As we celebrate the Lunar New Year, we naturally look to the future and wonder when the world will return to its former normalcy. I have been reading Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe on and off for over a year now, and although it is a thick book of nearly 500 pages, I feel as if I am living in the book, even though it is mostly history. It is like taking a journey through time and space, looking at the present through the past and anticipating the future.
Using the Covid-19 pandemic as a starting point, the book reviews the repeated outbreaks of infectious diseases throughout human history, the fear of death they brought, the impact they had on the global economy, and the profound impact they had on international relations, and how they impacted warfare, technology, religion, politics and other aspects of society to shape the course of human history. The author is Niall Ferguson, who argues that all natural disasters are in fact man-made disasters – the disasters caused by pandemics depend not only on the virus itself, but also on the political and social institutions of the human world.
Born in Scotland in 1964, Ferguson is a professor at the University of Oxford. He is a former professor of history at Harvard University, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, and a Bloomberg columnist. He is the author of numerous award-winning books, including Civilisation, Empire, The Ascent of Money and The War of the World. Ferguson’s book, Doom, presents his usual multifaceted perspective to help readers understand the significance of the pandemic – a book that at first glance appears to be a broad history of ‘catastrophes’, covering everything from plagues, earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanic eruptions, wars and famines, to stock market crashes, financial crises, plane crashes, nuclear power plant leaks, etc… It may seem like a lot, but it is only after closer reading that one realises that the focus of Ferguson’s thinking is to use “disaster” as a mirror to reflect a certain commonality in humanity.
“Disasters” have always been a part of human history, and each time a disaster (or wave of disasters) occurs, it often reflects the dysfunction of human social systems: human society is a complex system, political, religious, economic, social, racial … Doom gives the reader a closer look at how this complex “system” has gone wrong and failed in each of the disasters that have occurred.
In the course of human history, there have been disasters that have brought about fear-filled annihilation, but there have also been disasters that have led to a paradigm shift in human society. Whenever a crisis occurs, self-anaesthesia or avoidance is not advisable, and self-righteousness or brutality is even less so. Instead, we should look at the “system” in which we live, examine its composition, its structure and the principles of how it works, look for the problems it reveals as a result of the disaster and look for new outlets for human society. It is unfortunate that disasters happen, but if we can identify the problems and decipher the key messages behind each disaster, then we will be able to rebuild human society and get it back on track.
