least with my perspective appropriately adjusted everyone should read Graham Allison's book by the way because Destined for War is a really important book I was against it we were close colleagues at Harvard, we're still close colleagues despite my now being on the other side of the country and Applied History is our baby really.

But when Graham told me that he wanted to cull the book Destined for War, I knew it was going to be about the Thucydides trap. But when he told me that was the title and not even with a question mark, I was quite shocked. But he was right. He was right. And that book really captured the moment, the moment we turned from Chimerica to Cold War. And I was slow on the uptake. The interesting thing about the book, of course, is that it's as widely read in China as in the United States, which tells you that it really struck a nerve.

How do you think the Chinese think about the Thucydides trap? They think much more in this way than our policymakers are used to. That is to say, the approach is perfectly logical multiple analogies warnings of how to prevail because obviously they want to prevail they must recognize that they don't want to be the Soviet Union and that's been their great preoccupation really since 1989, if not earlier.

But it's a book that is right up their street because Chinese policymakers are much more used to thinking historically than their Western counterparts. And in all the years that I've been going to Beijing, I've always been struck by how much more comfortable they are with this kind of approach. So I think the correct reading of this book in China is, you don't want to be the Soviet Union, but you really don't want to be Germany. And if the United States is in the position of Britain just over 100 years ago, and China is in the position of Germany, then whatever else China does, it must not make the German mistakes. So I think it's a very useful book for Chinese policymakers

because it shows them that this Thucydides trap would be more disastrous for them ultimately than than for the United States if they fall into it the wrong way you mentioned earlier Neil that what we really have to fear is big disasters that do not kill us all but just a large number of us and what you're doing there is multiplying severity by probability. But I just want to focus on the severity part because obviously a disaster that killed everyone would be worse than a disaster that just killed a lot of us. And Derek Parfit raised this question once with an interesting thought experiment, Derek Parfit, the late great Oxford philosopher.

And he invited us to compare three possible outcomes for the planet. The first outcome was peace. The second outcome was a nuclear war that kills 99% of the world's existing population. And the third outcome was nuclear war that kills everybody. And his comments were as follows, two would be worse than one, and three would be worse than two. That's obvious, but then he asks, which is the greater of these two differences? Most people believe that the greater difference is between one and two, that is peace and losing 99% of the population, but Parfit believed that the difference between two and three, between losing everyone and 99% of people is very much greater. And his reason is that not only do we lose everyone alive today,

but also all possible future generations and all the great goods that they would create and enjoy down the line. Do you share Parfit's intuition and why do you think most people get it wrong i do most people get it wrong because they don't think much about posterity um and uh and they're just mesmerized by body counts but the difference between one percent of us left and none of us left is actually enormous. Humanity's had some close encounters, particularly in its early history as a species. We now are very numerous, and that gives us, I think,

maybe to great confidence in our ability to ride out disasters. But the big difference, the reason that people get it wrong and fall into Parfit's trap is how little we think about future generations. We might say we do. But in truth, most people think about their children, their grandchildren. And I remember my late grandmother saying, and the terrible truth, son, is she'd become a great-grandmother. It's hard to be interested in the great-grandchildren this was a very honest admission uh which i admired her for she was a tough minded but lovely woman but this was a great admission that she was finding it hard to really feel as strongly about the great-grandchildren as about the children and

grandchildren that's the truth. We don't have, we don't really have posterity in mind. Now, it's interesting that politicians used to talk a lot about posterity. I mean, 100 years ago, that was a standard trope in political rhetoric. It's largely gone now. Very, very few politicians plausibly talk about the need for us to sacrifice now for the sake of future generations the environmentalists are the exception to that rule but i wonder how much uh that really is is convincing and sincere because my my impression of the environmentalists is that their defining characteristic is their indifference to the great majority of people living today, rather than their deep and sincere commitment to future generations.

If you follow Burke's great, Edmund Burke's great recommendation in Reflections on the Revolution in France, and regard the real social contract as being between the dead, the living, and the unborn, then it makes more sense. Because I think posterities are only really conceivable, multiple future generations, are only really conceivable if you have the same sense of the preceding generations and all their enormous numbers. One of my favorite factoids, which I remember figuring out a few years back, was that of all the humans who've ever lived, only 7% are around today. There's an enormous number of dead people haunting this world, trying to communicate to us with the books they wrote and the other relics they left behind. So if you are historically

minded and feel connected to Thucydides, then that's not difficult to do, to project forward. Imagine 2,000 years hence there being something that that people can learn from us but very present-minded people who don't think much historically equally can't imagine many future generations and that's why they they fall into parfit's trap i think to persuade someone to care more about posterity, what would you recommend that they read? History. History and science fiction, actually.

I think to get a feel for time, deep, long time, you need to look back and forward. You need to realise the magical thing that you actually can connect with somebody who lived at the time of pericles in athens that that what thucydides writes is entirely intelligible to us today in the same extraordinary way that that shakespeare's plays are and i never cease to be stunned by how readily I understand what Thucydides and Shakespeare are saying despite the vast gulf in time and life conditions that that separates us but you also I think do need science fiction and that's one of the things that I've been doing a

lot more of I read science fiction avidly as a schoolboy. Then I felt I should give it up when I was becoming a historian. Sort of swore off it when I was applying to Oxford. Haven't read it much since. And then about a couple of years ago in 2018, 19, I started to nag the people at my advisory business, Green Mantle. You guys need to read science fiction. I was shocked to find that hardly any of them did. That came as a shock. And so I said, well, we all have to sort of correct

this history bias, that we have this bias in favor of the past. We need to start thinking about the future. And that's what science fiction authors do. They give you a bunch of imagined futures. That's a valuable sample right there let's let's delve into science fiction and think of it as as as really helping us to to think more concretely about the technological discontinuities that you can't really infer from history so my my binge reading of science fiction got me into the extraordinary books uh Liu Xixin has written, the Chinese author best known for The Three-Body Problem. But you absolutely need to read the sequel,

the two books that are part of a trilogy, along with The Three-Body Problem, The Dark Forest and Death's End. These are extraordinary books. And what's great about them is precisely that that he projects far into the future and and allows enormous passages of time to occur for characters essentially to travel in time brilliant stuff i think he's one of the most brilliant writers living in the world today and everybody should read read his books so yeah some kind of combination of history and science fiction will stretch out your your conception of time and make you realize that you're just this little mayfly. You sort of buzz around for a bit. But the big story is that chain of being that Burke talks about. If you're not connected to the dead and the unborn, you're not living and you're definitely not thinking.

Neil Ferguson, thank you so much for joining me. It's been my pleasure, Jolly Swagman. And God, I hope it recorded this time. Time will tell. Well, hopefully we can leave a great conversation for posterity. Or at least for a few mayflies that are still flying around yeah cheers exactly cheers thank you for listening i hope you enjoyed that conversation as much as i did head to my website thejspod.com for show notes transcripts resources and to join my mailing list the audio engineer for the jolly swagman podcast is lawrence moorfield our video editor is Alfetti. I'm Joe Walker. Until next time, thank you for listening. Ciao.