Disaster Junkies

Detail from Albrecht Dürer’s 1498 woodcut depicting the four horsemen of the apocalypse. Image via Wikimedia commons.

We live in an era where catastrophe looms large in the political imagination. On the one side, we find hellacious visions of climate crisis and ecological collapse; on the other, grim warnings of social disintegration through plummeting birth rates, mass immigration and crime. Popular culture’s vivid post-apocalyptic worlds, from Cormac McCarthy’s The Road to Margaret Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale, increasingly echo in political discourse — most memorably in Donald Trump’s 2016 inauguration speech on the theme of “American Carnage.” For more imaginative doom-mongers there are various technological dystopias to contemplate, whether AI run amok, a digital surveillance state, or simply the replacement of physical experience with virtual surrogates. Then in 2020, with the eruption of a global pandemic, catastrophe crossed from the silver screen to the news studio, as much of the world sat transfixed by a profusion of statistics, graphs and harrowing reports of sickness and death.

If you are anything like me, the role of catastrophe in politics and culture raises endless fascinating questions. How should we explain our visceral revulsion at fellow citizens dying en mass from an infectious disease, and our contrasting apathy to other forms of large-scale suffering and death? Why can we be terrified by climate change without necessarily feeling a commensurate urgency to do something about it? Why do certain political tribes obsess over certain disasters?

It was questions like these that led me to pick up Niall Ferguson’s new book, Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe. I did this somewhat nervously, it must be said. I found one of Ferguson’s previous books extremely boring, and tend to cringe at his use of intellectual gimmicks — like his idea that the past success of Western civilisation can be attributed to six “killer apps.” Then again, Ferguson’s contrarianism does occasionally produce an interesting perspective, such as his willingness to weigh the negative aspects of the British Empire against the positive, as historians do with most other empires. But as I say, it was really the subject of this latest book that drew me in.

I might as well say upfront that I found it very disappointing. This is going to be a bad review — though hopefully not a pointless one. The flaws of this book can, I think, point us towards a richer understanding of catastrophe than…