Our Strange COVID-19 Defeat: A Selection from Niall Ferguson’s Doom (2021)

“Strange Defeat was the title the historian Marc Bloch gave his account of France’s collapse in the summer of 1940. There have been many such strange defeats in history—disasters that were not difficult to foresee and yet precipitated collapse. In many respects, the American and British experiences of COVID-19 have both, in their different ways, been strange defeats, intelligible only as colossal failures by governments to make adequate preparations for a disaster they always knew to be a likely contingency. To blame this failure almost entirely on populist braggadocio would be facile. In terms of excess mortality, Belgium fared as badly, if not worse. Its prime minister for most of 2020 was a liberal woman, Sophie Wilmès.

Why do some societies and states respond to catastrophe so much better than others? Why do some fall apart, most hold together, and a few emerge stronger? Why does politics sometimes cause catastrophe? These are the central questions posed by Doom. The answers are far from obvious. . . .

Some disasters are ‘predictable surprises,’ like ‘gray rhinos’ that we see rumbling toward us. Yet sometimes, at the moment they strike, these gray rhinos metamorphose into ‘black swans’—seemingly bewildering events that ‘no one could have foreseen.’ This is partly because many black swan events—pandemics, earthquakes, wars, and financial crises—are governed by power laws, rather than a normal probability distribution of the sort that our brains more readily comprehend. There is no average pandemic or earthquake; there are a few very large ones and a great many quite small ones, and there is no reliable way of predicting when a very large one will come along. In normal times, my family and I live not far from the San Andreas fault line. We know ‘the big one’ could happen at any time, but how big and exactly when, no one can say. The same goes for man-made disasters such as wars and revolutions (which are more often disastrous than not) as well as financial crises—economic disasters that have lower death tolls but, often, comparably disruptive consequences. A defining feature of history . . . is that there are many more black swans—not to mention ‘dragon kings,’ events so large in scale that they lie beyond even a power-law distribution—than a normally distributed world would lead us to expect. All such events lie in the realm of uncertainty, not of calculable risk. Moreover, the world we have built has, over time, become an increasingly complex system prone to all kinds of stochastic behavior, nonlinear relationships, and ‘fat-tailed’ distributions. A disaster such as a pandemic is not a single, discrete event. It invariably leads to other forms of disaster—economic, social, and political. There can be, and often are, cascades or chain reactions of disaster. The more networked the world becomes, the more we see this. . . .

COVID-19 is not the last disaster we shall confront in our lifetimes. It is just the latest, after a wave of Islamist terrorism, a global financial crisis, a rash of state failures, surges of unregulated migration, and a so-called democratic recession. Next up probably won’t be a disaster attributable to climate change, as we rarely get the disaster we expect, but some other threat most of us are currently ignoring. Perhaps it will be a strain of antibiotic-resistant bubonic plague, or perhaps a massive Russian-Chinese cyberattack on the United States and its allies. Perhaps it will be a breakthrough in nanotechnology or in genetic engineering that has disastrous unintended consequences. Or perhaps artificial intelligence will fulfill Elon Musk’s forebodings, reducing an intellectually outclassed humanity to the status of ‘a biological boot loader for digital super intelligence.’ Musk was notable in 2020 for dismissing the threat posed by COVID-19. (‘The coronavirus panic is dumb,’ he tweeted on March 6.) He has also argued that ‘humans will solve environmental sustainability’ and that even death itself—the existential threat to every individual—can be overcome with some combination of DNA editing and neurological data storage. . . .

From the 1960s until the 1980s, a fear of global overpopulation led to a succession of mostly misguided and often downright harmful efforts to ‘control’ reproduction in what was then called the Third World. Stephen Enke, of the RAND Corporation, argued that paying poor people to agree to sterilization or the insertion of intrauterine devices (IUDs) would be 250 times more effective in promoting development than other forms of aid. Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb, commissioned by the Sierra Club, predicted mass starvation in the 1970s, with devastating famines killing hundreds of millions of people. Lyndon Johnson was convinced, as were a majority of members of Congress, which increased the U.S. Agency for International Development’s budget for family planning by a factor of twenty. As president of the World Bank, former defense secretary Robert McNamara declared in 1969 that the bank would not finance healthcare ‘unless it was very strictly related to population control, because usually health facilities contributed to the decline of the death rate, and thereby to the population explosion.’ Some American institutions—including the Ford Foundation and the Population Council—toyed with the idea of mass involuntary sterilization of entire populations. The consequences provide yet another illustration that people convinced of an imagined impending apocalypse can do a great deal of real harm. Encouraging, if not quite forcing, Indian women to accept IUDs and Indian men to accept vasectomies led to much suffering. At the height of the Indian Emergency of the mid-seventies, the government of Indira Gandhi carried out more than eight million sterilizations. Nearly two thousand people died because of botched operations. The United Nations also supported the Chinese Communist Party’s even more brutally administered ‘one-child policy.’ With hindsight, we can see that the solution to the problem of rising population was not mass sterilization but the ‘Green Revolution’ in agricultural technology, pioneered by agronomists such as Norman Borlaug.”—Niall Ferguson, Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe (2021)