![]() ![]() Ferguson’s interest is the patterns and systems that emerge from the repetition, to which end he skips quite breezily through a rich catalogue of gruesome, miserable experiences: floods, earthquakes that swallow whole cities, volcanic eruptions that bring humans to the brink of extinction, wars, famines and an array of lower-division horrors. ![]() It is not a gloomy book, although it dwells often on our collective failure to learn from past mistakes. What began as a taxonomy of doom evolves into a hawkish foreign policy treatise on the coming cold war with China That tension is the subject of Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe, Niall Ferguson’s excursion into the history of horrible afflictions. ![]() ![]() The march of progress gives cause for optimism the certain recurrence of disaster less so. But that minor skirmish is far from the frontline in a battle that science is winning, at least until the next disaster strikes. There is something medieval about paranoid mobs felling mobile phone masts in the belief that 5G signals are responsible for the disease. The Covid-19 pandemic has brought its share of irrational fanaticism. ![]()
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